functionalism, called the neopositivist-functionalist-systemic paradigm. This current is related to the creation and rapid development of the issues of cultural research in management, and offers numerous theoretical, methodological and empirical works. The chapter starts with a description of a functionalist vision of organisational culture, and after that focuses on the essence of the functionalist understanding of organisational culture. It then discusses the diverse models, typologies and functions of organisational culture which are ←11 | 12→widespread in management. The chapter ends with an attempt to look critically at the paradigm, both from the point of view of different cognitive perspectives and the pragmatic usefulness of these theories. It is a rather extensive chapter, even though it only briefly discusses a number of functionalist concepts of organisational culture. Apart from the first and last subchapters, it is of a reconstructive character, and so it is an attempt to select and briefly discuss a number of functionalist concepts of culture that are rooted in the theory and practice of management.
The third chapter analyses the significance of the second perspective, also originating from the functionalist paradigm, which is the influence of a cultural context on management processes. The most important projects described here include intercultural comparative studies based on the models of cultural dimensions, conducted by, among others, G. Hofstede, A. Trompenaars and C. Hampden-Turner, R. Hous and R. Inglehart. After a brief presentation of the models and cultural dimensions assumed by these researchers, the concept of cultural circles is discussed, which is a result of the intercultural comparative studies conducted. The next subchapter analyses the most important – from the perspective of management – research issues, undertaken by researchers carrying out intercultural comparative projects, and which are cultural determinants of the competitiveness of companies and whole economies. After that, a presentation is made, using the example of Polish culture, of how ambiguous the results and interpretations of the results of intercultural comparative studies can be. The last two subchapters concern two fundamental processes which take place in modern culture. The first is cultural convergence, which occurs with the deepening of globalisation processes. The second is the development of modern consumer culture, which is becoming the dominant model of values of modern societies.
The fourth chapter focuses on the issues of culture and organisational culture described from a point of view which is completely new to social sciences: the neoevolutionary perspective. It shares some elements with the neopositivist and functionalist paradigm, but to a great extent it is a separate cognitive strand. Should neoevolutionism turn out to be a promising basis for epistemological and methodological analyses in social sciences in the future, it will probably crystallise into a fully separate paradigm. The beginning of the chapter discusses the issues of neoevolutionism from the perspective of management science, and then makes an attempt to formulate an overview of the neoevolutionary concept of culture. The following subchapter introduces a theoretical proposal for considering culture within a projected and a rather promising general theory of replication (memetics). Then, there is an attempt to apply neoevolutionism to ←12 | 13→the analysis of organisational culture, through an analogy with primitive hunter-gatherer communities.
The subject of the fifth chapter is an analysis of cultural processes in management from the perspective of symbolic interactionism. This is the paradigm that has gathered the greatest number of works in the world over the last thirty years among non-functionalist approaches and within the cultural discourse in management science. The chapter starts with a description of the symbolic-interpretative paradigm, oriented towards the presentation of an outline of different interactionist concepts in management. Then, there is an analysis of extensive applications of symbolic interactionism with regard to cultural research into management. The last issue discussed in this chapter is the concept of organisational identity, which is set within the interpretative paradigm and is a proposal for a new perspective on cultural issues in management.
The sixth chapter contains an analysis of culture from the perspective of a radical structuralism paradigm, which in our discipline took the institutional form of Critical Management Studies. The analysis starts with theoretical deliberations on the basic cognitive and methodological assumptions which underlie the critical current, and which lead to radical criticism of the previous, mostly functionalist, concepts of organisational culture and culture in management. Another issue is the deriving of the emancipation concept of organisational culture from criticism, which is based on the negation of the dominant paradigm. The position taken by the critical current is controversial, and so the subject of the last subchapter is a distanced view on Critical Management Studies and the interpretation of culture that they propose.
The last chapter focuses on a dynamic perspective on organisational culture, analysing the relationships between culture and changes in management. Here, organisational changes are understood both as spontaneous transformations of an organisation and planned changes, which, by definition, should be controlled. At the beginning of the chapter, an attempt was made to organise the relationships between culture and organisational changes with the use of the paradigm matrix of social sciences used throughout the work. After that, based on this pattern, functionalist, interpretative and emancipation concepts and methods of managing cultural changes were analysed. The last subchapter is a proposal for the application of a metaphorical approach to the analysis of organisational culture dynamics.
The summary of the work emphasises the need for a multi-paradigm perspective on organisational culture and the prospects for the development of reflection on culture in the social sciences. The postmodernist approach and its cognitive relativism occupy only a marginal position in my analyses of culture ←13 | 14→in management. I believe that practising science with extreme assumptions of epistemological relativism is actually impossible, and so despite its output in the cultural discourse, postmodernism should not be treated as a paradigm or a scientific approach sensu stricto, but as a source of inspiration, ideas and metaphors. I think that at least the radical version of postmodernism belongs to art, literature and essay writing, rather than science. It seems, too, that postmodern inspirations have been successfully used by representatives of other non-fundamentalist paradigms.
I hope that the concepts presented in this book will contribute to the broadening of our knowledge of cultural processes in organisations, and particularly that it will be used for the better understanding and further exploration of concepts, such as interpretative and critical perspectives on culture (e.g. sensemaking) and the neoevolutionary approach. Finally, the proposed matrix of culture paradigms, drawn from G. Burrell and G. Morgan, is supposed to serve as a reference, but, of course, does not reflect the full complexity of reality. The book is based on Polish publications of Lukasz Sulkowski.*
* L. Sulkowski, Kulturowe procesy zarządzania, Difin, Warszawa 2012. L. Sulkowski, Czy warto zajmować się kulturą organizacyjną, Zarządzanie Zasobami Ludzkimi, 2008, 6, 9–25. L. Sulkowski, Społeczeństwo informacyjne a kultura konsumpcyjna, Prace Naukowe Akademii Ekonomicznej we Wrocławiu, 2006, 221–227. L. Sulkowski, Czy kultury organizacyjne zmierzają do unifikacji? Zarządzanie zasobami ludzkimi, 2002, (3-4), 9–20. L. Sulkowski, Kultura organizacyjna-próba oceny znaczenia nurtu kulturowego w zarządzaniu, Prace Naukowe Akademii Ekonomicznej we Wrocławiu, 2002, 157–161. L. Sulkowski, Czy jest możliwe kształtowanie kultury organizacyjnej? Organizacja i Kierowanie, 2001, (4), 99–110. L. Sulkowski, Organizacja w poszukiwaniu tożsamości, Przegląd Organizacji, 2005, (3), 7–10. L. Sulkowski, Wieloznaczność kultury organizacyjnej, Przedsiębiorczość i Zarządzanie, 2012, 13(12). L. Sulkowski, Kultura organizacyjna od podstaw, Wydawnictwo Społecznej Akademii Nauk, Łódź 2020. L. Sulkowski, O związkach między kulturą organizacyjną a organizacją uczącą się, Przegląd Organizacji, 2003, (4), 9–11. L. Sulkowski, Funkcjonalistyczna wizja kultury organizacyjnej w zarządzaniu–dominujący paradygmat i jego krytyka, Problemy Zarządzania, 2013, 20–32.
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