Rethinking Culture, Organization and Management

Robert McMurray, Alison Pullen, Robert McMurray, Alison Pullen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367234102
• eBook ISBN: 9781000061239
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The purpose of this book is to reimagine the concept of culture, both as an analytical category and disciplinary practice of dominance, marginalization and exclusion. For decades culture has been perceived as a 'hot topic'. It has been written about and deployed as part of 'a search for excellence'; as a tool through which to categorise, rank, motivate and mould individuals; as a part of an attempt to align individual and corporate goals; as a driver of organizational change, and; as a servant of profit maximisation. The women writers presented in this book offer a different take on culture: they offer useful disruptions to mainstream conceptions of culture. Joanne Martin and Mary Douglas provide multi-dimensional holistic accounts of social relations that point up similarity and difference. Rather than offering totalising or prescriptive models, each author considers the complex, polyphonic and processual nature of culture(s) while challenging us to acknowledge and work with ambiguity, fluidity and disruption. In this spirit writings of Judi Marshall, Arlie Hochschild, Kathy Ferguson, Luce Irigaray and Donna Haraway are employed to disrupt extant management cultures that lionise the masculine and marginalise the concerns, perspectives and contributions of women and the diversity of women. These writers bring bodies, emotions, difference, resistance and politics back to the centre stage of organizational theory and practice. They open us up to the possibility of cultures suffused with multifarious potentiality rather than homogeneity and faux certainty. As such, they offer new ways of understanding and performing culture in management and organization.

This book will be relevant to students and researchers across business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology.

1   Introduction

Rethinking culture, organization and management

Robert McMurray and Alison Pullen

As with the first three books of the Focus on Women Writers in Organization Studies series, this volume champions exemplary research and theorising that mainstream accounts have over-simplified or overlooked. The purpose of this book is to reimagine the concept of culture, both as an analytical category and a disciplinary practice of dominance, marginalization and exclusion. Women writers that have developed critical conceptualizations of culture have been employed to understand the ways in which culture creates and conditions power relations that perpetuate and reinforce the dominance of some bodies, at the expense and exclusion of other bodies (see books 2 and 3 in this series on power and embodiment).

For decades culture has been perceived as a ‘hot topic’. In the 1980s culture was written about and deployed as part of ‘a search for excellence’ in organization and management. Culture has been used as tool through which to categorise, rank, motivate and mould individuals and groups to align corporate and organizational goals and to maximise effectiveness and profits. As management ‘fad and fashion’ culture has been engaged to drive organizational change through the alignment of vision, policies, rituals, story-­telling and observable practice in the name of ‘strong culture’ and consensual top-down organizing. Where cultures are found to vary by nationality or geography they are to be mapped, understood and harnessed. In this way cultural difference can be shaped to generic organizational goals.

The writers presented in this book offer a different take on culture: they offer useful disruptions to mainstream conceptions of culture. The authors of our first two chapters present us with what most readers would recognise as models of culture that develop a critical reading of culture. Joanne Martin’s ‘Three Perspectives’ and Mary Douglas’s ‘Grid-group cultural theory’ set out to provide multi-dimensional holistic accounts of social relations that account for similarity and difference. Rather than offering totalising or prescriptive models, each author points to the complex, polyphonic and processual nature of culture(s). These writers challenge us to acknowledge and work with complexity, ambiguity, fluidity and disruption. That challenge is made real as each chapter moves from overt culture narratives to address cultures of sexism, injustice, otherness and inequality that are more subjective, invisible and less tangible. Rather than take for granted these critical accounts of culture, each author encourages the reader to embody a critical reading from our own individual perspective. We see how even critical accounts of management have ghettoised feminist theory, rendering it (in Douglas’s terms) as ‘dirt’, dirt which disrupts and undoes norms. In relation to culture, cultural norms and normalised values of an organization can be disrupted by understanding the ambiguity of knowledge, differences of perspective and bodies, and changes over time.

Subsequent chapters take this critical challenge further as authors discuss the ways in which dominant masculine cultures enforce ways of working that threaten diversity of experience and bodies. They look at the ways in which discourses of neutrality and rationality such as gender-neutral accounts of organizations and management have ignored difference and suffocated feminist thought and experiences of marginalization. These writers provide alternative accounts of organizing and being which are central to understanding the cultural diversity of organizations and which are central to understanding ‘the way we do things around here’. Such ideas foster an understanding of the differences between corporate culture as a management strategy and practice, and organizational culture as practices and processes created and maintained over time by the organization’s members, whose bodies and experiences are different. These chapters champion the cultural importance of difference. The writings of Judi Marshall, Arlie Hochschild, Kathy Ferguson, Luce Irigaray and Donna Haraway are employed to disrupt extant management cultures that lionise the masculine and marginalise the concerns, perspectives, contributions and diversity of women. These writers bring bodies, emotions, difference, resistance and politics back to the centre stage of organizational theory and practice. They offer hope in the form of diversity of experience and bodies that disrupt normalised understandings of culture. They open us up to the possibility of cultures suffused with multifarious potentiality rather than homogeneity and faux certainty. As such, they offer new ways of understanding and performing culture in management and organization.

