1.1 The development of the cultural trend in management
When undertaking analysis of the development of the cultural trend in organisations and in management discourse, one has to make a few assumptions. First and foremost, the picture presented will be simplified, and thus will only include the dominant themes of the afterthought and ideas quickly gaining popularity in the management environment. For reasons of clarity, the less-known concepts which complicate the chronological sequence of successive stages in management of cultural afterthought will be omitted. This simplification results in the narrowness of the views of many researchers, who are known more for their most important works than for evolving any contemporary views. For example, E. Schein is usually associated with the birth and development of the concept of organisational culture, as based on functionalism, although his later views would evolve in the direction of the interpretative approach1. Furthermore, one has to bear in mind that the development of the cultural concepts of the organisation and management are a part of broader thinking on the study of culture in the social sciences and humanities. There are a lot of very complex interdependencies between management and other disciplines examining the culture. Research into organisations draws from the achievements of sociology, cultural anthropology, social psychology, history, development economics, as well as behavioural economics, cultural expertise, linguistics and many other disciplines. At the same time, representatives of other disciplines use the ideas and research which fall within the remit of cultural discourse in management. The picture is further complicated by the division into theoretical and practical topics of cultural afterthought. Theoreticians tend towards research on the complex primary issues of culture in management, such as paradigms and research methodology, while practitioners look for simple solutions which can be translated into managerial actions and organisational techniques. One of the proposed solutions to these issues is a simplified analysis of the development of the cultural trend in management, which can be linked to the development of cultural thought in general. On one hand, the historical background which is the subject of this subchapter will serve the purpose. On the other hand, the placement of the concept of culture in ←15 | 16→management in the broad scheme of social sciences paradigms is simultaneously developed in this monograph.
The cultural afterthought has its roots in the eighteenth century, when the philosophers of romanticism began to take an interest in the development of civilisation, national cultural ideas and the culture-nature antinomy. The catalyst for the development of the concept of culture was the controversial philosophy of J.J. Rousseau, who took a critical look at the Enlightenment’s civilisation ideals glorifying the natural state. Rousseau’s arguments were challenged by the representatives of German and British romanticism, such as J.G. Herder, W. von Humboldt and A. Bastian. The latter proposed understanding culture as the ‘psychological unity of mankind’, which grouped universal ideas (Elementargedanken) with local ludic ideas of national culture (Yólkergedanken)2. M. Arnold defined culture in terms of the order of civilisation by contrasting it to anarchy, which was a reference to T. Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’.3 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Social Darwinism approach dominated views on culture. The philosophy of H. Spencer and F. Galton and L.H. Morgan’s idea of cultural evolution, as well as the evolution of religion, represented a distorted picture of the development of culture from primitive to sophisticated forms, an obvious example of which had to be the enlightened, white European belonging to the ruling elite4. In the twentieth century, the cultural topic becomes the core problem of the social sciences and humanities, which remains unchanged at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The beginning of the twentieth century saw fast development of the cultural idea and, at the same time, the birth of the idea that management could be understood as a science. Cultural issues were not essential to management in the first stages of their development. Representatives of the schools of scientific management and administration neither studied culture nor theorised about it. Actually, both F.W. Taylor and H. Fayol adopted only some pre-suppositional cultural assumptions which, according to critics, included the consolidation of structure and social order (status quo) around a new ruling class, i.e. the technocratic stewards (supervisors, managers)5. It pointed towards the nineteenth-century ←16 | 17→concept of elite culture, and contemporarily, it is often the subject of critical – but at the same time – not always balanced assessment6. F.W. Taylor, for that matter, began The Principles of Scientific Management with a patriotic appeal to work on ‘national productivity’, and thus indirectly associated management categories with the national community and its cultural values7. H. Fayol went even further in the direction of cultural variables, describing among his management principles the esprit de corps – the ‘team spirit’ – which was supposed to be a source of harmony and cooperation. It seems that the concept of esprit de corps can be regarded as the precursor of the organisational culture trend, and is therefore a pre-cultural idea in management8.
Increased interest in the cultural processes came from the school of social relations, the creator of which, as is commonly believed, was E. Mayo. Using the results of the famous Hawthorne experiment, Mayo saw the importance of management: the staff team, understood as a group based on social relationships, the communication feedback between subordinates and superiors, effective and personalised leadership9, sensitivity towards the emotions of employees and soft skills training10. A focus on the values in the social group and the social nature of the management process links Mayo’s and Roethlisberger’s concepts with the cultural trend. In the Hawthorne experiment, employees adapted their pace of work and dedication less to their individual remuneration, and more to mutual social relationships and professed values and norms. Mayo also noticed that management is not a purely technical process (social engineering), but above all, constitutes social and psychological interaction. This was a criticism of the tough school of scientific management which marginalised the social sphere of the organisation11. The school of social relations also covers more compromising positions. H.S. Dennison developed the concept of linking managerial control, drawn from scientific management, with the needs of employees and social group ←17 | 18→dynamics, which is the subject of the school of social relations. Ideas similar to those found in organisational culture began to appear in the interwar period in the works of psychologists and sociologists unrelated to the school of social relations12, such as K. Lewin, R. Lippitt, and R.K. White (social climate)13, suggesting that the issue was then mature enough for deeper analysis.
The maturation process of the cultural issue in management in the period before World War II took place against the rapid development of the functionalist and interpretative theory of culture. In the twentieth century, as a result of that second tragic historical experience, the simplified and racist vision of culture in the form of Social Darwinism, derived directly from the nineteenth century, was rejected. Cultural anthropology resulted from universalist perspectives in cultural studies, but gradually came around to cultural relativism. A similar process, sometimes called the ‘linguistic breakthrough’ or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, took place in linguistics and sociology14.
