Culture Contested Field

Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 35

Chapter 2

Culture as Contested Field

In this chapter I look at the concept of culture and how it has been tied to
organisation in what I call the analytical field. I also introduce two snippets of
my former fieldwork in a physics institute and an Italian village to illustrate the
relation between the analytical and the empirical field.
Researchers produce what I term analytical cuts. Analytical cuts are specific
agential cuts (Barad 2003) that delineate particular interests and discussions of
researchers. Two concepts are hotly debated within the analytical field organisa-
tion, culture and the relations between them. What are at stake are the different
definitions of these concepts.
I use organisational culture as demarcation of an anthropology of learning in
cultural habitats. I could have used national cultures (with blurry borderlines) or
migrant cultures (with a changeable culture) or other analytical cuts. Yet,
organisational culture makes it easy to explain the difference between newcomers
and experienced learners in organised activities in organisations, which may be
more difficult to explain if the analytical cut was culture in relation to nation or
ethnicity. Organisations can be organised materially with meeting spaces in build-
ings in which practiced places are constructed. Learning in organisations involves
learning about the material manifest including the virtual environment (e.g. e-mails
appearing on a computer screen) as an inherent part of a practiced place. The
difference between newcomers and experienced learners becomes apparent when
the newcomers realise what they have to learn about cultural resources that others
already know. In organised activity, in, for instance, villages, global companies,
workplaces or educational institutions, it is up to the newcoming ethnographer to
learn about the lines drawn between the virtual and the physical environment as
they learn what engage the ethnographic subjects.
Research on organised cultural lives is a complex matter in a globalised world.
To see culture as a fixed entity was questioned in the wake of postmodernism
(e.g. Strathern 1995; Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 1997; Appadurai 1995), and these

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2015 29


C. Hasse, An Anthropology of Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-9606-4_2
30 2 Culture as Contested Field

questions changed the traditional field of ethnography; focus used to be on onto-


logical heterogeneity rather than culture as a whole implying ontological homoge-
neity. The notion of culture seems to move from ‘remote places’ (Ardener 2012)
and re-emerge in new analytical cuts such as ‘organisational cultures’, ‘virtual
space’ (e.g. Miller and Slater 2000) and ‘zones of awkward engagement’ as in
Anna Tsing’s work on global connections and frictions (Tsing 2005). Notions of
culture as any real entities have been abandoned in anthropology (Clifford and
Marcus 1986; Abu-Lughod 1991; Hannerz 1997). Today, culture is recognised as
conceptual constructions made by anthropologists and other researchers. Fields can
be constructed without consideration of cultural boundaries because the notion of
cultural boundaries dissolved when anthropology began to study migrations and
social groups at home. Culture is simply no longer out there in the field because that
field is just another of the researcher’s constructions. As Vered Amit notes, the
notion of a field that exists independent of the fieldwork seems to be an oxymoron;
all fields are shaped by:
. . . the conceptual, professional, financial and relational opportunities and resources acces-
sible to the ethnographer. Seen from this perspective, an idea of fieldwork in which the
ethnographer is expected to break from his/her usual involvements in order to immerse
him/herself in the ‘field’ of other’s involvement is an oxymoron. (Vered Amit 2000: 6)

Opposed to this perspective of the field we find Charlotte Aull Davies’ perspec-
tive and to which I adhere. She underlines (inspired by the critical realist Roy
Bhaskar) that in empirical research critical realism is a position which requires ‘an
ontology that asserts that there is a social world independent of our knowledge of it
and an epistemology that argues that it is knowable’ (Davies 1999: 17).1 To this
perspective I add that the social world is also a material world – and, to some extent,
lines are drawn between the material and the social world, lines that can be studied
as agential cuts. Here the question becomes how we as researchers gain access to
learn not just from but with other people, since it is not at all easy to learn in other
people’s organised practiced places. In this light, the empirical field is a social and
material world of practices and cultural learning processes that feed into our
analytical cuts and analysis.
Culture is emerging when sedimented self-evident cuts are questioned. Learning
is often mentioned as an explanatory concept in relation to culture in anthropology
(see Hasse 2012, 2014 for summaries). Though many anthropologists refer to
learning in relation to, e.g., cultural change, few have set out to explore the concept
in relation to culture or organisation and connect it with their own learning
processes in the field. No ‘critical ethnography’ of culture (Marcus and Fischer

1
Just to avoid misunderstandings: Though Charlotte Aull Davies speaks about ‘Reflexive Eth-
nography’ (1999), her understanding of reflexivity is very far from the understanding of ‘reflex-
ivity’ given by Barad (where reflexivity is not thinking but, e.g., an image reflected by a mirror).
2.1 The Analytical and Empirical Fields 31

1999; Lave 2011) can be realised as long as we know so little of the basic process of
how we come to learn what we experience as being cultural.
Placing learning processes as the methodological alignment apparatus between
an ontological heterogeneity and epistemological homogeneity opens up for new
and dynamic understandings of culture in the field. Then culture can be understood
as a real force moving through persons and material artefacts binding them together
in organisations – not immediately, but over time. Culture is real – as a process, not
an entity. An anthropology of learning underlines the changes of the embodied
being in a world of agential cuts. When new experiences change people, the social
spaces we create together also change (Hastrup 1995: 290). Such processes of
change can be seen as changes in cultural organisations and in personas – under-
stood as ‘per sonare’ (the literal translation is ‘sounding through’): a permeable
being-in-the-world through which cultural lines and connections sound through as
we move. In these processes researchers are not individuals but persons through
which the forces of culture, no matter how invisible and non-reflected, pass through
and leave identifiable traces and marks to be elicited in anthropology.
The social organisation might be without explicitly denounced boundaries and
demarcation lines, but it is still an organised materiality, which includes bodies,
words and movements in and around artefacts. Most importantly, newcomers are
not immersed but can become experts over time – experts on how to move with the
local culture. Not in the local culture (which is a much too stable formulation) but
with a culture where we encounter other participants who, like us, are capable of
learning collective lines of expectations.
In this context, expertise includes how we use artefacts, like the chairs we sit on
and the doors we open. None of these engagements are innocent. Material artefacts
shape our organisations as we shape them in our organised way of handling them.
Our learning processes are formed by cultural mediation when artefacts and
humans move about in organisations spreading out in a globalised world. These
processes of mediation are not always harmonious – they may cause frictions like
when electrified fibres rub against each other. Ethnographers can pick up on these
frictions organised in never-quite-stable dust bunnies and make them available for
analysis.
The relation between anthropology, learning and culture is, I argue, best
explored in analytical cuts that focus on organisations where cultural frictions are
produced and sensed by embodied beings, rather than in large abstract entities like
fixed ethnic groups, nation states or other kinds of predetermined cultural islands.

2.1 The Analytical and Empirical Fields

We tend to not ask how researchers differ from the people they set out to study as
cultural beings, whether these people are organised in small villages in Indonesia, a
boarding school in Australia, in large Western companies like Ciba-Geigy or in
realms like small kingdoms ruled by fons (or mfons) in northwestern Cameroon. It
32 2 Culture as Contested Field

has been one of the self-evident presuppositions of cultural researchers – a black


box with no need of explanation since the researcher is not a real participant in the
everyday life of the people we work with.
Recently, however, social sciences have come up with many new available
positions for researchers. Ethnographers are no longer seen as a we studying them
but as collaborative partners in research (Low and Merry 2010; Lassiter 2005; Baba
and Hill 2006). Nevertheless, a new black box (with no need of explanation) has
emerged: the researcher is now a real participant in the everyday life of the people
we work with.
No matter what kind of fieldwork we claim to engage in or with, our positions as
researchers call for an opening of both of the two black boxes (participant or not) to
enable an explicit understanding of what participation in other people’s everyday
life mean from a learning perspective. When cultural analysis, which builds on an
anthropology of learning, is our point of departure, it is relevant to ask how the
researcher’s cultural learning processes might differ from the cultural learning
processes that form the everyday life for the other participants.
To underline this difference between researchers and other participants in
practiced places, I distinguish between the analytical field and the empirical field.
This distinction is an analytical agential cut that belongs to the analytical field. Both
the analytical field and the empirical field are entangled in the practiced places
where anthropologists move around. The difference lies in the objects of an
organised activity. The empirical field is the practiced place studied by ethnogra-
phers walking around learning in a material world together with the local people.
The analytical field is an organised activity used to create and criticise the theoret-
ical tools realised in cultural analysis. The difference between the researcher’s
activities and those of the other participants is that the ethnographer will eventually
leave the empirical field to discuss what he or she has learned with fellow
researchers in the analytical field. Anthropologists do not stay in the empirical
fields they visit – but they do stay in the analytical fields. Analytical cuts made in
the analytical field (like the concept of culture) may be of interest to the participants
in the empirical field, and they may even use the conceptualisations that are
constructed in the analytical field, but they are engaged in their own everyday
activities. The analytical field is also an analytical cut. It is not about particular
persons, but positions. An Ojibwa Indian may become an anthropologist – and an
anthropologist may leave his/her position and take up another as Ojibwa again
when the analytical field is of no importance. Thus, to be positioned in the
analytical or empirical field is not a fixed position, but defined by the participants
shifting objects of interest.
Ethnographic validity lies, in a realist’s perspective, in how well we come to
understand the people we study with (Maxwell 1992: 281). How we come to
understand is, in my argument, connected to learning, and learning is connected
to position in the fields, where we learn to become experts.
Certain norms of conduct are often expected in both the empirical and the
analytical field. In the analytical field, these norms change from discipline to
2.1 The Analytical and Empirical Fields 33

discipline. To become an expert, the researcher must learn about these cultural
norms in both fields.
In the analytical field of anthropology, it is sometimes accepted that the
researcher uses and investigates any number of theoretical perspectives in the
attempt to understand the empirical field. In the analytical field of other disciplines,
it is exactly the opposite; the researcher is supposed to choose one, and only one,
theoretical perspective before entering an empirical field and use that theory for
analysis no matter what is encountered. The research apparatus is thus constructed
differently according to the norms in the given analytical field. The analytical
distinction between an empirical and an analytical field helps me to take liberties
with theories (indeed whole theory complexes) when conducting an analysis of the
empirical field. Rather than beginning and ending with a chosen theoretical position
(such as actor–network theory, cultural–historical activity theory, postpheno-
menology, cognitive anthropology, feminist or STS theory, Foucault’s theory of
discourse or Bourdieu’s theory of practice), the starting point for my methodology
of an anthropology of learning is what the researcher may learn in the empirical
field. My commitment to and use of cultural–historical activity theory, anthropo-
logical theory, STS theory, feminist theory and postphenomenology must be seen in
this light. I learn in the analytical field from reading and going to conferences. I use
these theories to understand the process that transforms me when learning with the
empirical field. My methodological concern is how anthropologists are educated in
the empirical field in ways that change our perception of the material world and our
engagement with it as culture sounds through us and change us as persons.
How the ethnographer’s engaged learning process can be understood theoreti-
cally hinges on the development of a coherent theory of the anthropology of
learning, which draws on many of the above-mentioned theoretical perspectives.
Theories from the analytical field are cultural resources helping me to understand
my own learning process in the empirical field. They are cuts of varied perspectives
on the social and material empirical field I pass through. Instead of seeing theories
as internally coherent analytical perspectives, which are distinctly separated from
each other, I use theories to help me build up a cogent theory of cultural learning
processes, wherever I find them useful.
It is not an eclectic position when we assume there is an empirical field anchored
in a material world unknown to newcomers. Ethnographers may make use of
whatever they find reasonable from the analytical field in explaining other people’s
entangled social and material reality. This reality and our theories change when we
learn about practiced places. I make diffracted readings – i.e. I read texts from a
variety of theoretical perspectives, which in my use do not contradict but supple-
ment each other, highlighting different aspects (and they all belong to fieldwork-
oriented social sciences). In my diffracted readings, the texts (e.g. actor–network
theory (ANT) or cultural–historical activity theory (CHAT)) affect each other
enough to give me new perspectives on the emerging empirical field. Yet, the
empirical field carries more weight when it comes to changing my perceptions. This
means I allow myself to take liberties with theories, e.g., indicating a systemic view
on the empirical field. I find inspiration in much of the insights from systemic
34 2 Culture as Contested Field