In Chapter 2, Lotte Holck and Sara Louise Muhr highlight the nuanced writing of Joanne Martin – a sociologist whose work on culture has been overlooked and under-utilised when compared to textbook staples such as Schein and Hofstede. Spanning social justice, feminist theory, research process and culture, Martin’s work is presented as multi-dimensional and critical. Martin’s most well-known work on culture posits that a holistic understanding of organizational culture must account for three inter-related perspectives, described as: integration, differentiation and fragmentation. Discussing these perspectives, the chapter illustrates the ways in which Joanne Martin challenges the reductionism and simplification that characterises extant theory and practice on culture in organizational contexts, while at the same time acknowledging the value that is to be found in both theory and practice. Martin calls on those who study organizational culture to embrace and account for ambiguity and fluidity as well as multiplicity in such a way that disrupts our fantasies of clean, rational, unitary and orderly organizing. We also learn that Martin’s disruption of neat fantasies extends to challenging the culture of Critical Management Studies (CMS) for its relative neglect of gender, the discrimination inherent in the structures and processes of higher learning, and a deconstruction of ‘founding fathers [sic]’.

The cultural significance of cleanliness, or more precisely dirt, lies at the heart of Chapter 3, in which Ruth Simpson and Jason Hughes introduce us to Mary Douglas, whose work is central to the field of anthropology and gaining traction in organizational studies. Douglas’s work is shown to be wide-ranging in its scope and impact, traversing issues as diverse as culture, economics, terrorism, consumer choice, poverty, environmentalism and governance. Running through Douglas’s work is a concern with how our perceptions and relations are informed by the social and institutional contexts in which we find ourselves. Douglas’s work provides a framework for considering why people behave in certain ways by assessing the cultural forces that shape us. Labelled Grid-Group or Cultural Theory, this is perhaps the most well-known aspect of Douglas’s work in organization studies. Ruth Simpson and Jason Hughes point out that within this work there is also a concern with dirt. Specifically, a consideration of dirt in symbolical and material terms is shown to increase our understanding of preferred or cherished ways of ordering and controlling the world around us. As Simpson and Hughes go on to discuss, this has given rise to a growing body of work that seeks to understand the nature and effects of dirty work in contemporary society and the practical and cultural imperatives that attend such tasks. In cultural terms Douglas’s early work can be used to examine emerging cultural practices of ‘ritual purity’ in organizations and how they ‘inflect’ modern, contextually driven notions of conformity, morality and transgression. Ruth Simpson and Jason Hughes conclude that such an examination may encompass how appeals to, and images of, purity and impurity shape the organizational subject, as well as how they form the basis for organizational and wider discourses such as those around morality, inequality and fairness. Issues of inequality and its cultural roots and implications are writ large in the remaining chapters of this book.

In Chapter 4, Amanda Sinclair provides a highly original and personal reflexive account of the impact of three foundational feminist writers on her own research, practice and writing: Judi Marshall, Arlie Hochschild and Kathy Ferguson. We come to understand how, in the face of masculine disciplinary cultures that marginalise the concerns, lives and achievements of women, each writer disrupts extant management literature and more narrowly conceived assumptions on the nature of organizing. This is a deliberately personal account that challenges the abstractionism and faux neutrality of much management writing and reviewing to explain how the work of Marshall, Hochschild and Ferguson can change the course of a scholastic life and, with it, how we might reimagine the world around us. In so doing, Amanda Sinclair’s own feminism challenges the dominant culture of organization studies for its marginalization of women, its lack of interdisciplinarity and lack of readability. Judi Marshall’s work is highlighted as particularly instructive in this regard, providing as it does insight into the way women are encouraged to be invisible to self and other, particularly in the workplace. Cultures that lionise the masculine are shown to marginalise the concerns, perspectives and contributions of women. Further evidence is provided through reference to Hochschild’s work on emotional labour and the power lines that position such forms of labour as women’s work and, thus, as less valuable. Finally, the work of Kathy Ferguson is considered and the contention that bureaucratic hierarchies perpetuate cultures of suppression. All three writers provoke and transgress extant modes of thinking about organizing by bringing emotion, resistance, gender and politics centre stage to challenge masculine conceptions of discipline, leadership, organizing and privilege. Collective feminist thought is produced to effectively challenge discourses of neutrality that mask masculinity. In this sense they challenge a culture so dominant in organizational and managerial terms that it frequently goes unseen.

Many of the themes developed by Amanda Sinclair are pursued in Chapter 5 as Sheena J. Vachhani contemplates the place of the visceral, embodied, material, maternal, feminine and sexuate in organizational writing and practice, focusing on the philosophical thought of Luce Irigaray. With its post-structuralist foundations, Irigaray’s writings are a place for thinking through the meaning and application of difference and disruption such that it challenges the dominance of masculine patriarchal order. What we arrive at is a culture of difference. We learn that difference and disruption is not based on outright dualistic opposition but on a more nuanced acknowledgement of the existence of different sexes, bodies, forms of desire and ways of knowing. Such acknowledgment requires that the suppression of femininity and difference be over-turned as part of a wider rejection of the limiting (suppressing) effects of masculine thought. This is exemplified by Irigaray’s critique of psychoanalysis as a system that constructs and reproduces patriarchal forms of subjectivity that reinforce the phallocentric nature that governs dominant discourses (a critique for which, as Sheena Vachhani notes, Irigaray was effectively exiled from the psychoanalytic establishment). It is also seen in the practice of reclaiming and then redrawing essentialist characteristics of the feminine to subvert them. Sheena Vachhani presents the writings of Luce Irigaray as fluid and mellifluous engagements with possibility that challenge the dominance of masculine rationality in organization studies in favour of more embodied accounting for, and use of, the feminine voice.

