ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s my longstanding anthropological interests took me in the direction of cultural and identity processes in organisations. My previous research had been mainly on migration and ethnicity. This interest in organisations initially had a very negative colouring, for I was extremely irritated by the way organisational analysts, followed by managers and consultants, handled the concept of culture. The dominant view at the time was that culture was a manager’s plaything. You could direct it and change it in this or that direction as you chose. Culture was identified with shared values, rituals and symbols. It was supposed to be the cement of the organisation and decisive for its success or failure. Following authors like Peters and Waterman (1982), every effort went into finding out the characteristics of the ideal culture so that those characteristics could be implemented as quickly as possible. Notions of so-called excellent organisational cultures were presented as universally applicable. There was little or no interest in diversity or interpretations by the members of the organisation itself, and no links were made between the attribution of meaning and power. There was absolutely no concern about the situational use of cultural elements and the shifting of ethnic and cultural identities depending on the context, which had been familiar in anthropology since Barth’s publications in the 1960s (see in particular his standard work from 1969). In short, the dominant conception of organisational culture was too instrumentalist, mechanistic, static, uniform, topdown oriented and atomistic (for an extensive critique, see, for example, Koot and Hogema 1990).1
