ABSTRACT
Commentators generally acknowledge that the entrance of ‘culture’ into the discourse of management might be read as a response to the economic crises that shaped the 1970s. This chapter aims to explore the origins of academic scholarship on ‘culture’. In search of ‘culture’, the ethnologists recruited by Talcot Parsons focused upon symbols and symbolism (e.g. marriage celebrations, funeral rites, and culinary and dietary prohibitions). Turning his attention to the British scene, Adam J. Kuper observes that the study of ‘culture’ in the British academy was somewhat less constrained than in America. Building upon Max Weber’s concerns, Parsons developed a cultural reading of economics, framed within an account of ‘positivism’. The functionalist approaches which shape the foundations of British social anthropology have tended to assume that the cultural norms maintained by groupings persist because they perform integrating functions that are, for the collective, socially useful.