theories (like, e.g., Gregory Bateson’s and Yrjö Engeström’s learning theories), but
as a person I am not organised in systems in the empirical field but in messy,
moving yet coherent meshworks. Like Anne Edwards, who in the analytical field
have called for theories of ‘relational agency’ rather than systemic theories, I also
object to a use of theories which demand the researcher accepts the entire theoret-
ical package (Edwards 2009).
Within clusters of theories, like CHAT, we find diversity in the analytical cuts
that are made. Newcomers as individuals may move between ‘activity settings’
(Hedegaard 2012) or enter the kind of organisation found in Yrjö Engeström’s
studies of workplaces, where a group of people have a history of working together
towards a common object (1987). Though a theory may be brought to the empirical
field by the researcher, it may not be useful from the perspective of social and
material realities of that empirical field as it emerges through agential cuts learned
in the empirical field. Nevertheless, some stick to a particular analysis because that
perspective engages the researcher in the analytical field. As researchers we deeply
engage our persons with both the empirical and the analytical fields, and both fields
move us as we gain expertise.

2.2 Engaging with the Fields

Participant observation has sine qua non been the road to understand other peoples’
engaged practices (e.g. Atkinson and Hammersley 1994). It has been defined in
many ways (e.g. discussing if it is a method or not and the relation between
participation and observation). From Malinowski (1922) over Spradley (1980) till
recent times, the method of participant observation has been both problematised
and praised (e.g. de Laine 2000). Researchers may ‘rely on literally being an
inconspicuous bystander; or they may take the opposite approach and reduce
reactivity by participating as fully as possible, trying to become invisible in their
role as researcher if not as human participant’ (Davies 1999: 7).
In the following I discuss the question of participation as a question of engage-
ment. From this position, engaged observations can be made that may change
theoretical positions. However, theories may also guide our perceptions because
our engagement lies in the theories of the analytical field as well as in our
engagement with the empirical field.
To be engaged in participant observation is to have a cause for observation – but
what cause? In a supplement to Current Anthropology, Setha M. Low and Sally
E. Merry (re)opened the discussion of what engaged anthropology is. They identi-
fied six types of engagements: ‘[F]rom basic commitment to our informants, to
sharing and support with the communities with which we work, to teaching and
public education, to social critique in academic and public forums, to more com-
monly understood forms of engagement such as collaboration, advocacy, and
activism’ (Low and Merry 2010: 214). Thomas Hylland Eriksen has in most
2.2 Engaging with the Fields 35

excellent ways written about engaged anthropology (2006) and calls for a more
engaged public presence of the anthropologists.
Both of these approaches underline the political aspects of doing ethnography
and the necessity to move anthropological insights outside of the analytical field
and into public debates. To do engaged anthropology in a globalised world, we need
engaged ethnography, which may give us strong arguments in debates about how
some people may change the world for others. Though none of my own empirical
fieldworks directly challenge the powers of the world mongers, I believe my take on
engaged expert ethnography will give anthropologists and other researchers more
debt in their methodologies and thus in their engagement with the public as well as
with their ethnographic subjects.
In engaged anthropology, as defined by Low and Merry, the focus is on varied
approaches which find their ultimate form in advocacy and activism that address
public and political issues (Low and Merry 2010). Engagement could, however,
also be analysed as a process; nobody is born engaged in activism and politics.
Becoming engaged as an ethnographer is not being either restricted to the empirical
field (being an activist among activists) or restricted to the analytical field (being a
theoretician among theoreticians). We need not define the ethnographer as either an
activist or an aloof theory-maker. In studying with, as proposed by Ingold, we invest
ourselves in a transformation process which not only changes our perception of a
geometrical space into practiced place, but also changes our engagement in those
practiced places. We become expert learners with other people’s cultural resources.
The advocacy definitions of an engaged anthropology, proposed by, e.g., Merry
and Low, does not define how the ethnographers become engaged in the same
problems and concerns as the people and the everyday life they study. They start
with engagement as something given, not something to be earned.
Expert ethnographers are ignorant of many aspects of what there is to learn in
both the analytical and the empirical field when they embark on participant obser-
vation by following the paths taken by their ethnographic subjects. In the empirical
field they may be ignorant of how a chair may be materialised with unexpected
agential cuts. In the analytical field researchers are continuously reminded by
colleagues about other theories they should have known or used. As underlined
by Jean Lave, over time we learn many things that make us look back on a past
ignorance – yet the apprenticeship goes on forever (Lave 2011).
When I initiated my journey as an anthropologist with fieldwork in Cameroon in
the early 1990s, I had some notions with me from the analytical field (e.g. ‘cultural
capital’ Bourdieu 1990), but I had never heard of the work by Basil Bernstein on
cultural codes (Bernstein 1971). This agential cut came with learning from col-
leagues in the analytical field, when they informed me that a lot of my writing
seemed to draw on Bernstein’s work – although I had never heard about him. Such
reminders in the analytical field may be useful. Yet, the education we go through is
also firmly anchored in the empirical field which became most apparent to me
when I, some years after my visit to Cameroon, as a PhD. student entered a rather
unusual kind of fieldwork. I enrolled as a physicist student at the Niels Bohr
Institute for Physics in Copenhagen in Denmark determined to study what
36 2 Culture as Contested Field

contributed to women’s uneasiness with physics culture. Of all remote areas


(Ardener 2012) studied by anthropologists, this could have been considered one
of the least cultural and exotic places an anthropologist could learn about a remote
culture. It turned out not to be so. At first, however, the space was material and
primarily meaningful due to my past experiences.
In an early article written about this fieldwork, I begin my description of the
institute like this:
It is a building made of grey plaster with three wings two stories high. Windows are painted
red and the doors green. On the facade is written: Niels Bohr Institutet 1920. Through the
green door students dash off to their first class in experimental physics after the summer
vacation. They all look like ordinary Danish youth – T-shirts with Calvin and Hobbes, a
Jedi Rider or the Cure, faded jeans, sneakers and East packs. I already feel slightly out of
place. For one thing I am wearing a skirt and a jacket, in my backpack I carry not only
books with titles like Universe and Elements of Newtonian Mechanics, but also a tape-
recorder and I am not only a newly arrived physics student but an anthropologist just
starting fieldwork on my Ph.D.-project. The aim of the project is try to shed more light on
possible differences in male and female students’ approach to studying physics. I decided to
make participant-observing fieldwork among these anything but exotic initiates to the tribe
of physicists by ‘following the loop’ – a method that was recommended by Frederik Barth
with reference to Gregory Bateson (Barth 1994: 352). As a newcomer I intend to follow
wherever my position as a just-started physicist will lead me. (Hasse 2000: 5)

This positioned way of engaging with the physicist students gave me a possibil-
ity to understand the institution of physics education differently from the official
texts posted by the administrators of the physics education. The official description
of the Niels Bohr Institute for Physics was nothing like my embodied sensual
presence in the empirical field. The institute was officially organised in different
areas of study. The homepage of this educational institution said that the institute:
“[O]ffers academic degrees within the fields of astronomy, physics, geophysics, biophysics
and Nano-technology. To more than 600 students the institute offers a three-year Bachelor
degree followed by a two-year Master’s degree and a three-year PhD programme”. The
disciplines of physics we could study were: “astronomy, physics, geophysics, nanophysics
and biophysics [which] are all categorized within the disciplines of physics. Physics is the
science of the elementary laws of nature. Physics seeks to explain nature at all levels, from
the smallest elements, the quarks, to the greatest phenomena in the Universe. These aspects,
from micro level to macro level, form the sciences at the Niels Bohr Institute. Starting from
particle and Nano-physics, the institute continues to biophysics, onwards to geophysics and
meteorology and arrives at astrophysics. The students at the Niels Bohr Institute gradually
focus their field of study as they elevate towards their Masters and PhD degrees.” (Niels
Bohr Institute homepage retrieved 12.08, 1998)

It seemed that there was a world of difference between the officially organised
system and the local organisation. The meaning of pictures of, e.g., Calvin and
Hobbes and Jedi riders did not seem to be symbolic, but rather tied to local
meaning-making processes, which connected different groups of students. My
presence in the empirical field had made me a material-meaning learning ethnog-
rapher, rather than the symbol-interpreting ethnographer (e.g. Geertz 1973, 1984) I
had learned about in my anthropological studies.
2.2 Engaging with the Fields 37

