ABSTRACT
Culture as a concept has historically been the concern of anthropologists, who, however, have developed no consensus on its definition. Various schools of thought and methodologies within anthropology have influenced definitions and treatments of organizational culture. The notion of culture in an organizational context goes back at least as far as a 1951 study by Elliott Jaques. The English sociologist Barry A. Turner made the first extensive use of the concept of culture in studying organizations in 1971. Within public administration, some of the early work of the institutionalist school has much in common with later work in organizational culture. Current work in organizational culture developed rapidly at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s. In the later 1970s, the Organizational Symbolism Network, a group of primarily US academics, was formed. Cultural analyses of organizations generate situation-specific knowledge that reflects organizational actors' understandings of their situations and researchers' interpretations of those understandings as well as of their own experiences.
