ABSTRACT
Culture is one of the basic theoretical terms in the social sciences. Since the 1980s, culture has been increasingly popular in the theory and practice of organization and management (e.g., Mintzberg, 1990; Adler and Jelenik, 1986). Culture entails a very high level of abstraction; it is not obvious until we have learned to recognize it; and it is not something we will ever encounter “on the ground” (Ingold, 1994; Shapiro, 1956). As such, the term is plagued both by charges that it is unnecessarily vague (e.g., Schneider, 1993), and by insistence that definitional wrangling is a waste of time and we really do know what we are talking about (e.g., Mintzberg, 1990).