My description, however, reveals no insights into the colourful and complex


learning process, which lay before me in this practiced place and which gradually
changed the geometrical space to a force field of frictions in which Jedi riders and
Star Wars could engage me in unexpected ways.
I went to classes in physics, mathematics and astronomy, to lectures, to student
parties and plays. Gradually the position I had taken as a first-year student in the
empirical field began to have an effect on me. Instead of taking notes of how my
fellow students behaved, the very fact that I, to some extent, actually did what they
did, and they watched and reacted to me doing it, began to have consequences for
my actions and influenced my situated embodied thinking. As they expected me to
act and listen as a physics student I began to do so – and from this movable position,
it became increasingly difficult to not actually take an interest in and engage in
physics culture.
My notes mirrored this interest. At first, I meticulously noted the number of
female or male students attending class. I asked questions about how much physics
in primary school had mattered for, respectively, male and female students’ interest
in physics. Yet, in my notes I also began to ask a new kind of questions, like ‘do we
really not know what gravity is?’ or ‘does that mean all stars are actually suns?’
(see, e.g., Hasse 2008). Though naı̈ve at first, my questions were earnest, and over
time they developed into expectations of physics futures – and with time even the
Jedi riders found their place in a cultural ecology allowing science fiction but
excluding short dresses (see Chap. 8).
My changed reflections became a new key to a methodological understanding of
participant observation as observation with participation. Observation is a posi-
tioned and not a distanced observation. Learning from the position as a physics
student transformed my focus, my attention and the relation between words and
material world, and gradually the physical geometrical space changed into a
culturally practiced place. As noted by the British anthropologist Edwin Ardener,
the social is a space that identifies because of its structures of categorising and
classifying. In this social space (closer to Certeau’s practiced place), human beings
are ‘defined by the space and are nevertheless the defining consciousness of the
space’ (Ardener 1989: 212). In this respect, I was gradually becoming part of the
defining consciousness of a new social space.
I nourished in this process, which I eventually termed a cultural learning
process, theoretically on cultural resources in the analytical field (such as theories
from cognitive anthropology, psychology, pragmatic philosophy and the cultural
historian school). However, it was my changed perceptions in the empirical field
that made me select or deselect theoretical perspectives.
Cultural codes (a phrase from the analytical field) are not the best phrase for
what I learned as a student of physics. Cultural codes imply a kind of totally shared
and almost rule-based learning. The things I learned in the practiced place named
the ‘physics institute’ could also be learned by other newcoming students as kinds
of codes and rules. Sometimes, however, this was not the case. Codes and rules
could change. And everyone did not learn exactly the same about the cultural
habitat. For instance, I learned that physics students occupied a particular area in
38 2 Culture as Contested Field

the students’ canteen. Even though the chairs were all the same, I, and the other
students I hung out with, knew which particular area of the enormous canteen we
belonged to. If we wanted to meet up, we could always wait at this particular place
in the canteen, which also belonged to the social space of the students who defined
the boundaries of physics culture. Physics students who accidentally placed them-
selves among the math and chemistry students, with whom we also shared the
canteen, would be ridiculed, just as I was on the first day at work sitting myself on
the wrong chair (see Chap. 1). Other physics students, who did not care or were
ignorant of this invincible boundary forming them–us agential cuts in the physical
and social space, began their line-walking from another position. After a year my
group of students had moved to other localities such as the famed student room with
chess boards and soft chairs.
During my first week as a physicist student I learned about many local cultural
resources I could employ in order to become a physicist student like the other
freshman who had enrolled that year.
Whatever emerges as systems and structural relations from this position ‘are
specific material (re)configurings of bodies, that is, ongoing re(con)figurings of
space-time-matterings’ (Barad 2007: 448). A concept like Barad’s space-time-
mattering was not known to me at the time of my fieldwork – and indeed it did
not make a difference for me in the canteen. Yet, space-time-mattering is an
analytical cut which underlines that particular spot in the students’ canteen only
functioned as our cultural meeting place for a while. But for a while it became a
good resource for me for making acquaintances and keeping in contact with fellow
students from my freshman group.
Though I later came to know Barad’s work in theoretical discussions with
feminists about the new materialist movement in the analytical field, my first
encounter with the notion of space–time came from reading Elements of Newtonian
Mechanics and from discussions of relativity theory. Barad’s analytical field
emerged to some extent from what was now my empirical field. I can now explain
with her notions of agential cuts how I began a learning process of meaningful
mattering in this particular culturally practiced place. Yet, at that time of my
fieldwork I was ignorant of her work in the analytical field as a resource.
As new students we learned, or had opportunities to learn, about many local
cultural resources in this particular organised social and material reality (e.g. Hasse
2002, 2008). I learned that there was no absolute line dividing me, the ethnogra-
pher, from the lines followed by my fellow physicist students. Though I was
ignorant of many aspects of physics culture (including math), so were some of
my fellow students. We were all positioned differently in our search for potential
pathways to use the cultural resources found to become further engaged in the
empirical field (see Chap. 7). The cumbersome math exercises never really became
a cultural resource of engagement for me, and it was almost as difficult for some of
my fellow students to use math to gain access into the physics culture as it was for
me. We had to find other ways of staying within reach of the dust bunny. And many
of us did – at least for a couple of years. Some, however, like Vibe, dropped out of
the geometrical space. We wondered about them in the canteen corner. ‘Have you
2.3 Organisational Culture 39

seen Peter lately?’ ‘I think he has dropped out.’ ‘Why?’ It was always difficult to get
answers, but as an anthropologist I had the advantage that I could contact the
dropouts and ask them why they had left their study. ‘Math was too difficult’ was
a recurring yet not quite satisfactory explanation as many, who also found math
difficult, stayed (see Hasse 2003 and Chap. 8). Over time I learned to detect
frictions that could make people disappear – math or no math.
Though some would think I stayed in the same geometrical space – the physics
institute – during the 2 years I followed physicist students in their study, it became
in many ways a ‘multisided ethnography’ (Marcus 1995). As I moved around in this
practiced place and learned that organisations in this practiced place changed, the
geometrical space changed along with it.
And then I left. Researchers can never become participants in the empirical field
like other participants. This is what legitimates research in anthropology. Our
engagement in the analytical field will ensure this. Yet, my involvement in physics
still forms my engaged perception of the cultural social and material world I learned
in the empirical field.

2.3 Organisational Culture

Before we move on to what it means to learn culture as a defining consciousness in


the analytical field, I shall look at one of the production places of culture in order to
simplify the discussion: the cultural organisation.2 The Niels Bohr Institute was
more than a geometrical space of classrooms. It was an organised practiced place
stretching far beyond the physical brick walls – yet the organisation had its limits.
The word organisation refers etymologically to both ‘organs’ and ‘work’
(Starbuck 2003) and has been used in many different ways in organisational studies.
The most important usage for the discussion of cultural learning processes in
organisations is that the term organisation in organisational studies comes with
two meanings: one is the established institution and the other is the free organisa-
tion which emerges whenever humans work together to achieve a common goal.
This is inherent in the catchy phrase by Barbara Czarniawska that organisations can
act as ‘obstacles to organising’ (2013: 3).
This kind of organisation is also inherent in the concept of ‘relational agency’
(Edwards 2010) where professionals may act across institutional borders in order to
work together to achieve a common outcome like, for instance, helping vulnerable
children. Organisation covers then both institutions with already established tradi-
tions (Hedegaard 2012) and an organisation of people with different kind of
expertise contributing to the same problem space, although their workplace may

2
Though the basic theoretical approach I propose could also be used on conceptualisations like
national culture or ethnic groups, exploring cultural forces in organisations has the advantage of
rather restricted production sites even when we include virtual production of cultural resources.
40 2 Culture as Contested Field

be located in different institutions (like in Anne Edward’s work on ‘expertise’ 2010)


and in organisations without a long history of rituals and collective symbols.
This dual understanding of organisation has implications for how we understand
one of the most contested concepts in anthropology: culture. The anthropologist
Edwin Ardener has noted (1985) that important concepts tend to go through
periodic stages of hot debate whenever a disciplinary field of study is on the
verge of a strong epistemological break. In his days, the concept of ‘rationality’
was being debated as the discipline of anthropology shifted from being embedded
in the grand narratives of Marxism, structural functionalism and structuralism to
becoming more poststructuralist and relativistic. Since then, central anthropological
concepts like culture and fieldwork have undergone similar changes when post-
modern deconstruction problematised anthropologists’ writing culture – a discus-
sion brought to the forefront in the analytical field by George Marcus and James
Clifford in the 1980s (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Anthropology has a strong
tradition for hot debates. Yet, the problems with the concepts that cause these
debates tend to remain unsolved. As problems mount the debates are abandoned, or
discussions are muted, and on concept replaced with another (as yet) less contested.
When concepts like field and culture become too problematic and no solutions are
in sight, they are abandoned for new ones like identity, narrative, etc. without
getting to the core of the challenges: how to explain cultural variation in constituted
collectively shared common meaning-making, while individuals differ in their
meaning-making practices. This chapter cannot answer all the problems with the
culture concept addressed in the analytical field in the 1980s and 1990s, but it will
unfold some of the basic problems with the concept of culture, which I argue may
be remedied by connecting it to the concept learning.
My argument is best understood in relation to the small analytical field I call
‘organisational culture’. A diffracted reading of how culture as a concept has been
contested in studies of organisational culture is a simple way of approaching the
contested concept of culture in relation to the likewise contested concept of
organisation.
The field of analysis has culture in organisations as its object of analysis. The
field emerged from a much larger and broader field of organisational studies, where
management literature is the underlying context (Alvesson and Berg 1992: 19).
In the following I first look at the emergence of this analytical field of
organisational culture. Secondly, I look at three equally problematic and contested
concepts of culture within this field, which echo discussions in the broader and
more general field of anthropology: integration, differentiation and fragmentation
perspectives.
Analytical fields have histories. Most analytical fields are characterised by a
certain degree of consensus about the so-called founders of the field, i.e. the women
and (typically) men who invented the first theories to be repeated or contested by
later followers. In anthropology the founding fathers (and they are indeed mostly
fathers) are, e.g., Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, Marcel
Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard,
Franz Boas, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.
2.3 Organisational Culture 41

Though influenced by anthropology, the founding fathers of the field of


organisational culture are rather connected to the founding fathers of organisational
studies than the founders of anthropology. In organisational culture the founders are
often sociologists like Max Weber, who connected organisation with the ‘charis-
matic leader’ and proposed the rationale behind the bureaucratic organisation.
Another is F.W. Taylor, who gave name to the concept of Taylorism and discus-
sions of how organisations can be rationalised. Studies tied to the development of
Taylorism mainly deal with analysis of organisations as enterprises, and they have
the explicit purpose of supporting management and leadership. Only a few, like
Elton Mayo, took (at least to some extent) the perspective of the employees’
everyday life as his point of departure.
Researchers in the broad field of organisational studies tend to have their
analytical origin in business schools and similar institutions. The main purpose of
research was to enhance the performance of enterprises, and obstacles to the
effectiveness of work were (and still are) their main focus. From this field a subfield
developed from approximately the 1980s onwards, which emphasised the analysis
of organisations as organisational cultures (Parker 2000: 59). This change happened
when the field of organisational studies began to show an interest in the softer side
of studying organisational management. Mayo paved the way for an understanding
of what was later known as ‘human relations’ studies, where the meaning of loyalty
and other human relations in organisations was stressed. It has since been seen as a
paradigm shift that gradually emphasised the meaning of culture understood as
‘vision, mission, culture and values’ (Sandberg and Targama 2007: 1–2).
The researchers then began to show an interest in what can be seen (in an
anthropological sense) as shared visions (Selznick 1957), myths or sagas (Clark
1972), which shape what they called the shared ‘corporate culture’ (Deal and
Kennedy 1982). The interest in management did, however, still constitute the
main research focus.
The concept of organisational culture is not used systematically before the
1970s. The organisational researcher Elliott Jaques, from Tavistock Institute in
London, who was inspired by psychoanalysis, has been identified as the first to
connect the two concepts organisation and culture in his book on the enterprise
Glacier Metal from 1951 (Jaques 2007/1951). This is mentioned by many,
e.g. Hofstede (2001: 392) and Mats Alvesson and Per Olof Berg (1992: 12), who
have tried to trace the roots of the field. The work by Wilhelm Bion’s group also
developed out of the Tavistock school, but while Jaques and his group argued for
close relations between social and cyclic structures in organisations, Bion and his
followers underlined (according to Alvesson and Berg) unconscious collective
processes in work life and stressed the notion of ‘shared fantasies’ and ‘collective
defence mechanisms’ (Alvesson and Berg 1992: 12). Bion (1961: 146) has also
developed the concept of ‘basic assumptions’ as that which holds organisations
together (which later inspired the organisational researcher Ed Schein’s work on
culture in organisations).
From the mid-1970s and onwards, educational institutions were included as
organisations worth studying in the analytical field. In fact, some refer to
42 2 Culture as Contested Field

