ABSTRACT
As early as the 1950s scholars were writing about organizational culture, and a steady stream of books and articles have appeared since the 1980s. Kotter and Heskett’s refinement to the culture-performance argument is to introduce the idea of strategic appropriateness. In order to claim culture drives financial performance, or any other desired outcome, several assumptions must be made. These are that cultures are singular, monolithic, and stable wholes characterized by a single variable, such as values or norms, which can be measured so that any state change is therefore “proven”. Reducing culture to what leaders should be doing is the most popular reduction in the pop-culture-of-culture. Managerial intuition about culture, as said, is ahead of mainstream practice and thinking in MBA programs. The assumption that culture is a “choice”, a dependent variable, is directly at odds with cultural and cognitive anthropology and related disciplines.
