ABSTRACT
Social scientists who were writing in the 1960s can derive a certain amount of wry satisfaction from the way the idea of culture has swept through
business theory and practice in the 1980s. We were there twenty years ago, they can say at least Elliot Jacques (1951), Michel Crozier (1964), and Barry Turner (1971) can say so. It is an often repeated story how the theory of one generation becomes the practice of the next. The interesting thing about the issue this chapter raises is that it is not another version of that story. Although its concerns are not entirely remote from the interest in mitigating mechanistic views of organization which inspired the culturalist interpretations, it is stimulated as much by the experience of management and administration as it is by social scientific theory. If anything, the theory lags behind.
