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The concept of culture has been central to anthropology and folklore studies for over a century. Practitioners of these disciplines have produced an enormous body of literature, and during the 1940s and 50s some of their research dealt directly with the customs and traditions of work organizations (e.g., Chapple, 1941, 1943; Dalton, 1959; Messenger, 1978; Roy, 1952, 1954, 1960: Whyte, 1948, 1951, 1961). This trend was paralleled in sociology by Jacques (1951) among others, who wrote about the culture of the factory. Although organizational culture studies began to appear around the early 1970s (Clark, 1972: Pettigrew, 1973; Trice, Belasco, & Alutto, 1969; Turner, 1973), it was not until the 1980s that management scholars widely adopted the culture concept (Deal & Kennedy, 1982; Kilman, Saxton, Serpa, & Associates, 1985: Ouchi, 1981: Pascale & Athos, 1981: Peters & Waterman, 1982: Sathe, 1985). In this regard, Schein (1981, 1983, 1984, 1985) was especially influential because he, more than the others (including anthropologists and folklorists), articulated a conceptual framework for analyzing and intervening in the culture of organizations.
Since the establishment of the organizational culture construct, some organizational researchers have applied ideas directly from Schein (Pedersen, 1991; Pedersen & Sorensen, 1989; Phillips, 1990: Schultz, In press), whereas others have challenged his approach. For example, subculture researchers have disputed Schein's assumption that organizational cultures are unitary (Barley, 1983: Borum & Pedersen, 1992; Gregory, 1983; Louis, 1983; Martin & Siehl, 1983; Riley, 1983; Van Maanen & Barley, 1985; Young, 1989). Other researchers, noting the apparent ambivalence and ambiguity found in culture, have contested the idea that the function of culture is to maintain social structure (Felman, 1991: Martin, 1992: Meyerson, 1991a, 1991b; Meyerson & Martin, 1987). Still others, working under the brow and label of symbolic-interpretive research, have pursued perspectives that Schein ignored. The symbolic-interpretivists generally follow traditions established by Berger and Luckmann (1966) or Schutz (1970), focusing on symbols and symbolic behavior in organizations and interpreting these phenomena in a variety of ways (e.g., Alvesson, 1987; Alvesson & Berg, 1992; Broms & Gahmberg, 1983; Czarniawska-Joerges, 1988, 1992; Eisenberg & Riley, 1988; Kreiner, 1989; Pettigrew, 1979: Putnam, 1983: Rosen, 1985: Smircich, 1983; Smircich & Morgan, 1983; Turner, 1986; Wilkins, 1978). However, in spite of all these approaches to understanding organizational culture...