Pettigrew’s influential article on a private British boarding school from 1979 ‘On
studying Organizational Cultures’ as the place where the concept of organisational
culture is explicitly defined for the first time (Alvesson and Berg 1992: 15). That
definition underlines the stable and collective nature of culture in organisations:
In order for people to function within any given setting, they must have a continuing sense
of what that reality is all about in order to be acted upon. Culture is the system of such
publicly and collectively accepted meanings operating for a given group at a given time.
This system of terms, forms, categories, and images interprets people’s own situation to
themselves. (Pettigrew 1979: 574)

Culture is thus a systematic organisation of collectively generated and accepted


meanings, which functions for groups in specific situations. Psychological aspects
of what creates these collectively generated and accepted meanings are not touched
upon yet. From this tentative beginning, the analytical field of organisational
culture emerged and grew to become the new trend in organisational research.
During the 1980s, culture in organisations almost sent all the main journals on
organisational studies into raptures, and they all wanted to publish special issues of
this particular topic. Martin Parker, for instance, presents this impressive list of
journals with special issues on organisational culture in the 1980s: ‘Journal of
Management Studies (1982, 1986), Organizational Dynamics (1983), Administra-
tive Science Quarterly (1983), Journal of Management (1985), Organization Stud-
ies (1985) and International Studies of Management and Organization (1987)’
(Parker 2000: 59).
Various different factors may be behind the enormous interest in cultural
analysis. For one thing, several researchers in the analytical field of organisational
studies (what Alvesson and Berg call the intra-scientific perspective (1992: 21))
have for long pointed out that something is missing in rigid structural and so-called
objective analysis, as well as in primarily quantitative studies. We have seen an
apparently growing dissatisfaction with the state of traditional science-based
approaches in the analytical field.
One is what appears to be a growing dissatisfaction with the state of “normal science” in the
discipline. Ever more obscure statistical innovations have contributed to the discipline’s
attractiveness to technically minded government bureaucrats, but these have failed miser-
ably to address issues of serious social and cultural significance. (Wuthnow and Witten
1988: 49)

2.4 Fighting Over Culture Concepts

The development of the small analytical field of organisational culture is an


interesting case of how analytical fields evolve, grow and shrink – along with fierce
debates taken by researchers as these processes evolve. What is at stake is the
boundaries set by the analytical cuts we use when analysing organisational culture.
The field of organisational culture emerged from the larger field of organisational
studies, because a growing number of researchers began to consider Tayloristic
2.4 Fighting Over Culture Concepts 43

measurements of time and quantitative studies of production inadequate to capture


the complex everyday life and processes of change in organisations. This is an
interesting development, even for researchers today, since cultural analysis is often
based on qualitative methods, which many researchers in organisational studies still
consider less accurate and scientific than quantitative methods. However, in the
1980s, cultural analysis was thus re-invented. The quantitative methods of Taylor-
ism were unable to grasp that something which, at that time, was considered more
important than legitimising research through quantitative scientific approaches,
namely, how to study what cannot be weighed and measured: the basic assump-
tions, values, symbols, motivation and emotions.
Furthermore, two external factors influenced the development of the analytical
field towards a focus on culture. With the growing globalisation it became clear that
enterprises in the West could not be studied as separate from the surrounding world
since there appeared to be a growing need in business life to understand what
happens in a world that is increasingly viewed as a global village. Following this
trend, Martin Ouchi’s Theory Z (1981) deals with enterprises in Japan. His work
shocked the analytical field, which was hitherto rather self-contained in Western
journals and conferences, because he clearly showed that the Western world
competed and still competes with many other non-Western countries with excellent
industrial organisations. Ouchi argues that by studying Japanese organisational
culture, we can learn from the different nations’ cultural ways of organising and
developing productive enterprises. Later, with the national studies of Geert
Hofstede, the national culture approach to organisational culture develops into a
proper comparative design, where organisational cultures in different national
contexts are understood on the basis of a common formula (Hofstede 2001).
The other factor to influence the analytical field of organisational studies towards
cultural analysis is a search among many researchers of something that holds
organisations in place. Organisational culture becomes, in the lingo of the analytical
field, the social glue which the researchers assume can account for employees’
loyalty and effectiveness. At the same time, employees begin to seek a better work
life with a fruitful and giving workplace culture. Employees make new demands
that indicate they want more out of life in the workplace than just the salary; they
want a better organisational culture (Alvesson and Berg 1992: 20). These factors
can be argued to trigger the development of the analytical field of organisational
culture.
Researchers met in the analytical field to discuss this concept. They discussed at
conferences and through their contributions to journals, and in local research
discussion groups formed around the concept of organisational culture. Yet, as in
any other analytical field, there is never complete consensus about what is to be
achieved by using the concept organisational culture as a common denominator.
Nevertheless, precisely these frictions – the endless discussions about where culture
is, what an organisation is and what the relation between the two might be – hold the
analytical field together.
These feuds in the analytical field of organisational culture mirror, to some
extent, the fierce discussions we know from the larger and more loosely connected
44 2 Culture as Contested Field

fields of anthropology: STS, feminist studies, etc. Because the field of


organisational culture is small, it is possible, even for an outsider, to gain an
overview and follow the discussion in the journals. Possibly due to the limited
number of participants, or the specific focus on culture, the general tone of
discussion is often hard and fiery when the researchers challenge each other’s
theoretical tools of analysis, methods and methodologies.
In research overview articles and books the conception of culture splits the
researchers into different camps. One the one hand, there is a division line between
functionalists and symbolists, and, on the other hand, there is a division between
seeing culture in organisations as integration or differentiation and the postmodern
fragmentation. Though using the same term (organisational culture), their analyt-
ical cuts differ. The integration perspective comprises both functionalists and
symbolist, while the other two, differentiation and fragmentation, are often seen
as belonging to the postmodern wave of deconstructing the wholeness created by
functionality and symbols.
The functionalists are often described as those who want to use the concept of
culture to improve the workplace or create enhanced value for the enterprise. They
are in opposition to researchers who are occupied with developing a symbolic
understanding of the concept of culture and its relation to organisation. Both
perspectives draw heavily on discussions found in the analytical field of anthropol-
ogy in the 1960s and 1970s.
‘The harmonic whole’ propagated by Edgar Schein (2004) is often connected
with what is known as structural functionalism or functionalism in anthropology. In
anthropology this direction is tied to the two anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski
and Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown. The theoretical perspective focuses on culture as
wholes, with particular elements (e.g. a ritual) that function to secure social
equilibrium and meet psychological and biological needs within the culture as a
whole. Here it is taken for granted that something like culture exists as a context for
needs and other basic human aspects.
The culture (notice culture in singular) comprises, as a whole, basic social values
that are sustained and strengthened through shared acts and rituals. Culture is seen
as the context for social systems and basic human needs. This anthropological
perspective on culture comes close to Schein’s, whose theory on organisational
culture operates on several levels. At the basic level we find the ‘basic assump-
tions’, which are the deepest and most stable fundament of the organisation. This
level is followed by two levels of more superficial, but increasingly more visible,
aspects of culture: values and artefacts (Schein 2004). Unlike some anthropologists,
Schein does not discuss culture in relation to biological needs but assumes that
basic assumptions are initiated in organisations by their founders (Schein 1983)
where after culture becomes a sort of social glue holding the organisation together.
Schein also disregard mechanisms of inclusions and exclusions and how new
members of the organisation, as persons, come to act in accordance with the basic
assumptions and how they may dissent and change basic assumptions over time.
Though he does touch upon learning, he does not discuss the relation between
culture, organisation and learning in any deeper sense.
2.5 Pro Loco in the Integration Perspective 45

Opposite this perspective on culture as a whole, we find a perspective on culture


as constructed. The group of researchers adhering to this approach draws in many
ways on Geertz’s interpretive understanding of culture as meaning-making of
native symbols. Anthropology is not an experimental science but an interpretive
science of decoding symbols, signs and seeking meaning (Geertz 1973: 4–5). In this
perspective, culture cannot be reduced to physical or psychological needs known to
social systems – nor to basic assumptions created by its founders. Culture is ‘a
historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of
inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men com-
municate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life’
(ibid.: 89). The ethnographer can construct the ethnographic material by
interpreting native interpretations, so culture appears and can be read as a publicly
accessible text (ibid.: 10).
The symbolic perspective on cultural analysis focuses on the anthropological
point of departure that human beings are creative co-constructors of their own
reality. In relation to the functionalist perspective, where the overall meaning is
given and which always operates with fixed levels of analysis, the symbolic analysis
operate with individual elements, which must be put together in interpretations.
From these interpretations the researcher’s analytical work elicits patterns of
meaning in relation to the empirical data material.
The comprehensive discussions of symbols in organisations have opened for an
understanding of other ways to define organisational culture than what has been
done in the functionalist perspective (Alvesson and Berg 1992). In the symbolic
interpretation of organisational culture, in contrast to the functionalist approach, it
is assumed that organisational members do not always attribute the same meaning
to the same phenomena (Hatch and Schultz 2004).
Considerations of who shares what in a culture recur in the debates between the
researchers who understand culture to be an integrated whole, differentiated or
totally fragmented (where elements of functionalist and symbolic approaches may
be present especially in the integrated perspective).
In the following, I will present my point of departure in the overview of the
analytical field of organisational culture as presented by Joanna Martin in her book
Cultures in Organizations (1992) and illustrate her perspectives with an example
from my fieldwork in Sardinia in Italy.

