Managing Organizational Culture and Imperialism

In Culture and Imperialism (1994), Edward Said sets out to reconnect cultural forms, notably the novel, “with the imperial processes of which they were manifestly and unconcealedly a part” (1994: xv). Thus he famously identifies allusions to the slave-based Caribbean sugar industry in Jane Austen’s 1814 Mansfield Park, resituating our understanding of Austen’s narrative within British imperialism of the time. Culture in Said’s sense includes not just art forms like the novel and opera, but “the specialized forms of knowledge in such learned disciplines as ethnography, historiography, philology and literary history” (1994: xii). In this vein, Bishop (1990) has, for example, explored Western mathematics as a secret weapon of cultural imperialism, and Rabasa (1993) re-presented Mercator’s Atlas as a Eurocentric imposition of meaning upon the World. This chapter, titled in homage to Said,1 presents the management of organizational culture (MOC) as another such cultural form. This form is perhaps more mundane than the novel, opera, Western mathematics, or Mercator’s atlas. As the basis for interventions in the working lives of employees in the United States and the United Kingdom, particularly from the 1980s onwards (Burnes, 1996; French & Bell, 1998) MOC is however particularly pernicious.