The ‘slippery’ concept of ‘culture’ in projects: towards alternative theoretical possibilities embedded in project practice

Abstract

This paper is conceptual in nature. It begins with a critique of the slippery use of the concept of culture in organization studies and management practice and aims to illuminate problems with mainstream approaches to managing cultural differences and designing corporate culture as a panacea to organizational diversity, lack of intra-organizational cooperation or employee resistance. By contrasting the ‘culture as a variable’ approach with an understanding of culture as social-relational practice, as a meaning-making process, the paper expounds the importance of taking into account the fluidity of cultural categories, and the context-dependent and history-dependent nature of self-identification and self-consciousness in the attempts to improve performance and collaboration. The paper draws on a position known as process organization studies from which projects are ontologically understood as social settings in a permanent state of creation, evolution and emergence through complex processes of relating bet...