The sets of processes and relations we have come to know as ‘the economy’ or as ‘the organization’ no longer appear as obvious as once they were. Many established certainties – both practical and academic – concerning what makes organizations hold together or markets work seems less clear-cut and our knowledge of them feels less secure. Yet among these proliferating uncertainties has emerged a belief that something called culture is somehow both critical to understanding what is happening to, as well as to practically intervening in contemporary economic and organizational life.

This ‘cultural turn’ has taken many different forms depending on context and preferred project. In a large number of formal organizational settings – both public and private – for example, managers have found themselves turning to ‘culture’ as a means of attempting to improve organizational performance. A central feature of this particular ‘cultural turn’ is a renewed attention to the production of meaning at work. ’Culture’ is accorded a privileged role in this endeavour because it is seen to play a crucial role in structuring the way people think, feel and act in organizations.

As in the worlds of management and organizations, so too in terms of knowledge, theory and understanding of economic and organizational life within the social and human sciences. Here, also, culture has assumed an enhanced significance and explanatory weight. This has involved more than various disciplines putting cultural questions closer to the centre of their concerns, alongside e.g. economic processes, social relations, and political institutions. It has involved a reversal in the relationship between the vocabularies and concepts used to describe and analyse things, and the things themselves. Instead of viewing a market or an organization as existing prior to or independently of descriptions of it, the turn to culture instigates a reversal of this perception, by indicating the ways in which objects are constituted through the discourses used to describe them and to act upon them.

This course will seek to explore these two aspects of the recent ‘cultural turn’ and explain and analyse how they are have become entwined in the field of contemporary organization and management studies. It begins by establishing a common platform for understanding what the “cultural turn” is and how it has been integrated into the field of organizational studies. We will also discuss why and how culture has come to play a significant role for both organizational research and organizational practices. From this general overview of the research field, the course moves into more specific themes and issues of relevancein relation to the cultural part of organizational life at both a macro and micro level. The course concludes with a discussion of how current positions have challenged and transformed the “cultural turn” and we will raise the question whether or not the “cultural turn” has run out of steam?

Suggested literature: articles and selections from the following books

Appadurai 1990. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis. London

Bourdieu: Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Stanford University Press, 1998. Or Distinction 1984

Calhoun, C. 1994. "Social Theory and the Politics of Identity." Pp. 9-36 in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: Blackwell

Callon, M. 1998. The Laws of the Markets Oxford: Blackwell

De Certeau, M., 1984: “The Practice of Everyday Life.

Du Gay, P. 1996. ”Organizing Identity” Cultural Identity. (Eds)Paul du Gay & Stuart Hall p.151-170

Du Gay, P. 1997. Production of Culture/Cultures of ProductionLondon:Sage

Du Gay, P. 2007. Organizing Identity: persons and Organizations ‘after theory’ London:Sage

Egholm Feldt, L. & Lotz, M. 2010.“Making Joint Learning” .

Foucault, M 1998 The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality:1 London Penguin Books.

Goffman, Erving (1959[1990]). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin.

Kjeldgaard D. and S. Askegaard 2006, “The Glocalization of Youth Culture: The Global Youth Segment as Structures of Common Difference”, Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 22 (September), 231-247.

Latour, B. & Weibel, P. 2005. (edt) Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

Maffesoli, M. 2003. The time of the tribes : the decline of individualism in mass society. London.Sage.

Rose, N. &Miller, P. 2008. Governing the Present: Administering economic, social and personal life Cambridge: Polity

Robertson, 1995.v"Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity” in Global Modernities. Ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, Roland Robertson