2.5 Pro Loco in the Integration Perspective

Martin defines three different perspectives on research in organisational culture:

1. ‘The integration perspective focuses on those manifestations of a culture that have


mutually consistent interpretations [. . .]’
2. ‘The differentiation perspective focuses on cultural manifestations that have inconsis-
tent interpretations [. . .]’
46 2 Culture as Contested Field

3. ‘The fragmentation perspective conceptualizes the relationship among cultural mani-


festations as neither clearly consistent nor clearly inconsistent.’ (Martin 2002:
94, author’s italics)

In the integration perspective, a researcher’s focus is on what ties the organisa-


tion together as a whole. In the differentiation perspective, focus is on the internal
differences in the organisation, e.g. the internal contradictions perceived by every-
day participants in organisational life. Lastly in the fragmentation perspective, a
researcher’s focus is on the ambiguities and complexities of the organisational
culture.
I will illustrate the three perspectives by referring to a small study I made in Italy
of an organisation – in the looser sense of the word (Czarniawska 2013).
First, an example of a cultural analysis of an integrated organisational culture:
Martin specifically points to one researcher as a proponent of the integration
perspective. This is Schein, who defines culture as:
The culture of a group can now be defined as a pattern of shared basic assumptions that was
learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration,
that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new
members as the correct way you perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.
(Schein 2004: 17) [Author’s italics]

And Schein also claims that it is basically the founders of organisations who
create the organisational culture by creating and embedding the cultural elements
like rituals and traditions to be followed as a whole by employees (Schein 1983).
This approach seemingly fits well with the following story. In the 1960s, a bank
manager created a local subdivision of a tourist organisation called Pro Loco in the
village Mamoiada on the island of Sardinia in Italy. In Sardinia, many villages have
organised local divisions of Pro Loco in order to entice tourists to visit the area. In
the village where I lived, from 1990 to 1993, the local organisation pivoted around a
particular, rather mysterious, mask parade. The origin of this ritual could be
referred back to the times of the arrival of the Saracens in the island of Sardinia.
Some contested this idea and argued that the ritual stems from ancient Greece. The
Pro Loco organisation selected twelve men, who, wearing polished black wooden
masks and sheepskins ringing cowbells, marched through the village each year on
the 17th of February on Sancta Antonio’s day. Alongside the parade of masked
men, young agile men ran around with lassos and kept the masked men from
breaking the line by whipping them back in formation if they tried to escape.
Mamuthones – the name of the participants in the parade as well as the name of
the masks that the men were wearing – was performed during the carnival season
and on other festive occasions. The parade also appeared at international folklore
festivals.
Following Schein, one could argue that the group supporting the bank manager,
who organised the Mamuthones parade, share the basic assumption (initiated and
made explicit by the founder of the group, i.e. the bank manager) that the village
needed a common identity in order to not sink into oblivion and that the local Pro
Loco organisation had the mission to sustain that identity by performing and
2.5 Pro Loco in the Integration Perspective 47

upholding the traditional ritual of Mamuthones. New members were carefully


selected and trained to understand how the parade gave the village a shared identity.
The group’s loyalty and faithfulness towards the common values and basic assump-
tion were strengthened when an election for the local municipality changed the
power relations in the village. The new people in power did not support the original
Pro Loco group, led by the bank manager, and created a new group similar to the
Mamuthones group, which made the original small organisation around
Mamuthones and the bank manager fight for their right to define how the parade
is done and what it means to the village. Every year the two organisations fiercely
discussed who could participate in the parade (the parade is generally referred to as
‘sfilata’) and how the costumes of Mamuthones should be maintained. The faithful
members of the Mamoiada Pro Loco felt strongly for the original Mamuthones
organisation and would not dream of leaving Mamuthones to the new competing
tourist-oriented organisation of parades, named Gruppo Beccoi.
Even though the Beccoi group had more money, because they were supported
financially by the local government after the election, the faithful members of the
original Mamuthones group stayed in the original group. The Mamuthones group
saw themselves as the keepers of many traditions in Mamoiada built up over the
years to maintain a collective spirit in the village. They arranged a shared breakfast
in the carnival season and promotion tours for selected members of the
Mamuthones group, and each year they conducted a special tour around the village
to collect money, wine and cookies from the people in the village.
The participants in the Mamuthones group had created a miniature
organisational culture which could easily be understood with an analytical cut
based on what Schein calls ‘basic assumptions’, creating a ‘strong culture’ (Deal
and Kennedy 1982). In a strong culture, basic assumptions are taken for granted by
all members, while espoused values (following Schein’s argument (2004)) are what
the public is shown. Finally, we find the artefacts which are visible to all but can,
however, be difficult to interpret. The basic assumption in the Mamuthones group
was that the village identity and reputation depended on their keeping up the
traditions; thus, the group had a special responsibility to live up to this obligation
even when the local government worked against them. The espoused values were
the uniform sheepskins, bells and wooden masks, which showed the group’s
internal collaboration and discipline to the public, and the artefacts were the
sheepskins and not least the masks which were all alike: shining, polished and
black. For the parade participants the artefacts appeared to be an expression of a
common mission to save the village from oblivion. They seemed to agree on this
and appeared to be a strong cultural group.
In the integration perspective the research apparatus seeks agential cuts, which
make strong culture, shared values and symbols (like Pro Loco’s black
Mamuthones mask, which also was the logo of the organisation) emerge as phe-
nomena. Martin (2002) mentions, as an example of the integration perspective,
Pettigrew’s study of boarding school leaders who explicitly try to introduce new
cultural values at the schools by reinforcing the changes they wish for with new
cultural rituals and symbols (Pettigrew 1979). The leaders create rituals and edify
48 2 Culture as Contested Field

narratives of the organisation to express acknowledgment of the kind of behaviour


they wish their students pursue.
Others like Schein (1983) talk about symbolic consistency, where a uniform
dress code of, e.g., masks and fur signals something about the company’s shared
values – just as an open floor plan signals a kind of open business value in contrast
to individual, enclosed offices (Ouchi 1981). In the integration perspective, culture
brings clarity to the analytical cut; it prevents insecurity when things appear
ambiguous and controls the otherwise uncontrollable (Martin 1992: 51). Integration
analyses reduce research to the study of a few ‘content issues’, which are common
values, rituals, symbols and basic assumptions (Schein 1983, 2004), and these are
described as if they are shared by all participants in the organisation. The shared
values will be put on display and played out consistently via a number of cultural
manifestations. All participants know what to do and why they do what they
do. ‘Organisation-wide consensus, consistency and clarity’ define the integrated
perspective on culture (Martin 1992: 45).
In general, in this analytical field, integration theory refers to ‘common values’
with no need to explain the foundation of these analytical concepts or what we
basically are to understand by ‘culture’, ‘common’ and ‘values’ (Alvesson and Berg
1992: 16).
In relation to my exploration of how cultural learning processes create motion
through frictions, the analytical cut based on the integration perspective indicates
total integration is impossible. It is always possible to find some people in a cultural
dust bunny who share common knowledge and even implicit and embodied
espoused values, rituals and symbols. But is common knowledge and some shared
values an expression of harmony? A culture that seems strong, at a superficial level,
may achieve its strength through various forms of frictions regarding
categorisations, meanings, actions, humans and artefacts. Culture is defined as
much by its expulsions as by its espousing.

2.6 The Differentiation and Fragmentation Perspectives

Other analytical cuts became available as I spent more time in the village and began
to understand the bank manager’s group seen in a larger perspective. As mentioned,
in the 1980s, a group of young men seceded from the local Pro Loco organisation in
Mamoiada to form their own version of the local mask parade called Gruppo
Beccoi. One of the young men, the founding member of the new group Gruppo
Beccoi, had previously been excluded from the original group of Mamuthones
because he did not believe in the bank manager’s way of controlling the parade nor
the group’s demand for rigid routines and dress code during the carnival. While
being a member of the Mamuthones group, he had secretly conspired with several
supporters, who now followed him in his confrontation with the bank manager and
supported the formation of a new group.
2.6 The Differentiation and Fragmentation Perspectives 49

Although the Pro Loco-based Mamuthones group as such appeared to represent


a, on the surface, strong culture in the early 1980s, it was a misleading picture of the
actual conditions experienced by the participants.
Cultural analysts like Van Maanen (1991) and Gideon Kunda (1992) have
focused on the downsides of strong cultures and how people react to them. This
analytical cut opens for a focus on subcultures where people are suppressed,
subdued and have difficulties getting their voices heard. To give an example,
although the management in Disneyland highlights what is seen as common and
shared values, the employees only pretend to agree with management’s smiling
culture. In the analysis of Van Maanen, pancake ladies, peanut pushers, coke
blokes, suds divers and soda jerks only pretend to be smiling, whereas in fact
they feel underpaid and overworked (Van Maanen 1991). Researchers need to
move around and take new positions in order to become critical of espoused
enunciations of strong cultures.
In the village of Mamoiada, it turned out that the Gruppo Beccoi, to some extent,
stemmed from a subculture of dissent. Theories such as Schein’s cannot explain
what happens when frictions move members in and out of cultural dust bunnies, nor
how or why a subculture of dissent emerges.
Had a researcher only focused his or her analytical cut on the elements visible
from the Pro Loco perspective during the carnival, the result would have been an
image of a strong organisational culture. This analysis would not have captured the
simmering unrest. An analysis of ‘strong culture’ (Deal and Kennedy 1982) may be
based on a researcher’s first superficial learning in the empirical field. When the
researcher goes into more depth and gains access to and allows new learning to take
place, new analytical cuts emerge as a necessity to include cultural disagreements
between members of a group which disturb the image of a uniform style. Thereby,
the researcher has a tool to identify subcultures as a differentiation perspective
(Martin 1992: 110). The differentiation perspective focuses on how internal differ-
ences found between subgroups within the same culture challenge the notion of a
singular, harmonious culture characterised by uniformity. In the context of
organisational culture, focus is on conflicts between groups and how they may
challenge management’s assertions of egalitarianism and strong culture. The
researcher’s attention is not directed at major common events such as common
rituals and symbols, but on how employees are reacting against each other and
treated differently as well as how subgroups of employees tend to confirm each
other’s values – perhaps in opposition to those espoused by management.
Subculture is defined by Turner (in connection with studies of industrial subcul-
ture) as a ‘distinct set of perspectives shared by a group of people whose behaviour
differs from that of society at large’ (Turner 1971, op.cit.; Alvesson and Berg 1992:
15). Both Van Maanen and Kunda’s studies show how the subcultures of employees
can be critical towards and challenge the organisation’s espoused symbolic repre-
sentations of a strong common culture. Van Maanen illustrates that though
Disneyland’s ‘smile culture’ indeed encourages an espoused value, i.e. smiles
(smiling broadly for all customers), the superficial behaviour of the smiling,
management’s perceptions of the shared basic assumptions behind the smiles and
50 2 Culture as Contested Field

the actual perceptions of employees differ. The employees do not smile because
they love the Disney concept but because they want to keep their jobs (Van Maanen
1991). The very idea of basic assumptions and strong ‘corporate cultures’ are
challenged by studies such as these (Parker 2000: 76).
In relation to the theory of cultural learning processes, researchers need to
understand that when learning about what goes on in organisations, i.e. when
researchers gradually become more experienced and engaged learners sharing a
lot of time and practiced place with the members of the organisation, new agential
cuts and boundaries are created. Learning new agential cuts creates a need for new
analytical cuts.
Martin acknowledges that an integration perspective can capture something
significant in the organisation, but if a researcher settles for an integration perspec-
tive as the only approach, many organisations will appear too homogeneous and too
full of harmony with no room for ‘doubt, uncertainty, or collective dissent’ (Martin
1992: 45). The differentiation perspective rests, admittedly, also on a harmonic
concept of culture; only in this perspective the common culture does not belong to
the organisation as such but to the subculture. The limit of analysis has shifted from
organisational culture to subculture with an organisation. Within this new frame-
work, culture is maintained as a notion of an unproblematic harmonious commu-
nity. Subcultures are perceived as uniform; ambiguity is banished to subcultures’
interstices and takes place between subcultures (Martin 2002: 94). Neither the
integration perspective nor the slightly more nuanced differentiation perspective
of subcultures brings us closer to a viable definition of culture in the analytical field
which manages to capture complexities.
The two perspectives resemble each other and are vulnerable to the same kind of
postmodern criticism known from the analytical field: the functionalist and the
interpretive perspectives overlook how fragmented cultures are. In the functionalist
perspective, cultural unity is something culture has and maintains through a balance
of individual elements such as shared narratives, symbolic logos and rituals. In the
interpretive perspective, culture refers to something the organisation is and that is
open to different interpretations of common symbols, rituals and stories (Smircich
1983). Common for both analytical cuts is that culture is perceived to be static, be it
in the unified culture or in cultural subgroups.
Ultimately, an ethnographer may never know for certain whether the patterns
that shape the analysis of a presumably general culture, or subcultures, actually
cover the experiences of all employees in the organisation. The same goes for the
analysis of any culture referred to as an ethnic group, a national identity, etc.
Gideon Kunda finds two subcultures in his work, i.e. engineers and programmers,
that counteract each other in the enterprise he calls Tech. Yet, his analysis of
subgroups can be deconstructed in a fragmentation perspective.
Kunda argues that an organisation’s programmers, who create the technological
hardware and software, tend to perceive engineers as narrow-minded. And in
Kunda’s Tech organisation (1992), the hardware engineers were perceived as
uneducated and narrow-minded by the software guys. But, did all the software
guys really share this perception as Kunda argues? Or would this picture of two
2.7 Postmodern Deconstruction 51

