Pergamon History of European Ideas, Vol. 19, Nos 1-3, pp. 3-15, 1994

Copyright @ 1994 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved

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THE DEFINITION OF ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND ITS HISTORICAL ORIGINS

GORM HARSTE*

THE THEORETICAL GENESIS OF “ORGANISATION” AND “CULTURE” IN KANT

It is often somewhat ridiculous to speak of a definition as #redefinition, as if a field of research could be delineated by only one sentence. A sentence is not a language, and particularly in the humanities I do not think that such definitions even have any practical use.

Meanwhile there is a paradox between the “anything goes” approach in the search for a concept of what in the eighties became widely and popularly known as “organisational culture”, and the peculiar fact that the first conceptualisations

of human “organisation” as well as of modern “culture” are to be found in the

same work, that is, Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). That book is one of the most outstanding philosophical monuments in the history of mankind,

and is extremely complex. In his little 1783 article, “Answering the question: What is Enlightenment?‘,

Kant was the first to schematise what the neo-Kantian Max Weber later called “the model of bureaucracy”. Kant’s article displayed, foremost, a model showing the conditions necessary for freedom, justice and public reasoning. Its thoughts would later be turned into a code of “Freedom through Organisation” by Kant’s younger contemporaries, the leading ministers Johann Gottlieb Svarez, Klaus von Stein and Klaus von Hardenberg.

In The Critique of Judgement we do not find short definitions of “organisation” and “culture” which in any easy way serve the purposes of organisational sociology or historical sociology. Therefore I will first try to construct such workable definitions. In place of a difficult discussion of the validity of Kant’s theory of organisation and culture, I will expound some of the central features of its origins, its genesis. My overall point is that the second half of the eighteenth century has been and is still formative not only for theoretical social research but also for the modern mind and organisation. Parameters laid down a long time

ago should be reflected upon or even changed when organisations seek to change themselves in light of their supposed culture.

The Critique of Judgement has two parts. The first concerns how extremely subjective aesthetic judgements are interwoven in communication (Mitteilung). Kant was the first to distinguish conventional “civilisation” from the more reflective or cultivated “culture”, so to speak, in his programme article “Ideen zu

*Humanities Research Centre, Hollufgaard, Hestehoven 201, DK-5220 Odense S49, Denmark.

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einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbiirgerlicher Absicht” (“Ideas for a universal history with a cosmopolitant purpose”).’ In the first part of The Critique of Judgement he proposes what has been by far the most penetrating but also the most difficult theory of culture, attaching it to a theory of the limits of communication. How is it possible to communicate about new events which do not fit our words and our rules? This seems to be one of the leading questions in Kant’s theory of culture. It has led to a number of philosophical and aesthetic treatments, especially during the last 30 and particularly the past 10 years, when it has been possible to combine a post-Wittgensteinian philosophy of language with the Kantian theory. Sociologically, it has hitherto most directly influenced the cultural sociology of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu.

It is surely possible to extract an indefinite number of definitions of “culture” from the first part of 2’7ze Critique of Judgement. This could be one of them:

Culture has to be considered as a form of communication which makes it possible for different human beings (“Menschen”) to undertake&dgements of unusual situations and cases in the same indeterminate, reflexive, unco~itionat way.2

It is possible to make other and surely better and more adequate short statements or definitions of the Kantian philosophy of culture. What interests me theoretically is that it is the first modern conceptualisation of the notion of culture; furthermore, it has been the most influential one because of the tremendous founding role Kant has had for the sociological traditions. Except for Anthony Giddens, all great sociological theorists seem to have been Kantians, from Durkheim and Simmel through Parsons to Habermas and Luhmann. Furthermore, from an historical and empirical perspective, not only did Kant have an immense impact on the German Enlightenment and on governmental reforms, but also these reforms and the whole period during the French Revolution have in turn had an influence on the constituent parts of what is meant by modern organisation. If modern social science really wants to understand how modern organisational culture is constituted, I do not think there is any way of getting around an analysis of Kant’s concepts and the period in which he lived. Surely Kant happened to be an outstan~ng figure partly because his historical time was outstanding.

