ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that ‘culture’, within the American academy, was constituted as a residual matter, subordinate to, and, peculiarly, separated from social action. Commenting upon this approach and upon the outcomes that it promotes, Adam J. Kuper argues, that the pioneering American academics developed descriptively rich but under-theorized accounts of culture that amount to little more than inventories of artefacts. Nonetheless, he laments the inability of Bronsilav Malinowski’s functionalism to accommodate and to account for the everyday social dynamics that cause and allow cultural change. The chapter suggests that students and scholars of organization might embark upon this new pedagogy by reading novels and by engaging in more conventional forms of research designed to seek out the voices and perspectives, excluded from the analytical frame. It offers texts and tales that index polyphony, profanity, and the organizationally prosaic, to encourage reflection on the realities of working and organizing.