coherent subcultures (software and hardware employees) dissolve and become


fragmented if Kunda spent more time and moved more around in the geometrical
space of the company? Would new variations and changes emerge? At some point,
Kunda might have encountered programmers who found their hardware counter-
parts sympathetic and friendly. The perceptions of narrow-minded engineers could
be related to specific episodes or particular days of irritation or even to particular
people with especially bad relations. Learning new agential cuts would require a
more refined and complex analysis in which the subcultures could be deconstructed.
A fragmented perspective, Martin argues, can dissolve perceptions of a common
organisational culture or subcultures.

2.7 Postmodern Deconstruction

In the 1980s new deconstructive winds blew over many analytical fields and
challenged former self-evident assumptions of applied analytical concepts. The
concept of culture was no exception. These winds, which with a broad term may be
called postmodernism, changed both the field of organisational culture and anthro-
pology. The movement turned the researchers’ centre of attention from the empir-
ical fields to the analytical field. The deconstruction affected cultural analysis in
two fundamental ways: (1) deconstruction of the researcher’s conceptualisations of
the empirical field and (2) deconstruction of the researcher’s position in the
empirical field.
In the first period of the postmodern perspective, we find an increased attention
to how researchers construct their fields (Clifford and Marcus 1986) inspired by
theories of construction and deconstruction (e.g. Derrida 1976, Lyotard 1984 and
Foucault 1972, 1979). Statements of culture are as a new norm in this analytical
field to be put in inverted commas, and the cultural explanations are now always
considered powerful but performative statements, which are simultaneously ‘pre-
carious and partial’ (Alvesson and Berg 1992: 218–219).
The new norm in the analytical field is that any reference to culture must be
acknowledged as a partial perspective. It becomes suspect to build a holistic
perspective through a culture concept that attempts to bring together all cultural
elements – be it rituals or narratives – in one common term: culture. Postmodern
researchers concentrate on deconstructing paradoxes contained in any past rhetoric
and assertion about culture as a whole. In his review of the anthropological cultural
history, James Boggs concludes that the concept of culture and anthropology itself
has become ‘powerfully constitutive forces in today’s world. Critiques of culture
[. . .] must be considered in the context of its decentring and disorienting impact on
the ideas, institutions, and ideologies of Western modernism’ (2004: 193).
The deconstruction of culture in anthropological studies of indigenous peoples
took turns with a concept of culture that defined native culture as static, essential
entities and isolated islands, which we find in, for instance, the analyses made by
Ruth Benedict (1934, 1947) or the works by the group of the founding fathers of
52 2 Culture as Contested Field

anthropology, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Lévy-Bruhl,


Evans-Pritchard, Boas and even Geertz. Their culture concepts do not make sense
in a globalised world. Part of the deconstruction movement entailed new construc-
tions of the empirical field, where studies of networks or migrating groups began to
replace studies of people in place. Even studies of people on islands looked at
creolisation processes rather than the stable cultures of the past (e.g. Hannerz 1997).
During the 1990s, it became clear that the harmonious cultures depicted in past
ethnographies were constructs and fictions made by anthropologists (e.g. Gupta and
Ferguson 1992, 1997; Appadurai 1995). Some anthropologists wanted to discard
the concept of culture all together. Others, like Lila Abu-Lughod, voiced sharp
criticism of this ‘island-like’ culture concept and demanded a rethinking of the
concept of culture rather than abandoning it (Abu-Lughod 1991). Like so many
others, she denounced the idea of culture in the singular and warned that culture
theory overemphasises diversity and that anthropologists help maintain this differ-
ence by constructing culture in anthropological discourse (Abu-Lughod 1991: 143)
and, like anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, dismantled the idea of culture as ‘shared’
(Hannerz 1997: 544). Instead she argued culture should be understood as distrib-
uted and complex – referring to Hannerz’s concepts of creolisation and cultural
complexity (e.g. 1992). As in the case of the integration perspective, the notion of
culture in the singular was criticised for not disclosing complexity and presenting a
false homogenisation of society, as well as creating illusions about borders and
notions about how all natives in the culture share ideas because they are in the same
geometrical space.
In the emerging postmodern anthropological perspective, culture was not some-
thing organisations have, nor something that can be discovered or something that
can be interpreted. It is rather something written as the constructions of researchers
and something which new perspectives can always deconstruct (Clifford and Marcus
1986). In this process, the notion of finding something stable which holds groups of
people together is gradually excluded from the analytical field of anthropology, along
with the question of why we once needed a concept of culture. The new focus is, just
as in the field of organisational culture, on fragmentation.
The cause of the deep conflicts in the analytical field of anthropology concerning
how to understand (or why to discard) culture becomes clearer through a diffracted
reading of the conflicts and discussions in the much smaller field of organisational
culture. Here the concept of culture is put to the test. Contrary to the field of
anthropology, organisational culture has, only to a small degree, been occupied
with critical scrutiny of concepts like culture and organisation. Within this field,
organisations must be able to make use of concepts; i.e. companies must maximise
their profits and therefore ask for good theories of cooperate culture.
When put to the test, functionalist cultural analysis was discarded in the 2000s
because it had promised more than the analysis could keep. In the 1980s, 1990s and
2000s, the mentioned types of analyses were, in one critical review after the other,
considered subjective, inaccurate, biased and unrecognisable to participants in the
studied organisations’ daily life (Alvesson and Berg 1992: 16; Parker 2000: 9;
Martin 1992; Smircich 1983).
2.7 Postmodern Deconstruction 53

Researchers in organisational culture were accused of being unilaterally focused


on managerial and management-oriented aspects, and they were discredited
because of their instrumental use of culture. Many cultural analyses, previously
hailed as handbooks for how to do strong culture, draw strongly on anthropological
theory but run into problems when applied to real-life situations. The theories did
not work in practice, and the culture promoters could not live up to their promises
(Martin 2002: 8). Both researchers and consultants will want to work with a useful
culture concept from the analytical field, but they have very different perceptions of
what it entails. Culture is often by consultants described in general terms as ‘[t]he
way we do things around here’ (Deal and Kennedy 1982: 4). Even when culture is
defined as elements like communication, rituals or material artefacts, there is rarely
a deeper understanding of the underlying processes that explain why researchers
and consultants perceive manifestation as cultural manifestations. In the 2000s,
several overviews of studies in organisational culture emphasised that the so-called
culture wave had levelled out.
The concept of culture is no longer hyped, as it was previously (e.g. Kunda 2006:
ix). The concept is still relevant and seemingly indispensable for the analytical
field, but it has undoubtedly disappointed as a tool for change. Consultants can still
find evidence of Schein’s theory of basic assumptions that continues to be discussed
and applied in cultural analysis, but the functionalist integral analysis apparently
exists side by side in the research with other perspectives (subcultures and frag-
mentation) that has contested an analysis of culture as a harmonious whole. These
frictions have not led to a renewal of analytical terms that can improve cultural
theories to actually accommodate all the different perspectives. Rather, they have
caused a slowdown and in some cases rejection of the concept of culture, which is
then replaced with other concepts around which it is easier to reach consensus in the
academic field – as, for example, identity (Parker 2000; Hatch and Schultz 2004).
A researcher with a fragmentation perspective will pursue differences down to
the detailed level where some individual persons get confused by the symbolic
meaning of artefacts. Focus is on people’s lack of understanding of shared rituals
and their rejection of differences that were formerly identified between subgroups.
This perspective ‘focus[es] on ambiguity, complexity of relationships among
manifestations, and a multiplicity of interpretations that do not coalesce into a
stable consensus’ (Martin 1992: 130). A fragmentations study may, for example,
focus on a single theme (such as the espoused value behind individual agency). In
this perspective the researcher will be able to find participants who share, and value,
or contest or become confused by the symbols espoused in the organisation.
With the fragmentation perspective, researchers come closer to a learning
perspective as they are more likely to see cultures as being in constant motion.
This approach operates with neither an overall consensus culture nor consensus in
subcultures but an organisation constantly under construction and therefore full of
ambiguity. In fact, many researchers applying the postmodern approach end up
discarding culture, subculture, basic assumptions and shared symbols and rituals
all together. Instead they deconstruct any sign of what would be considered shared
in the two other perspectives.
54 2 Culture as Contested Field

Concepts of coherence thus gradually lose their eligibility as analytically rele-


vant concepts. Culture, which formerly defined both the field of anthropology and
organisational culture, is either discarded or used as an everyday concept because
no one can come up with a culture concept that can comprise the integrated,
differentiated and fragmented perspective in one.
Instead of addressing the problem of how to find a viable definition of culture,
the solution seems to be to get rid of the concept. Researchers in the analytical fields
become just as fragmented as the fields they study. The fragmentation perspective
leads to cultural relativism and ultimately to the postmodern dissolution of the
culture concept. In spite of critique within this field, many continue to conduct
functionalist analyses of culture in organisations to this present day. They have
found it easier to ignore the postmodern criticism and continue as before.
Anthropologists worked from a more critical understanding of the concept of
culture than the researchers using anthropological culture theory in the field of
organisational culture. In the anthropological field the self-reflection led to new
questions. Where Margaret Mead and Levi-Strauss had asked questions about
animism in cultures, the questions are now directed towards the very culture
concepts Mead and Levi-Strauss used in their analyses.
Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overing formulated it as follows: ‘Where does it reside –
in the mind or is it a matter of practice?’ (2000: 93) The answer is none of the places.
The concept of culture belongs to the analytical field. It does not refer to a reality, but
appears in the texts we write (Clifford and Marcus 1986). When we interpret, we do not
simply perform text analysis; text and reality emerges through our analyses (Hastrup
1995). Culture came home, so to speak, to the anthropological analytical field. After
having been located throughout the world linked to sites and indigenous people (Gupta
and Ferguson 1997) and after experiencing a surge of interest from the public (Strathern
1995) and many other related analytical fields, the concept of culture, which had played
a defining role in anthropology in many ways (Stocking 1982), was firmly defined as an
analytical construct. It was necessary when anthropologists wanted to stress that all
people are ‘cultured’ (not just the people in the West), but in the times of globalisation it
had become a tool for creating ‘otherness’ (Abu-Lughod 1991). The new consensus in
both the field of organisational culture and anthropology gradually made it increasingly
impossible to make symbolic analyses like before the postmodern wake, and it also
diminished the interest in searching for core values and underlying patterns. The
analytical field did not decide, however, that there were no basic assumptions, shared
meanings or symbols and rituals in organisations (or other anthropological objects of
study). All such discussions of former discrepancies were simply left behind in the
postmodern branches.
If culture was referred to, it would be as a complicated concept based on the
individual researcher’s definition. A ‘writing culture’ approach goes beyond the
ambiguous and fragmented culture in organisations to deconstructions of the
concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘organisation’ (Alvesson and Berg 1992: 219–220)
because it does not acknowledge anything which cannot be fragmented down to
the researcher’s own perspective.
2.8 Culture as Representation 55

One reason for this lack of usefulness of the culture concept is no doubt that only
a very limited part of the research has been directed at understanding how a concept
of culture can take account of the many disagreements between researchers. This
may be solved by a focus on the researchers themselves – a focus that also emerged
in the wake of postmodernism.