Let us consider Kant’s concept of organisation. The Critique of Jua’gement was hastily and densely written during one of the central periods of the French Revolution, from 1788 to 1790. At the same time, Emmanuel Sieyes wrote his famous and beautiful essay Qu’est-ce que Ie Tiers Etat? (“What is the Third Estate?“). Since the beginning of the eighteenth century the “organisation” of the species in biology was widely talked about. The origin of the organisation concept is to be found in Greek and then Christian theology of the organism, the organ, the corpus of society.3 But Sityes was a rationalist, adept at the mechanics of metaphysics. For him, organisation was the way in which the delegation of mechanical and reversible representation could be reorganised.’

Kant meanwhile changes all this. In the second part of The Critique of Judgement he constructs an extremely modern theory of self-organising systems, showing how nature organises its own systems in order to distinguish them from

Organisational Culture 5

their environments, and therefore-when observed from the perspective of human culture-inevitably seems to do so also with cultural organisation. Therefore, human systems differ from natural systems, and therefore culture has to observe itself as distinct from nature. The nature of human organisation is to be distinguished from its environment in order to organise itself. In The Critique of Judgement, all this is philosophy, but in his later (1795) Zum Ewigen Frieden (Perpetual Peace) he shows how he will relate this empirically and historically to the organisation of states. His philosophical thesis is revealed to have not only philosophical but also some empirical, historical validity. The history of state- building and of what could be called “organisation-building” is surely almost totally interwoven.

Now, how is Kant’s concept of human organisation to be expressed in a short, workable way? Let me propose the following:

Organisation is created when a group of human beings coordinate their communication in such a way that they reproduce a differentiation of that coordination from the demands and conditions of their environments. Thereby organisation becomes a se~f~rganising system.5

Finally we can synthesise the two “definitions” of “culture”and “‘organisation” into a definition of ‘“organisational culture”:

Organisational culture is created when groups of human beings can, in spite of their differences, reflexively judge in a common, universalising way how their organisation can be differentiated from the demands of the en~ironment.~

As to how such a definition could ever be extracted from Kant’s text, I do not think one could avoid letting one or another Kantian notion of organisational culture be more or less “the” standard concept of what is meant by “organisational culture”.

The reasons for the necessity of bringing Kant into focus are based not onlyon the history of ideas, but also and rather on the theoretical strengths of Kant’s concepts, and on the inevitable empirical and historical burden owed to the Kantian theory of organisation and culture. Nis theory and his period are for us a watershed, and I want to show that this is crucial.

THE CODIFICATION OF CIVILISED INTERACTION

Instead of an ongoing theoretical interpretation of the definitions and their paradoxes, or a demonstration of their theoretical validity and actuality as compared with our contemporary theories (although I am convinced this can be demonstrated), I will discuss a few central traits, which not only theoretically but also empirically belong to the “conditions of possibility” of the definitions.’ Could Kant at his historical moment, when so many of the constituents of modernity were formed, have judged and defined differently, and if not, why not? What was his (and therefore also our) cultural and organisational heritage?

How does it happen that Kant is able to distinguish “culture” from

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“civilisation”, and what does it signify? The institutions of Europe had been dominated since the Renaissance by aristocrats and their civilised manners. The judges solving local conflicts were first the chevaliers, and then, when the military order became dominated by the Swiss phalanx, their heirs, the noble aristocrats. The state had almost no role in the inner affairs of the territories, No apparatus could uphold claims of law. Law was less a substantive code than it was a guide to how judging had to proceed. In France, these judicial functions of the aristocracy were to be institutionalised in the so-called “parliaments”, of which there were eighteen in the eighteenth century; the biggest and highest court was in Paris, naturally.*

In the Holy Roman Empire the so-called Regierungen were the local courts. In England these functions were more individualised and showed early a stronger feudal structure, with the local “peace judge” in the important position.

The parliaments and Regierungen not only judged but would also pass and register laws and taxes. They functioned roughly, on the one hand, as steady organs replacing the rare estates assemblies, and on the other hand, as the nobles’ own institutions separate from the royal central councils, and especially since the middle of the sixteenth century, separate from the still-growing central military and fiscal apparatus.

