roots in the eighteenth century, when the philosophers of romanticism began to take an interest in the development of civilisation, national cultural ideas and the culture-nature antinomy. The catalyst for the development of the concept of culture was the controversial philosophy of J.J. Rousseau, who took a critical look at the Enlightenment’s civilisation ideals glorifying the natural state. Rousseau’s arguments were challenged by the representatives of German and British romanticism, such as J.G. Herder, W. von Humboldt and A. Bastian. The latter proposed understanding culture as the ‘psychological unity of mankind’, which grouped universal ideas (Elementargedanken) with local ludic ideas of national culture (Yólkergedanken)2. M. Arnold defined culture in terms of the order of civilisation by contrasting it to anarchy, which was a reference to T. Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’.3 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Social Darwinism approach dominated views on culture. The philosophy of H. Spencer and F. Galton and L.H. Morgan’s idea of cultural evolution, as well as the evolution of religion, represented a distorted picture of the development of culture from primitive to sophisticated forms, an obvious example of which had to be the enlightened, white European belonging to the ruling elite4. In the twentieth century, the cultural topic becomes the core problem of the social sciences and humanities, which remains unchanged at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The beginning of the twentieth century saw fast development of the cultural idea and, at the same time, the birth of the idea that management could be understood as a science. Cultural issues were not essential to management in the first stages of their development. Representatives of the schools of scientific management and administration neither studied culture nor theorised about it. Actually, both F.W. Taylor and H. Fayol adopted only some pre-suppositional cultural assumptions which, according to critics, included the consolidation of structure and social order (status quo) around a new ruling class, i.e. the technocratic stewards (supervisors, managers)5. It pointed towards the nineteenth-century ←16 | 17→concept of elite culture, and contemporarily, it is often the subject of critical – but at the same time – not always balanced assessment6. F.W. Taylor, for that matter, began The Principles of Scientific Management with a patriotic appeal to work on ‘national productivity’, and thus indirectly associated management categories with the national community and its cultural values7. H. Fayol went even further in the direction of cultural variables, describing among his management principles the esprit de corps – the ‘team spirit’ – which was supposed to be a source of harmony and cooperation. It seems that the concept of esprit de corps can be regarded as the precursor of the organisational culture trend, and is therefore a pre-cultural idea in management8.
Increased interest in the cultural processes came from the school of social relations, the creator of which, as is commonly believed, was E. Mayo. Using the results of the famous Hawthorne experiment, Mayo saw the importance of management: the staff team, understood as a group based on social relationships, the communication feedback between subordinates and superiors, effective and personalised leadership9, sensitivity towards the emotions of employees and soft skills training10. A focus on the values in the social group and the social nature of the management process links Mayo’s and Roethlisberger’s concepts with the cultural trend. In the Hawthorne experiment, employees adapted their pace of work and dedication less to their individual remuneration, and more to mutual social relationships and professed values and norms. Mayo also noticed that management is not a purely technical process (social engineering), but above all, constitutes social and psychological interaction. This was a criticism of the tough school of scientific management which marginalised the social sphere of the organisation11. The school of social relations also covers more compromising positions. H.S. Dennison developed the concept of linking managerial control, drawn from scientific management, with the needs of employees and social group ←17 | 18→dynamics, which is the subject of the school of social relations. Ideas similar to those found in organisational culture began to appear in the interwar period in the works of psychologists and sociologists unrelated to the school of social relations12, such as K. Lewin, R. Lippitt, and R.K. White (social climate)13, suggesting that the issue was then mature enough for deeper analysis.
The maturation process of the cultural issue in management in the period before World War II took place against the rapid development of the functionalist and interpretative theory of culture. In the twentieth century, as a result of that second tragic historical experience, the simplified and racist vision of culture in the form of Social Darwinism, derived directly from the nineteenth century, was rejected. Cultural anthropology resulted from universalist perspectives in cultural studies, but gradually came around to cultural relativism. A similar process, sometimes called the ‘linguistic breakthrough’ or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, took place in linguistics and sociology14. The second epistemological axis of analysis was the problem of the universality of culture. Some researchers, mainly from the school of F. Boas, and then R. Benedict and M. Mead, supported the position of particularism, which was in line with the assumptions of symbolic interactionism, which argued that cultures form an entirety in themselves (gestalt16) and cannot be generalised in research15. The line of the cultural universalists was developed by the functionalist schools, and later by the schools of structuralism seeking universals of culture. The most important representatives of structural functionalism were B. Malinowski, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and E.E. Evans-Pritchard16. Thus, in the social sciences, two opposing epistemological perspectives were formed before World War II: interpretivism, which postulated ←18 | 19→relativism and cultural particularism, and functional structuralism based on universalism and cultural realism. This opposition lingered on in the antinomy of the following decades, taking the form of structuralism (C. Levi-Strauss, T. Parsons17) versus post-structuralism (R. Barthes, J. Lacan, and M. Foucault18). As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, cultural anthropology was dominated by the paradigm of the interpretative-symbolic and post-structuralism perspective, reflected in the statement by C. Geertz that ‘man is an animal entangled in a web of meanings he wove himself’, and that the study of culture is ‘an interpretive science involving the search for meaning’19. Relativism and particularism in the cultural sense take precisely the form of post-structuralism, and later on, postmodernism, finding expression in the development of cultural studies. In the 1970s, S. Hall20 and R. Williams21 crystallised a critical neo-Marxist approach to cultural studies, based on the assumptions of radical structuralism. It utilises the intellectual base of the Frankfurt School, P. Bourdieu’s sociology, A. Gramsci and L. Althusser’s Neo-Marxism and radical feminism, thus developing a method of critical cultural studies which involves the ardent analysis of culture as a source of inequality, violence and the means of preservation of an unjust status quo22.