2.8 Culture as Representation

A new addition to the postmodern branches of the anthropological and the


organisational cultural fields in the 1990s and 2000s was a new attention to the
researcher’s position in the empirical field as well as in the analytical field. Some
regarded this to be introspective, or auto-ethnographic; others went into dialogue
with other fields such as science and technology studies or postcolonial and cultural
studies to open up for new discussions of how research and theory develop.
In the postmodern perspective, following Geertz’s notion of culture as text, it
becomes central to look at the anthropologist as interpreter. Anthropologists’ data is
defined simply as our construction of other people’s construction of what they and
their friends have going (1973: 9). The basis for Geertz’s hermeneutics is that
culture is stable and public and can be interpreted as a text, and since culture is
public, meaning is public as well. What do ethnographers do? Geertz ask – and
provides the answer:
The ethnographer “inscribes” social discourse; he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it
from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account,
which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted. (Geertz 1973: 19)

Geertz’s hermeneutics does not explain the difference between interpretations


made by ethnographers and the other participants’ interpretations apart from his
claim that we (i.e. ethnographers) interpret ‘their’ interpretation. This is why post-
modernists, once they had discredited the legitimate position of the authorised
ethnographer as interpreter, involved the natives’ voices as direct statements in
anthropological texts; the aim was to heighten the legitimacy of their work as more
than simply subjective. What became known as ‘the crisis of representation’
stressed that in describing others as cultural, anthropologists do not just construct
cultures with their writings, but through their representations they affect other
people’s lives (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986). Texts are not innocent but creative,
poetic and political constructions of others. Anthropologists are responsible for the
(re)figurations they make of, e.g., Arapesh people and physics students.
These representations are not easily made. Postmodernism made it apparent that
there might be crucial differences between a researcher’s interpretations and the
other participants’ ability to read, describe and analyse cultural meaning in their
everyday life. Judging from recent years of hot debate, it is rare for participants in
56 2 Culture as Contested Field

the empirical field to fully accept and recognise the anthropologist’s culture essays.
Protests are often the result when they read what the researcher has written (Brettell
1993). Western researchers have been accused of establishing a dominant discourse
that constructs the others in their own image and present the other as weak and
oppressed (Said 1978). In other words, we find deep discrepancy between the
researchers’ interpretations of representations and the interpretations of represen-
tations made by the others. This has again been associated with the different
interests of the others in the empirical field. In addition to the overt references to
hegemony and power relations that are linked to these discussions, this also
comprises an essential discussion of misinterpretations in ethnographic research,
which in turn may be connected to the earlier discussion about the relation between
word meaning and world in the construction of culture analysis.
In the new ideological landscape of the postmodern analytical field, all refer-
ences to culture are (since the 1990s) seen as controversial claims about represen-
tations. Poetic representations of the indigenous world are seen as political
statements produced by a researcher or any everyday life participant who is part
of an organisation constructed by historical development (Clifford and Marcus
1986). The author cannot claim any special authority over the natives’ own voices
(ibid.: 2), but that leaves the question of the authority of the natives’ voices. We
must realise that after postmodernism, we can no longer take statements of truth for
granted, even when they act as natives’ statements in cultural analysis. In postmod-
ern critiques, empirical truths always appear in inverted commas to underline the
fact that truths are situated, fragmented and partial. The purpose of a postmodern
analysis is not to contribute to or obtain postulated scientific truths, but to decon-
struct unrecognised assumptions and dichotomies, which underpin other scientific
studies (Martin 1992: 193).
The elimination of the omniscient narrator gives way to a demand for reflections
on authorship. Postmodern analyses amplify their own normativity when partici-
pants learn (more or less explicitly) how to write texts based on postmodern
theories in the analytical field. ‘Postmodern self-reflexivity, whereby an author
reflexively deconstructs the weaknesses in his or her own argument, is [. . .]
paradoxically, a way of strengthening the authority of an author’ (ibid.: 197).
Another way to circumvent the diminished authority of the anthropological
writer was to let the ethnographic subjects speak directly in the text and attempt
to remove the signs of the anthropological author. James Clifford attempts, for
example, to resolve the dispute about representation by allowing the natives to fit
into his texts with ‘native voices’ (1988). Ethnographic subjects can speak directly
to readers through their own letters, photographs and texts, which merely has the
researcher as collector and mediator of texts and pictures. The ethnographic sub-
jects’ voices may represent one layer and the researcher’s own voice another layer
of analysis (see, e.g., Lather 1993).
A postmodern perspective demands that the writer of the cultural analysis texts
abandon ‘the author/ity game’ (Martin 1992: 200). But as Martin points out, ‘[i]t is
difficult to imagine how to give up the author/ity game, without reducing the
researcher to the role of a secretary or a publisher’ (ibid.: 201). Even the role of
2.8 Culture as Representation 57

secretary arranging native voices entails selection mechanisms. Any anthropolog-


ical text will always build on a research apparatus (or more of them), regardless
how much the text deconstructs itself and include selected natives’ voices. In this
way, truth can never be just a representation (Said 1978: 272), but always some-
bodies’ representation.
Deconstruction, as an analytical strategy in itself, was a typical attempt to
recreate authority as a postmodern writer. A particular style was required during
the excavations of the text as text and focus was especially on contradictions in the
writing. One implicit rule was that writers should strive to avoid any attempt to
close an analysis (which Martin calls ‘closure’) precisely because ethnographic
subjects could always question and attack any interpretation made by the
researcher. The postmodern wake made a righteous demand for accountability in
anthropological texts and suggested that the researcher should never lock someone
or something in the categories, but always conclude with open ends (Martin calls
this approach ‘disclosure’ (1992: 197)).
Martin stresses her own research position in the analytical field by pointing out
how she has created her analysis of the analytical field from contrasting perspec-
tives. The three perspectives in her analysis of the discussions in the analytical field
of organisational culture appear in opposition to each other. They emerge in what I
later named a process of ‘culture contrast’ (Hasse and Trentemøller 2009). The
fragmentation perspective is dissolving harmony in comparison to the integration
perspective, which is holistic, and the differentiation perspective suggests conflict,
whereas the integration perspective focuses on harmony. Martin’s own position
builds on an understanding of the always situated and partial perspectives in
cultural analysis, which are based on researcher-constructed categorisations. In
Martin’s further discussion it is clear that the same organisation may be usefully
analysed from all three perspectives. Such an analysis would be able to clarify what
creates consensus and how rituals and symbols act as common denominators among
the organisation’s participants and whether the events and statements are
interpreted consistently or differently by the participants. If there are no ambigui-
ties, we can ask whether they have been excluded from the analysis or reserved for
what is taking place outside the (sub)cultures or disregarded as crucial in the
analysis of individual experiences. The three approaches are, however, even
when used together, just ‘one among many ways to “carve up” this domain of
inquiry’ (Martin 1992: 43). There are no single definitions of culture and no
agreement of its meaning, says Martin. Yet something is holding cultural dust
bunnies together. Humans still live in material worlds, which emerge as self-
evident to some but cultural to others.
58 2 Culture as Contested Field

2.9 Summary

I build my theory of cultures as frictioned, organised dust bunnies around a concept


of learning. Is it a coincidence that I chose this position in the analytical field? As a
researcher in an analytical field I am located among colleagues who work on
aspects tied to learning and organisation. My view on culture, learning and anthro-
pological theory is created in a particular analytical field where following the
postmodern currents is the norm. This has formed my learning process in the
analytical field. Thus I cannot, as some of my colleagues in the analytical field of
organisational culture still do, expect culture to be a relevant concept in a self-
evident way. I must begin by relating my use of culture to the many deconstructions
and denouncements of the concept in the analytical field. My linking culture and
learning maintains and insists on the concept of culture, but only after I have
deconstructed it; we are children of our time as researchers and participants in the
analytical fields. ‘A theory comes forward in its particular historical context and in
relation to ideas that it succeeds’ (Boggs 2004: 193). As researchers we are
positioned in this space-time-mattering of theories in the analytical field.
The postmodern movement created a new normativity in the analytical field
which requires anthropologists to explain themselves if they present representations
and modernist analyses of the postulated empirical episodes. For some time the new
postmodern norms were about avoiding closure. New cultural norms and values are
presented, and it is up to the students in the given analytical field (in, e.g., gender
studies, anthropology and science and technology studies) to pick up on these new
trends and conform to them.
The three analytical approaches presented by Martin (i.e. the integration per-
spective, differentiation perspective and fragmentations perspective) have all been
normatively used in the analytical field. They have also grouped analysts into what
might be described as groups of functionalists and symbolists, which have mutually
excluded each other’s perspectives.
In her summary, Martin emphasises, however, that the three approaches only
appear to be in opposition to each other (i.e. the fragmentation perspective is
fragmented in comparison to the integration perspective, which is holistic and
thus not fragmented). Following the postmodern approach, any analysis is always
a partial perspective based on the researcher’s positioned access to a material space
and the theoretical already constructed categorisations ethnographers bring with
them to the empirical field – and the way they are formed in contrast to other
perspectives in the analytical field. The three perspectives have been seen as the
basis for power struggles (as in which one perspective is better than another) in the
analytical field, rather than an attempt to explain how the three perspectives
complement each other. In many ways, theory tends to form a battle arena in the
analytical field rather than something to be developed in the meeting with the
empirical field.
It is neither the ambition nor hope of Martin that this type of theory of culture
should be able to reconcile and strengthen all the three perspectives in one
2.9 Summary 59

