Culture Contested Field
Culture Contested Field
Culture 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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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.
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
2.9 Summary
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.
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