Regarding communications, the rules for the way to behave were thoroughly dominated by the royal court and by the judicial courts. Over the course of at least three centuries, from Erasmus to Kant, social interaction in the higher circles became more and more codified. All the present-day cliches about how aristocrats interacted seem to have had validity. The social order was constructed as an extremely complex system of dependencies. Everyone, including Louis XIV, was dependent on a huge number of distinguished potentates. The management of enormous possessions, castles. and families numbering thousands of people depended on the management of communication in the construction of liaisons and connections, their inner differentiation and their outer differentiations from other and lower circles to which one would be supposed not to belong. Norbert Elias has shown all this in some extremely well- done works9

Interaction became codified, civilised, symmetrical, peaceful and intricate. Because interaction became an important and complicated, risky affair, it was a tremendous relief that codes were furnished concerning where to hold the hands, legs and feet when talking with potentates above, equal to, or beneath the new or young noble “officer” or courtier; how to salute, and at what distance; how to leave a room; how to present others; and above all, how to present oneself, and thereby represent one’s family. There were leaders of manners and novices.

I shall mention just a few central aspects of this particular aristocratic evolution of interaction codes. First, these codes had a diplomatic character: when at least some codes were followed, it became possible to coordinate action between people who had different origins, different references and different characters. The abstraction and codification ofcotimunication made it possible to integrate a differentiated society. The consequences of this aspect for modern organisation are elegantly elaborated in Emile Durkheim’s De la Division du Travail and in his Leqons de SocioIogie.‘O

Organisational Culture 7

From the aristocratic circles, these manners spread to the cities among members of the higher bourgeoisie, in the higher salons but also in the numerous cafes.” People who didn’t know each other could enjoy each other’s company while being protected from each other. I2 The society had become civil. Civility creates a breach between intimacy and hostility.

All modern organisations have to enable different people, who do not know each other and who are specialised in different operations and occupations, to integrate and communicate. Modern organisations all seem to be conditioned by the processes of civilised communication. These processes of civilisation have developed under different conditions and with very different degrees of sophistication in different regions of Europe. Many of them have influenced the everyday life in which organisations are embedded, and have woven the norms of interactions so tightly, and so inseparably from our modern life, our language and our thinking, that we can hardly observe ourselves without already using these communicative figurations.

Approaches to studying the modern interaction forms, for example ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism, have often been used in analyses of organisational culture and of possibilities for,organisational change, but they have had almost no notion of the historical construction and evolution of the interaction norms.i3 Therefore, they have not had any overall theory for a cultural diagnosis of the scope of the freedom to change ways of interaction (i.e. organisational integration).

THE CODIFICATION OF CIVILISED ORGANISATION

Another aspect of this issue is that noble manners became elaborated codes not only in the aristocratic circles, but, in another way, in the argumentation procedure in the judicial courts -especially in the Frenchpariements. They were also codes for the collegially-organised chancelleries, chamber-administrations of domains in the increasingly stratified military administration, and of particular interest, in the financial and fiscal government of the absolutist state. The codification had its centre in France, in Paris and Versailles. But nowhere did its organisational signification become more codified than in the Brandenburg-Prussian government under Frederick Wilhelm I (17 13-l 740).

Since the fifteenth century, the Prussian cities and their bourgeoisie had been heavily dominated by the commercially active Junker aristocracy, when compared with French cities and their bourgeoisie. There is a difference between the German Biirger and the French bourgeois as well as between the Prussian Junker and the French aristocrat. Although the Junkers were less wealthy than the French aristocrats (and less in debt), they were almost fully separated from the Biirger, who only by admission to the higher state administration had any chance of becoming noble, by which I mean acquiring the prestige and privileges that the nobles had. Aristocrats had privileges regarding judicial courts; they did not have to pay taxes; and they could be appointed to higher and better-salaried offices much more easily.i4

For the relatively unsophisticated “soldier’s king”, Frederick Wilhelm I, the

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survival of an independent northeastern Germany and of the raison d’etat of the small and (after the Thirty Years’ War) extremely shaken Brandenburg-Prussia was of utmost importance. Furthermore, it was an extraordinary possibility for strengthening the Hohenzollern family. For that purpose it was essential to construct a workable, efficient government apparatus. Brandenburg-Prussia has been called “an army with a territory useful as a supply magazine”, and in some

sense the state grew out of nothing. The Junker sons were often too bound to local, centrifugal interests, while able Biirger and lower nobles were much more dependent on the upper principals appointing them. Therefore these lower and “uncivilised” but able persons were recruited in large numbers in the first part of the eighteenth century. They, the upcoming and future Beamtenstand (“Civil service”), assumed the interaction codes of their French-upper-aristocracy- oriented and often French-speaking department heads.

