The ambiguity of organizational culture

Bibliogr. s. 23-25

Organizational culture is a key concept of cultural discourse in management sciences. Definitions of organizational culture are ambiguous, like the characters of culture are determining in general speaking. Main focus of this article are concepts and paradigms of organizational culture, which are the heart of the cultural discourse in management. Mainstream culture is one of the most pluralistic discourses emerging in management sciences. This reflects the situation in the other disciplines of humanities and social sciences, in which culture is viewed from many different perspectives. The oldest and still the dominant mainstream cultural discourse is functionalism, which developed in cultural anthropology and sociology in the first half of the twentieth century. Interpretative and symbolic trend has developed a little later, after the so-called "linguistic turn", through G.H. Mead, H. Blumer and hermeneutics. Postmodernism developed in the contemporary arts in the 70s and 80s and wandered into management at the end of the twentieth century. Critical current is related to the critique of contemporary culture, which is based on the one hand on the neomarxism, while the other refers to post-modernism and radical feminism. However, the picture of four paradigms of cultural discourse, both in management and other social sciences, is a simplification, because we have more to do with the grid in the assumptions and concepts. For example, the concept of culture neoevolutionary necessarily refers to the underlying cognitive Darwinism, at the same time, however, completely rejected the nineteenth-century social Darwinism, eugenics from his perspective on human nature. Therefore, the adopted matrix Burrell and Morgan's paradigms must be used reflexively, seeing simplistic nature of this categorization.