Pop (Culture) Goes the Organization: On Highbrow, Lowbrow and Hybrids in Studying Popular Culture Within Organization Studies

Abstract

Do we need to study popular culture within organization studies, and exactly what is it we do if we choose to do so? Is it nothing more than organizational scholars co-opting yet another discipline, or is there an independent contribution to be made? I will in this text argue that in order to develop, organization studies must find its own identity in relation to cultural studies, and that the search for this must by necessity include the study of hybrid cultural forms. Such forms, which are neither highbrow nor properly lowbrow, challenge common assumptions about what `popular' in fact means in the field, and points towards the need for a more complex theory of how images of management and organization are consumed, disseminated and re-created from the world of popular culture into the world of the contemporary organization and back again.