ABSTRACT
Eliot Jaques was the first commentator to speak of ‘culture’ in the context of work organizations. Yet it is worth observing that while the text prepared by Terrence Deal and Allan A. Kennedy has become foundational to the discussion of ‘organizational culture’, others had previously recognized that the workplace might usefully be configured in cultural terms. Defining his engagement with the social system of the factory, Jaques offers an account of culture that would have been (painfully) familiar to Frederick W. Taylor’s ‘time and motion’ specialists. In the 1970s R. Harrison and later Charles Handy, for example both developed typologies of organizational culture. Thus, it is clear that in their opposition to the individualized approach to management pursued in the name of Taylorism, the coal miners, for example, invoked social solidarities, crystallized around customary patterns of thought and action, in order to defend their occupational culture against the incursions of management.