In Chapter 6 by Ajnesh Prasad, Paulina Segarra and Cristian E. Villanueva, we are reminded of the ways in which ethnocentrism can effectively subjugate and objectify the ‘other’ as part of culturally embedded biases and practices. Succinctly outlining a critique of second-wave white Western feminism, they draw our attention to the ways in which Donna Haraway developed theoretical insights that disavowed the ethnocentrism underlying universal truth-claims, while at the same time enabling feminists to engage responsibly in discourses about ‘other’ women in an effort to catalyse social change. In a move that is echoed in many of the writings in this series, Donna Haraway makes the case for an embodied understanding of the world around us that is objective in so far as it is grounded in our sensory systems, while being contextually sensitive such that transcendental or universal claims are not made. The resulting ‘feminist objectivity’ sees knowledge as situated, partial and locatable. Enacted through passionate detachment, such knowledge is held answerable for its claims while also offering the possibility of holding cultural practices to account. Prasad, Segarra and Villanueva then consider how such theorising has informed the use of post-colonial theory in organization and management studies such that it is possible to engage with the ‘other’ while attending to the concerns of positionality and representation. The result is a more nuanced and reflexive engagement with and through the cultures of self and other.

Taken together the above works reimagine what it means to organize and manage in contemporary workplaces and organizations. In so doing, the authors invite readers in their multiplicity to rethink their own experiences of management and culture to embrace perspectives that reject totalising accounts of culture in favour of perspectives that are multiple, partial, critical and constructive. Culture as understood through women writers is embodied – it is not constructed without people, and the diversity of experience and bodies lies at the heart of understanding culture. This is a book for those who want to identify organizational norms, appreciate practices of organizing and managing in their various and shifting shades, and be able to critique them. Understanding culture as an exercise of power enables readers to appreciate the ways in which organizations shape people in their workplaces, as well as the ways in which people resist organizational norms. This fourth book in the series provides the most interesting and timely theorising on culture management and organizing.

2 Joanne Martin

Lotte Holck and Sara L. Muhr

Joanne Martin is the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Organizational Behavior, Emerita at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Martin holds a BA in fine art from Smith College, where she studied woodcutting with Leonard Baskin, and a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University. As a social psychologist, who critically investigates key issues of organization studies, Martin has received numerous awards, including the Centennial Medal from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, for research-based contributions to society ¹ . She was the first woman at Stanford Graduate School of Business to earn tenure and was for a long time the only woman in any business school department there. For this reason, the Centennial Medal was particularly important to her, and the speech at the award ceremony was focused primarily on her work on gender and served as a door-opener for other female scholars and legitimised feminist scholarship.

While, as we will show in this chapter, she has worked extensively on issues of social justice, feminist theory and (gendered) aspects of academic careers and research processes, she is mostly known for her comprehensive work on organizational culture. In a blurb on the back cover of Martin’s key book from 1992, Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives, Rosabeth Moss Kanter writes: “Joanne Martin is an astute and insightful analyst of organizational culture, who continually probes below the surface to reveal the reality buried beneath official pronouncements”. The chapter aims to draw attention to the important work of Joanne Martin by mapping and discussing her three perspectives on culture – those of integration, differentiation and fragmentation – and illustrating their relevance for organization studies. In addition, we will also draw attention to other important aspects of her work on social (in)justice, gender (in)equality and (gendered) aspects of academic careers and research processes. To keep in mind the feminist goal of this volume, however, we have decided to focus mostly on Martin’s work on gender (in)equality and (gendered) aspects of academic careers and research processes and how both intersect with her theory of culture. By doing this, we highlight Martin’s consistent simultaneous commitment to holism on the one hand, and the disruption of unitary fantasies on the other. We will end by discussing how Martin’s cultural theory together with her feminist work can be a powerful combination for scholars who want to engage with an elaborate and helpful organization theory of culture, supplemented by a (possibly radical) feminist change agenda.

The chapter draws on a close reading of her written work as well as an email conversation with Martin about her scholarly work. We are forever grateful for Martin’s very helpful comments and feedback throughout the entire process.

(Meta)theory of culture

Joanne Martin’s theory of cu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series note
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: rethinking culture, organization and management
• 2 Joanne Martin
• 3 Mary Douglas: the cultural and material manifestations of dirt and dirty work
• 4 1984: women scholars re-visioning organizational life
• 5 Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of the feminine: exploring a culture of sexual difference in the study of organizations
• 6 Situating knowledges through feminist objectivity in organization studies: Donna Haraway and the Partial Perspective
• Index