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.
Introduction: rethinking culture, organization and management Robert McMurray & Alison Pullen Joanne Martin Lotte Holck & Sara L. Muhr Mary Douglas: the cultural and material manifestations of dirt and dirty work Ruth Simpson & Jason Hughes 1984: Women scholars re-visioning organisational life Amanda Sinclair Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of the feminine: exploring a culture of sexual difference in the study of organizations Sheena J. Vachhani Situating knowledges through feminist objectivity in organization studies: Donna Haraway and the partial perspective Ajnesh Prasad, Paulina Segarra & Cristian E. Villanueva
Robert McMurray is Professor of Work and Organization at The York Management School, UK. Alison Pullen is Professor of Management and Organization Studies at Macquarie Business School, Sydney, Australia.
