Advances in cultural theory: in honour of Gerald Mars

Citation

Altman, Y. (2015), "Advances in cultural theory: in honour of Gerald Mars", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 28 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-06-2015-0095

Advances in cultural theory: in honour of Gerald Mars

Article Type: Guest Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 28, Issue 5.

It is a pleasure to bring to the reader this collection of four papers. They come under the heading “Advances in Cultural Theory” and refer to the theory and analytical framework (thereafter: CT) introduced by the late Dame Professor Mary Douglas – one of the foremost anthropologists in the second half of the twentieth century; and further developed by her followers. The contributions have been put together in particular to honour the work of Professor Gerald Mars, drawing on his 40-year long oeuvre.

Gerald Mars, a close associate of Mary Douglas, who has made a major contribution to CT theory and body of knowledge, has published in his distinguished career over 70 papers in refereed journals and research books and authored 12 books, in diverse disciplines, including business and management, sociology, criminology and deviance, leisure and tourism, food and recreation; most of them in reference to the CT theory.

CT (also known as grid/group), a typology of cultures in the Durkheimian tradition, has been proposed by Douglas to help us make sense of people’s need for and recourse to classifications. She came up with a simple structure, as she puts it in her lucid voice: “I plotted the main varieties of social organisation, borrowing Bernstein’s two-dimensional scheme of family organisations, and then derived logically compatible values for each variety […]. The only materials you need to set up this form of analysis are two dimensions. Group (meaning a general boundary around a community) shows on the horizontal axis; and grid (regulation), on the vertical. Individuals are expected to move, or be forced to move, across the diagram, according to choice, or according to circumstances. The group dimension measures how much of people’s lives is controlled by the group they live in. An individual needs to accept constraints on his/her behaviour by the mere fact of belonging to a group. For a group to continue to exist at all there will be some collective pressure to signal loyalty […]. Apart from the external boundary and the requirement to be present, the other important difference between groups is the amount of control their members accept. This is supplied on the other dimension: grid gives a measure of structure. Some peoples live in a social environment where they are equally free of group pressure and of structural constraints. This is the zero start where everything has to be negotiated ad hoc. Moving along from zero to more comprehensive regulation the groups are likely to be more hierarchical. Put the two dimensions together, group and regulation, you get four opposed and incompatible types of social control, and plenty of scope for mixing, modifying or shifting in between the extremes” (Douglas, 2006, pp. 2-3). The model became more elaborated over the years (Thompson et al., 1990) establishing a dynamic typology of cultural bias, stoking (almost perpetual) ideological confrontation, infused by values, driven by expectations and normative behaviours; yet thriving for accommodation, as reason and reality dictate.

CT has developed a strong following in disciplines such as policy studies and political science, in addition to sociology and anthropology; much less so in the field of management and organizations. Thus, for example, early papers introducing the theory and its application to organizations and management published in major European journals have had only a modest impact (Altman and Baruch, 1998; Hendry, 1999)[1]. In this collection we are concerned with advancing our understanding of organizations and organizing by deployment of CT and in particular as regards institutional change. Through the papers presented here we wish to demonstrate the scope and utility of CT for business, management and organization studies and their relevance to students of change.

The first paper by Patel undertakes the important task of positioning CT (or as she labels it, the Douglasian Cultural Framework) within the current discourse on national and organizational cultures and in comparison to other anthropology-derived models. Patel finds it has some distinctive merits that other theoretical frameworks lack, in particular as concerns the emergence of cultures (without the necessity to resort to cultural origins as a deterministic explanation) and accounting for dynamic transactions as building blocks of social exchange. Unlike other, mostly static models, one of CT’s main strengths lies in explaining the dynamics of cultural change. Patel cautions, however, against misusing CT as a simplistic classificatory tool and confusing between culture type and personality.

Altman and Morrison’s paper shines a light on common, yet under-researched and under-theorized workplace practices that build on one of Mars’ seminal contributions to CT. In his memoirs on the coming of age in post Second World War Blackpool (Mars, 2015), providing a hilarious depiction of this working class holiday resort, as well as profound insights into its workings, Mars recounts how he came into understanding fiddles and fiddling as a fundamental aspect of work behaviour and work relationships. He was later to formalize these in his book “cheats at work” (Mars, 1982), a treatise about the day-to-day realities of occupations at work. Mars contends that if we would only bother to look around us, we will discover that ordinary daily activities are imbued with elaborate sets of informal rules and regulations that affect the breadth and length of work relations (with clients, in hierarchy, among peers), with an emphasis on illicit (mostly grey rather than black) transactions. To understand the essential logic that drives them one has to resort to CT as each elementary form manufactures its own deviance. Altman and Morrison build on Mars’ ideas explicating the role and place of informal economic relations in the everyday life of organizations. They bring the case of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia to demonstrate the continuities of informal practices over time and a seismic socio-economic-political transition, employing CT to chart changes and highlight the role of informal economic relations in deciphering organizational cultures and work behaviour.

