Uses and Abuses
of Culture in
Organized Life

The term culture has two enduring meanings – narrowly, as a particular set of valued beliefs and practices, and broadly, as the way of life of a people. The first sense separates some aspects of human life and terms them ‘culture’ – the sort of things found in an art gallery or opera house but not those in a football ground or factory. The second takes a more anthropological perspective, understanding all the ways of life of a people as symbolic, constituted by meaning and interpretation. Such divisions have been important in informing the history of the study of organization and organizing.

In the narrow sense, culture can be opposed to structure, as the soft is opposed to the hard, or the informal to the formal. Such a set up anchors ideas about organizational culture, atmosphere and symbolism as analytically distinct from concepts like ‘economy’, with its underpinning of the masculine rational economic actor. Culture is also, in an era of globalization, imagined as a way of understanding the other, a field that cultivates ideas about cross-cultural communication and international management precisely in order to cancel culture as a form of noise that interferes with properly economic transactions.

Yet if we adopt a broad sense of culture then all these distinctions are dissolved, since nothing is outside language and symbolism. Social and economic structures cannot be imagined as somehow different from other anthropological practices that human beings engage in. There is no outside to culture, which means that any understanding of the term culture is itself cultural, a word made by the flows and tangles of the present, and hence being shaped by contemporary concerns as much as disciplinary history.

In this workshop we would like to explore this essentially contested concept in a new context, one of the culture wars, of the weaponisation of cultural symbols and language to condemn the woke or the TERF, the snowflake and the gammon. This is an understanding of culture as a form of life that embeds certain assumptions about politics and ethics, about the distributions of virtue and violence that should be defended in what seem to be increasingly polarised times. For athletes to take the knee before a sporting event provokes some to clap and others to boo, like a confused pantomime in which the audience don’t agree who is the goodie or the baddie. The rise of European populism, of nativist parties and angry elites punching down is a context in which what have often seemed like North American problems have now begun to shape the European academy, making certain questions easier to ask, while others shrink into silence.

The port city of Bristol, in the Southwest of England, is a useful example of the divisions and social changes that have been shaping European states. Built on the Atlantic trade—in enslaved Africans, wine, tobacco, sugar – it was one of the most significant cities in England until its harbour became too small for large ships. Now, it is one of the fastest growing cities in the UK, with many people employed in digital and creative technology, media, higher education and aerospace technologies. This is a profoundly divided city with areas of substantial deprivation sitting next to rapid gentrification, skyrocketing rents, and a council that is acrimoniously divided between labour and the greens. is It also an example of a form of boosterism that sells the idea of an edgy pirate city, of creatives sitting on their laptops in coffee shops, green urban lifestyles and street art.

Bristol become a symbol in the culture wars with the tumbling of Edward Colston. His involvement in the Royal African Company in the seventeenth century resulted in a statue in the city centre thanking him for his charity and philanthropy. In 2020, in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests, a crowd pulled the statue from its plinth and rolled it into the harbour. It now lies, battered and paint splattered, in a city museum, an emblem for some of reparation and social justice, for others of mob rule and political correctness gone mad.

The ‘culture wars’ now extend to broader concerns with morality, ethics and identity that have profound and lasting effects in academic practice too. Within business and management studies, culture has often been appropriated as a managerial tool to compliment rational logic, a way of impressing or seeding routines into work activity, often through affective force. Reason, rationality and instrumentality have also all been ascribed cultural status as embodiments of values that should be celebrated or questioned depending on which ‘side’ you stand on.

Is culture now consigned to the same fate as Colston’s statue? The politicization and weaponization of culture has become a vehicle for the voicing of grievance and demands for reparation, for the articulation of purity, for the assertion of a right and wrong way of thinking, all of which seems to diminish rather than elevate culture. Anthropologically, if culture is what defines the human, a common grounding or forming, and our (western) culture is so fractured, then what does that say of us and our organizations? Yet even in its fractured state – and for some it is when culture is fragmented that it is at its most potent – culture retains a curious force. It sells, whether in terms of ideas about the creative city with its marketable counter cultures or the white cube avant-garde, an ironic riposte to dominant interests and manners. Culture divides and culture makes money.

We welcome papers that engage with any of these takes on ‘culture’. Specifically, but not limited to, we would welcome papers that consider:

• How is culture built through practices, products and consumption?
• What kind of understandings and theories of culture can we enlist to problematize and complexify binary distinctions of ‘high’ and ‘low’, or ‘soft’ and ‘hard’, or ‘them’ and ‘us’?
• In which ways do cultural symbolic orders (Cassirer) offer forms and practices of
  organizational sensemaking that both foster and disturb established cultural categories?
• How does temporality affect culture? For example, the ‘heterochronic’ understanding of
  multiple cultural practices that counters the linear temporality of Western culture with
  multiple time-spaces of doing culture?
• How is culture – as ways and forms of organized life – technologically conditioned, shaped by
  media that select, store and process (or in socio-digital terms: count, index and link)?
• How is culture atmospherically – affectively, spatially and materially – embodied, enacted and
  extended in everyday practices and routinised behaviours?
• Beyond outdated ideas of ‘organizational culture’, how can we understand organization,
  management and entrepreneurship as culturally shaped, and as shaping culture? What, then,
  of the normative role of culture in business and management?
• Are there practical and sensible forms of culture which need to oppose the extremist and
  fundamentalist?
• Given that culture is etymologically related to cultivation, can it open to the non-human?
• Are evaluative senses of culture always likely to be racist, sexist, homophobic and humanist?
• How to understand the practice and limits of ‘free speech’, in times of culture war?

Daub, A. (forthcoming) The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hall, S. (1997) ‘Introduction’. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall, London: Sage, pp. 1-11.

Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (2002) ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 94-136.

Jørgensen, L. and Beyes, T. (2023). Organizing Half-Things: Knowing, Theorizing and Studying Atmospheres. Organization Theory, 4(4).

Parker, M (2000) Organizational Culture and Identity: Unity and Division at Work. London: Sage.

Simmel, G. (1997) ‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture’. In Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone. London: Sage, pp. 55-74.

Sontag, S. (1981) ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’. In Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Vintage Books, pp. 109-136.

Stalder, F (2018) The Digital Condition. London: Polity Press.

Steyaert, C, Beyes, T, and Parker, M (eds) (2016) The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education. London: Routledge.

Strathern, M. (1999) ‘The new modernities’ (Chapter 6), in: Property, Substance and Effect. London: Athlone Press, pp, 117-137.

Williams, R. (1976) Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.