Cultural Reflection in Management. Lukasz Sulkowski

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Introduction

      Culture in management is an important issue, and one that is still open, from both theoretical and practical points of view. Its essence lies in its significance to the functioning of an organisation as a whole. Culture is a universal medium, in which people act and organisations are submerged. It is a basis for all processes, such as communication, the exercise of power and valuation in the world of people and organisations. Culture, however, also remains an open and ambiguous phenomenon.

      I began my research into cultural issues in management 20 years ago. Back then I assumed a functionalist approach, as I believed it to be the most mature stream of research, allowing for operationalisation of the notion of organisational culture. However, it turned out that an alternative approach to functionalism was developing more dynamically, and even completely new cognitive perspectives then appeared. Most of all, a number of concepts which make use of interpretative assumptions were created, which understand culture as a network of interactions and meanings. But the most rapid increase in the number of publications and research took place within the critical current, which as a scientific school is only two decades old. By contrast, postmodernism has by now lost its significance, although in the 1980s and 1990s it seemed to be the most important alternative to functionalism. Such rapid and profound changes in cognitive approaches to research into culture provoke reflection, and force one to adopt an open cognitive approach. This is why this monograph deals with different visions of culture in management, emphasising epistemological and methodological pluralism, and the need for the development of new, creative concepts of culture.

      My interests in the epistemology and methodology of management science lead towards such non-orthodox areas of the theory of organisation as cultural processes. The research I carried out for the monograph entitled Epistemology of Management made me realise that reflection on the cultural processes of an organisation develops quickly and is source of a number of new approaches within the social sciences. Thus, making use of numerous threads and interpretations which appear as part of epistemological management projects, I decided to focus on the issue of cultural processes in management, and this monograph is the outcome.

      This monograph contains an explication of several theses which place cultural analyses in management science on a very general plain of academic discourse.

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      1. The theory of culture in management science is a reflection of the theory of culture in science as such. This is why all deliberations on organisational culture and intercultural comparative studies of organisations should be carried out in the context of the development of cultural discourse in social and humanist sciences.

      2. The basis for the reflection on culture is a proposal for a division into paradigms, which means largely diverse ways of understanding culture that are rooted in science and have epistemological, methodological and pragmatic consequences.

      3. The subject of research should be the dynamics of organisational culture, which means culture from the procedural perspective, undergoing constant transformation. This includes the issue of spontaneous transformation of culture and the processes of planned and controlled changes.

      The problem of a research field determined in this way is its excess. Cultural processes in organisations include numerous social phenomena that are difficult to define and study. Organisational culture is an ambiguous notion, described within different paradigms. This is why the stand taken here is based on epistemological pluralism, meaning openness to research into cultural processes in organisations from many perspectives. Pluralism in cultural research has a long tradition, as it relates to consideration of the assumptions of cultural relativism and the limiting of ethnocentrism, as well as the tension between functionalist and interpretative approaches present in cultural research from the very beginning.

      It also seems that it is worth looking for completely new inspiration in the research into organisational culture, as the most popular concepts are by now exhausting their cognitive and pragmatic potential. In my opinion, further exploitation of the already classic models of E. Schein and G. Hofstede contributes little to management, and so it is worth looking at new concepts of culture, many of which are offered by social and humanist sciences. This is why special emphasis has been placed on looking for new inspirations in poorly spread, yet valuable perspectives, such as the neoevolutionary understanding of organisational culture and a critical approach to cultural processes in management. First of all, this is especially important from epistemological, methodological and pragmatic points of view, and concerns mostly the better understanding of culture in management. Secondly, it is important to carry out a reliable analysis of the cognitive effectiveness of different methods of research into organisational culture and culture in management. Thirdly, it is worth drawing on the practical effectiveness of culture management, as we are dealing with growing scepticism about the ←10 | 11→possibility of managing culture at all. This is why it seems of key significance for researchers into management culture to think about the existing concepts and methods, but also to be open to new inspirations.

      The pragmatic orientation of management science also encourages attempts to carry out analyses from the point of view of organisational culture’s usefulness in the process of introducing changes. The prescriptive aspirations of our discipline are supposed to lead to the improvement of an organisation. In this sense, organisational culture is a tool for the introduction of positive changes. It seems, however, that many researchers, especially interpretativists and supporters of the critical current, do not agree with viewing organisational culture as a tool of optimisation changes. In consequence, we are faced with a research problem that will be analysed further in this monograph – the basic question about the relationships between the cultural processes of an organisation and change management.

      This current monograph consists of seven chapters, and assumes a beginning from reflections on the most significant cognitive problems of cultural currents, through an analysis of well-known and popular functionalist concepts of culture in management, ending with a presentation of less popular perspectives.

      The first chapter focuses on an analysis of the basic problems of the development of cultural reflection in management science. The starting point is the historical overview of the evolution of cultural discourse in our discipline, with reference to the idea of culture in social and humanist sciences. Then, there is a proposal for a pattern of the diversification of culture concepts in management, consisting in distinguishing four paradigms: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, critical current and postmodernism. Based on this, the following chapters analyse diverse concepts of cultural current in management. The subjects of the next subchapter are the different ways of defining organisational culture, resulting from the proposals of paradigms in management. The chapter ends with an analysis of cognitive problems faced by the cultural discourse in management. The following chapters of this work attempt to solve these dilemmas.

      The second

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