ABSTRACT

The purpose of this discussion is to set the research issues within the wider context of the debate about organisational culture and to consider in a more detailed and thoroughgoing way the meaning and usage of the notion of organisational culture. To achieve these aims it will be necessary to construct a review of many of the landmark studies so that an analysis may be made of the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of organisational culture in the literature. This will indicate how the idea has been both altered and extended since its first use. This is helpful for three reasons. Firstly, the discussion will frame the account of fieldwork methodology and findings in the broader picture of key developments in the organisational culture area of interest within the interdisciplinary academic activity of organisation studies. Secondly, it will summarise several of the other recent theoretical developments and in so doing help codify the increasingly diffuse and burgeoning literature in the subject. This Catholicism may be said to include importation from the sociology of education as well as the further development of an anti-managerialist critique of literature here. Both of these avenues are briefly explored in this chapter. Thirdly, it will permit a demonstration of some relatively recent theoretical avenues of enquiry. These concern the application of concepts such as counter-culture and anti-culture to the study of organisational cultures. This may, in turn, offer interesting avenues of exploration in the analysis of the culture of the two large organisations studied. Given the overall chronology of this study, the discussion of the more recent thinking is further developed in chapter seven. That is a research endpiece. It is appropriate in this chapter here, however, to begin that process of identification and discussion.