comprehensive theory. She notes that, even when all three perspectives are included
and addressed in one analysis, the researcher only covers what can be classified
within the three perspectives (Martin 1992: 193). And as already mentioned, all
three perspectives can be criticised by other, more postmodern perspectives for
lacking an understanding of the researcher’s position.
The question remains why researchers in the analytical field of organisational
culture have not even tried to reach an agreement on ‘why vehement disagreements
among the three social scientific perspectives have characterised this field’ (Martin
1992: 43). After all, replacing the concept of culture (as some have tried) with that
of identity (or any other analytical concept referring to what people share) only
raises new questions similar to those that led to disagreements about the notion of
culture. What makes people emerge as different or alike in their engagements with
the material world? The question is still important whether people stay in place or
move about or meet virtually or in a village. The discrepancies as well as the basic
questions in the analytical field remain the same.
In order to gain a more comprehensive overview of culture in an organisation in
the material learning perspective, a researcher can exchange the three different
analytical cuts found in the analytical field and pursue learning connections
between materials and meanings. This approach may itself be part of a new trend
in the analytical field called ‘new materialism’ (which follow and question the
former postmodern perspectives). In the material learning perspective, basic
assumptions, subgroup controversies and individual deviances may all be relevant
for the analysis. Yet, what matters is that vibrations of materials sound through the
moving ethnographer – who may shift perspective by changing position many times
in the research process.
This shifts focus from the processes in the analytical field back to the empirical
field. Maybe closure is not an option, but in new materialism it has again been
acknowledged that researchers should strive for ‘the clearest vision’ (Davies 1999:
62) when trying to make sense of other people’s everyday life. This does not,
according to Charlotte Aull Davies, mean that anthropologists should go into ‘cover
behind’ the natives’ voices, nor should we accept assertions of mimetic
representation.
How do we then identify ‘the clearest vision’ of culture in a researcher’s text or
in the texts of natives or organisation members for that matter?
Martin’s critique suggests that one of the most important considerations we can
take with us from the postmodern era is awareness that researchers must be able to
explain how their research is not simply a subjective interpretation. If a researcher’s
text claims to be an accountable presentation of other people’s everyday practiced
life, how can the processes of this accountability be explained without reducing the
research apparatus to mere fiction writing or a microphone holder? Even if we shift
the vocabulary to one of intra-actions and lines, the basic methodological problems
of participant observation have not been addressed.
By not trying to answer these questions, the analytical field of both
organisational culture and anthropology is left behind. As already mentioned by
Jean Lave (2011), it is high time we went back to scrutinise the fieldwork done in
60 2 Culture as Contested Field

the empirical field before the ‘writing culture’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986), as the
fieldwork is after all supposed to form the basis of the written text. This would shift
focus from what happens in the analytical field to what happens to the researcher in
the empirical field. And that will be the topic of the subsequent chapters.

References

Abu-Lughod, L. (1991). Writing against culture. In R. G. Fox (Ed.), Recapturing anthropology:


Working in the present (pp. 137–162). Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Alvesson, M., & Berg, P. O. (1992). Corporate culture and organizational symbolism: An
overview. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter Inc.
Amit, V. (Ed.). (2000). Constructing the field: Ethnographic fieldwork in the contemporary world.
New York: Routledge.
Appadurai, A. (1995). The production of locality. In R. Fardon (Ed.), Counterworks. Managing the
diversity of knowledge (pp. 204–223). London/New York: Routledge.
Ardener, E. (1985). Social anthropology and the decline of modernism. In J. Overing (Ed.), Reason
and morality (A.S.A. Monograph, Vol. 24, pp. 47–70). London: Tavistock.
Ardener, E. (1989). The voice of prophecy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Ardener, E. (2012). Remote areas: Some theoretical considerations. Journal of Ethnographic
Theory, 2(1), 519–533.
Atkinson, P., & Hammersley, M. (1994). Ethnography and participant observation. In N. Denzin &
Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 248–261). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Baba, M. L., & Hill, C. E. (2006). What’s in the name ‘applied anthropology’? An encounter with
global practice. In C. E. Hill & M. L. Marietta (Eds.), The globalization of anthropology
(NAPA Bulletin, Vol. 25). Arlington: National Association for the Practice of Anthropology.
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to
matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter
and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barth, F. (1994). A personal view of present tasks and priorities in cultural and social anthropol-
ogy. In R. Borofsky (Ed.), Assessing cultural anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc.
Benedict, R. (1934/1959). Patterns of culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Bernstein, B. (1971). Class, codes and control. London: Routledge.
Bion, W. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. London: Tavistock Publications.
Boggs, J. P. (2004). The culture concept as theory. Context. Current Anthropology, 45(2), 187–
199.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Brettell, C. B. (1993). When they read what we write. London: Bergin & Garvey.
Clark, B. R. (1972). The organizational saga in higher education. Administrative Science Quar-
terly, 17(2), 178–184.
Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. (Eds.). (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Czarniawska, B. (2013). Organizations as obstacles to organizing. In D. Robichaud & F. Cooren
(Eds.), Organizations and organizing. Materiality, agency, and discourse (pp. 3–22).
New York: Routledge.
Davies, C. A. (1999). Reflexive ethnography. A guide to researching selves and others. London:
Routledge.
de Laine, M. (2000). Fieldwork, participation and practice: Ethics and dilemmas in qualitative
research. London: Sage.
References 61

Deal, T., & Kennedy, A. (1982). Corporate cultures: The rites and rituals of corporate life.
Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Derrida, J. (1976). Speech and phenomenon. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Edwards, A. (2009). From the systemic to the relational: Relational agency and activity theory. In
A. Sannino, H. Daniels, & K. Gutiérrez (Eds.), Learning and expanding with activity theory
(pp. 197–212). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edwards, A. (2010). Being an expert professional practitioner: The relational turn in expertise.
Dordrecht: Springer.
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding. An activity-theoretical approach to developmental
research. Helsinki: Orienta-konsultit.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish. New York: Vintage Books.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, C. (1984). From the native’s point of view: On the nature of anthropological understand-
ing. In R. A. Shweder & R. LeVine (Eds.), Culture theory: Essays on mind, self, and emotion
(pp. 123–136). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gupta, A., & Ferguson, J. (1992). Beyond “culture”: Space, identity, and the politics of difference.
Cultural Anthropology, 7(1), 6–23.
Gupta, A., & Ferguson, J. (1997). Anthropological locations – Boundaries and grounds of a field
science. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hannerz, U. (1997). Borders. International Social Science, 49(154), 537–548.
Hasse, C. (2000). Feedback-loop among physicists – Towards a theory of relational analysis in the
field. Anthropology in Action, 3, 5–12.
Hasse, C. (2002). Learning physical space – The social designation of institutional culture. FOLK,
Special Issue: Culture of Institution/Institutions of Culture, 44, 171–195.
Hasse, C. (2003). Veje Gennem Fysikstudiet. In C. Hasse, N. O. Andersen, & K. B. Laursen (Eds.),
Studieforløbsundersøgelser i Naturvidenskab – En Antologi. København: Københavns
Universitet.
Hasse, C. (2008). Postphenomenology – Learning cultural perception in science. Human Studies,
31(1), 43–61.
Hasse, C. (2012). The anthropology of learning and cognition. In N. Seel (Ed.), The cognitive
encyclopaedia of the sciences of learning (pp. 255–261). Hamburg: Springer.
Hasse, C. (2014). The anthropological paradigm of practice-based learning. In S. Billett,
C. Harteis, & C. Gruber (Eds.), International handbook on research in professional and
practice-based learning (pp. 369–391). Hamburg: Springer.
Hasse, C., & Trentemøller, S. (2009). The method of culture contrast. Qualitative Research in
Psychology, 6(1–2), 46–66.
Hastrup, K. (1995). A passage to anthropology – Between experience and theory. London:
Routledge.
Hatch, M. J., & Schultz, M. (2004). Organizational identity: A reader. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hedegaard, M. (2012). Children’s creative modeling of conflict resolutions in everyday life as
central in their learning and development in families. In M. Hedegaard, K. Aronsson,
H. Charlotte, & O. S. Ulvik (Eds.), Children, childhood, and everyday life: Children’s
perspectives (pp. 55–74). Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.
Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and
organizations across nations. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Jaques, E. (1951/2007). The changing culture of a factory. London: Routledge.
Kunda, G. (1992). Engineering culture: Control and commitment in a high-tech corporation.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Kunda, G. (2006). Engineering culture, control and commitment in a high-tech corporation (2nd
revised ed.). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
62 2 Culture as Contested Field

Lassiter, L. E. (2005). The Chicago guide to collaborative ethnography. Chicago: University of


Chicago Press.
Lather, P. (1993). Fertile obsession: Validity after poststructuralism. The Sociological Quarterly,
34(4), 673–693.
Lave, J. (2011). Apprenticeship in critical ethnographic practice. Chicago: Chicago University
Press.
Low, S. M., & Merry, S. E. (2010). Engaged anthropology: Diversity and dilemmas: An intro-
duction to supplement 2. Current Anthropology, 51(2), 203–226.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Malinowski, B. (1922/1964). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Ltd.
Marcus, G. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnogra-
phy. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1), 95–117.
Marcus, G., & Fischer, M. (1999/1986). Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental
moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Martin, J. (1992). Cultures in organisations – Three perspectives. London: Oxford University
Press.
Martin, J. (2002). Organizational culture: Mapping the terrain. London: Sage.
Maxwell, J. A. (1992). Understanding and validity in qualitative research. Harvard Educational
Review, 62(3), 279–300.
Miller, D., & Slater, D. (2000). The internet: An ethnographic approach. Oxford: Berg.
Ouchi, W. G. (1981). Theory Z. How American management can meet the Japanese challenge.
New York: Avon Books.
Parker, M. (2000). Organizational culture and identity. London: Sage.
Pettigrew, A. M. (1979). On studying organizational cultures. Administrative Science Quarterly,
24, 570–581.
Rapport, N., & Overing, J. (2000). Social and cultural anthropology. The key concepts. London:
Routledge.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.
Sandberg, J., & Targama, A. (2007). Managing understanding in organizations. London: Sage.
Schein, E. H. (1983). The role of the founder in creating organizational culture. Organizational
Dynamics, 12, 13–28.
Schein, E. (2004). Organizational culture and leadership (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Selznick, P. (1957). Leadership in administration. Evanston: Row, Peterson.
Smircich, L. (1983). Concepts of culture and orgnaizational analysis. Administrative Science
Quarterly, 28(3), 339–358.
Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant observation. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College
Publishers.
Starbuck, W. H. (2003). The origins of organization theory. In H. Tsoukas & C. Knudsen (Eds.),
The handbook of organization theory: Meta-theoretical perspectives (pp. 143–182). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1982). Afterward: A view from the center. Ethnos, 47(1–2), 172–286.
Strathern, M. (1995). The nice thing about culture is that everybody has it. In M. Strathern (Ed.),
Shifting contexts: Transformations in anthropological knowledge (pp. 153–176). London:
Routledge.
Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press.
Van Maanen, J. E. (1991). The smile factory: Work at Disneyland. In P. Frost, L. Moore, M. Louis,
C. Lundberg, & J. Martin (Eds.), Reframing organizational culture (pp. 58–76). Newbury Park:
Sage.
Wuthnow, R., & Witten, M. (1988). New directions in the study of culture. Annual Review of
Sociology, 14, 49–67.
http://www.springer.com/978-94-017-9605-7

You might also like