Culbert, Samuel: The Magician’s Work on Organization Change

Samuel Culbert payed attention to his experience and made himself the consummate applied behavioral scientist. He is an almost five-decade contributor of pathbreaking ideas, skilled in identifying management dysfunction and original in suggesting models of progressive organizational change. Combining a clinician’s eye with system analytic, inductive thinking, he constructs mid-level theoretical frameworks aimed at influencing frontline practitioners along with academically housed students of change. Always “outside the box” challenging conventional wisdom and mainstream practice, his contributions have been both methodological and substantive. His body of work combines an intense humanism with critical thinking that advances the state of knowledge. This essay attempts to review the roots of his thinking, the essence of his work, and the muckraking advocacy stances he has taken. We see the progression of his thinking in his forthcoming book where he revises some of his previous assumptions about organizations, concluding that far more variables than previously thought must be engaged for the management mentality, mainstream in organizations, to appreciably change.