Popular Culture

Conceptual Overview

In organization studies, researchers have investigated forms of popular culture as diverse as science fiction films, popular music, detective novels, children's books, television cartoons, and blockbuster movies. John Hassard and Ruth Holliday suggest that important insights can be drawn from the way that organizations are represented in the popular media, and that such media offer significantly more dramatic, intense, and dynamic representations than are found in management texts. In common with many approaches to popular culture, the interest in bringing it together with a specific field of practice, in this case, organizations, is educational. They argue that well-known media representations of organizations can be used in the classroom to help people learn how organizations work. They also argue, for example, that popular dramas, although often in the form of simple morality tales, are different from conventional academic understanding of the work-place. Such dramas are seen to be of value when, rather than focusing on an image of workplaces as rational, disembodied, and unemotional, work is represented as embodied, personal, emotional, and drawn from quotidian human interaction. Also, commenting on the value of studying popular culture, Nelson Phillips has argued, for example, that mainstream cinema provides the narrative resources to assist with the study of such important organizational issues as racism, sexism, the effects of job loss, and frustration at work. He adds that, for both managers and management theorists, popular culture provides access to cultural knowledge that is difficult to get to through more conventional research practices and sources of data.

The concern with the representation of organizations in popular culture is a minority interest in the study of work and organizations. Nevertheless it is an interest that has been explored for some time. For example William H. Whyte dedicated two chapters of his 1956 book The Organization Man to the organization man in fiction. In so doing, he traced representations of what he saw as the conformist social ethic of postwar U.S. white-collar work in fictional stories from the cinema, novels, and popular magazines. Whyte included the study of popular culture in his broader field of inquiry because he believed that popular fiction could be read to gain an index of changes in popular belief. Whyte's rationale points to a key issue in the study of organizations and popular culture. This issue relates to the relationship between the popular representations of work and broader cultural concerns. Following the influential work of Theodor Adorno on the “culture industries,” a common starting point for many theorists has been the view that popular culture, as a commodified and homogenized form, provides a distorted perspective on the realities of capitalist relations of production and consumption. The common view here is that popular culture is a product of capitalism that is not only economically driven and exploitative, but also reinforces capitalist ideology by placating emancipatory interests through both the satisfaction of false needs and as a distraction from socioeconomic realities.

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