Perri 6 offers us an insight into the inner sanctum of the cabinet of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, drawing our attention to the little understood, yet highly significant phenomenon of unintended institutional change. In his paper Perri 6 builds on several key concepts that Mars introduced to CT, notably his idea of “organizational capture” (Mars, 2008, 2009) whereby an organizational actor captures key or scarce resources that provide them with a power base to distort the original intent and legitimated processes of the organization. Perri 6 provides a theoretical dissection of events that led to Macmillan’s unintended institutional change in governmental procedures and consequent structure, culminating in his rushed 1962 drastic cabinet reshuffle (known as the “night of long knives”). What has seemed as Macmillan’s stamping his authority, turned out to be an increased isolation of his office, and in turn, of his ministers. Employing and building on Mars innovations to CT theory, Perri 6 demonstrates how deviance as a causal factor in institutional change actually works.

Umejesi and Thompson provide us with an account on “clumsy solutions” – the way a community progressively deals with the conflicting solidarities emerging from the Nigerian oil rush. The perception of risk – an issue both Douglas and Mars dealt with extensively (e.g. Douglas and Mars, 2003) and its derivative compensations are at the core of this negotiation among solidarities. Negotiation requires a common language – CT, at least at the theoretical level, offers such a device. That may lead, if not to an agreement on the issues at stake, than to an understanding of rival problematics, a means to finding a consensual modus vivendi.

Looking ahead, what are the challenges for CT generically and in the field of management and organizations, more particularly?

Reaching a consensus on naming would be a starter. CT, grid/group, Douglasian framework? What is in a name?; Is it four or five quadrants (“ordering”)? Should they be known as: entrepreneurs – hierarchical- isolates (fatalists?) – egalitarians (enclave?); or low grid/low group, high grid/high group, low grid/high group, high grid/low group; or simply A, B, C, D? The inherent anarchic characteristic of an enclave is here demonstrably in action. Yet with the founder now safely no longer among us, having acquired a totemic stature, perhaps the beginning of a hierarchy is insight and with it may come the legitimating procedures for the canonic deployment of CT (and we may be lucky and be spared of tyranny: Mars, 2008). Next, positioning CT among the numerous 2×2 classification matrices abundant in the social sciences, business and management included, drawing out its distinctive advantages (Patel’s paper is a good start in this direction) would sensibly follow. And finally, stirring away from using CT mechanistically solely as a classificatory device in organization studies (since it begs the “so what” question), would be yet another corrective step in the right direction. That may be aided by a representative collation of CT publications in organization and management studies that apply the theory dynamically, causally and demonstrate an explanatory power.

CT has much to offer the field of organization and management studies. The inherent heterogeneity in organizational functions and the importance of latent dynamics in the way organizations operate, the cultural biases of the different positions in hierarchy – all lend themselves well to CT applications and in particular to issues of change. I hope this collection justifies its title and will advance our knowledge and appetite for employing CT in our fields of studies. Enjoy.

Dr Yochanan Altman - Department of Management, Kedge Business School, Bordeaux, France and Department of Leadership, Work and Organisations, Middlesex University, London, UK

Note

1. Cited 83 and 82 times, respectively, as per Google Scholar of 10 June 2015.

References

Altman, Y. and Baruch, Y. (1998), “Cultural theory and organizations: analytical method and cases”, Organization Studies, Vol. 19 No. 5, pp. 769-785

Douglas, M. (2006), A History of Grid and Group Cultural Theory, University of Toronto, Toronto

Douglas, M. and Mars, G. (2003), “Terrorism: a positive feedback game”, Human Relations, Vol. 56 No. 7, pp. 763-786

Hendry, J. (1999), “Cultural theory and contemporary management organization”, Human Relations, Vol. 52 No. 5, pp. 557-577

Mars, G. (1982), Cheats at Work: An Anthropology of Workplace Crime, Allen & Unwin, London

Mars, G. (2008), “From the enclave to hierarchy – and on to tyranny: the micro-political organisation of a consultant’s group”, Culture and Organisation, Vol. 14 No. 4, pp. 365-378

Mars, G. (2009), “East-End warehouse: a case study of ‘organisational capture’ and cultural conflicts”, Culture and Organisation, Vol. 15 Nos 3-4, pp. 237-256

Mars, G. (2015), Becoming an Anthropologist, Cambridge Scholars Publications

Thompson, M., Ellis, R. and Wildavsky, A. (1990), Cultural Theory, Westview Press, Boulder, CO