From Fundamentalistic to Pluralistic Epistemology of Organizational Culture

Abstract

This paper sets out to analyse the concept of a broad multi-paradigmatic approach, combining different cognitive perspectives, drawn from the social sciences and the humanities. It presents various issues of organizational culture: critics of functionalism in organizational culture concepts, interpretativist approach to organizational culture, critical perspective of organizational culture, organizational culture management methods (comparison of fundamentalism, pluralism, eclecticism, and methodological anarchy). The theory of culture in management and the attempt at presenting ways of studying its changes presented in this paper indicate that there are multiple diverse concepts. The complexity of the theory is a derivative of the problems related to the notion of culture. The multiplicity of concepts results from the fact that researchers assume different paradigms.