Culture and organization theory
By: MORRILL, Calvin
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ArticlePublisher: Thousand Oaks : SAGE, September 2008The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 619, p. 15-40Abstract: Culture has become a legitimate concern and part of the basic conceptual toolkit in much of contemporary organization theory. This article historically traces the contested place of culture in organization theoryfrom acultural rationalist theorizing at the turn of the twentieth century; to the accidental "discovery" of shop floor culture by human relations scholars in the 1920s; to mid-twentieth-century explorations of informal and institutionalized relations in organizations; to present-day approaches that blend concepts from organizational culture frameworks, neoinstitutional analysis, sociology of culture, and social movement theory. This historical backdrop provides a context for raising several research questions relevant to organizational change, boundaries, and deviance. In closing, the author suggests that an analytic nexus between culture, power, and agency is emerging in contemporary organization theory that ultimately may yield a theory of society.
Culture has become a legitimate concern and part of the basic conceptual toolkit in much of contemporary organization theory. This article historically traces the contested place of culture in organization theoryfrom acultural rationalist theorizing at the turn of the twentieth century; to the accidental "discovery" of shop floor culture by human relations scholars in the 1920s; to mid-twentieth-century explorations of informal and institutionalized relations in organizations; to present-day approaches that blend concepts from organizational culture frameworks, neoinstitutional analysis, sociology of culture, and social movement theory. This historical backdrop provides a context for raising several research questions relevant to organizational change, boundaries, and deviance. In closing, the author suggests that an analytic nexus between culture, power, and agency is emerging in contemporary organization theory that ultimately may yield a theory of society.
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