What since Max Weber are known as the modern bureaucratic codes of organisation-the distinctions of role versus personality, work versus leisure, salary versus office budget, office versus home, administrative individual case

(Sache) versus reality-were codified in the ancien rkgime of the absolutist state as the result of the absolutist civilisation and its forms of interaction. These differentiations are not strictly speaking modern, but they are necessary

conditions for modernity. If modern organisations were to be changed or “de-differentiated”r5 as a result

of cultural orientations in organisations, then it would not only be the last

hundred years of social and cultural order which would have to be dealt with. At least three or four hundred years’ worth of civilised codes would have to be thrown over. This can perhaps hardly be called “postmodern” in the sense of

postmodernity as an eclectic combination of modernity and the Baroque period; rather, it would go back to feudalism.

THE CULTURE OF COMMUNICATION

We now come to the third and final aspect concerning the cultural definition. This aspect will show that modern culture has already filtered and reflected upon what it means to change codes of communication.

The inner logic of the aristocratic evolution of interaction codes can be said to be the evolution of a paradox between the involution of codes-or durcissement de systtme as the French historians call itr6- and the signification with which

new symbols of interaction were invested. There were a number of extreme differentiations between stable involution and innovation, between past and present, and between outer interaction codes and personal management of these codes.17

These differentiations show the phenomenological order of our modern culture, and nothing is so classic as the recent search for a peculiar organisational culture. All aristocrats and bourgeois commoners had to follow the same imperative: they had to find their own expressions, and they should find these expressions in the same way as other nobles. All nobles had in comparable ways to express themselves differently from all other nobles. This was the way to create

Organisational Culture 9

a niche of influence and importance in the ever increasing competition for attention and therefore for positions in the differentiated market of the higher circles. Today, and especially since the seventies, we see a revival of these codified forms of “ksprit de corps” and of the communicative ways to achieve distinguished honourable positions inside organisational forms. What today is called “organisational culture” shows in its contrast to regular bureaucracy often astonishing parallels to the kind of esprit de corps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In both cases a group of interaction codes and rules are not so much set aside as they are already understood as given, and the certain Psprit or undeterminable “culture” of how to handle particular situations and particular cases that might result in the innovation of new codes and norms is deeply cultivated; it does not demonstrate an ignorance of the given rules but rather what Habermas calls a post-conventional mastering of these rules.‘*

Instead of bureaucratic responsibility, symbolic and representative honour was in focus. This is not that interesting as regards modern administrative law, but it is extremely interesting for modern organisational practice, in which what I will call the accountability of individuals is more important for organising practices than the boundary condition of the more critical “responsibility”, which comes into focus particularly in those cases, which are normally rather extreme, when the organisation does not function any more.

For the bourgeoisie it became essential not to stick to the traditional privileges of the aristocrats, that is, to the past. The aristocrats were not to have the particular privilege of their nobility being considered a certain form of merit in the recruitment to state functionary positions.

The interaction codes became more and more widespread, especially in the cities; and they could be taught in courses of rhetoric equal, in a way, to the different specialised training programmes in the universities, with textbooks, etc.

The present was to be evaluated for its difference from the past, not for its resemblance to the past. I9 The individual was not to be evaluated as a representation and an extension of his family. The individual was to become a difference that made a difference. The individual was to be responsible for what he was here and now, and not for whatever to which he in an honourable way had belonged in the past.

The signification of the present as something different from the past, and of the individual’s personal attributions to this difference, was to be cultivated in art and in the public reception of art, and more generally in the public reception of anything new that happened. Every symbolic performance could be received, debated and criticised in the public sphere. *O Taste and judgements could be personal, but there existed public criticism and public standards for them. Because no taste could be upheld and reproduced without any symbols at all, no cultivated judgement in “high society” could stay unaffected by the cultivation process., Culture became open, unconditioned and disinterested. It was to be measured and judged when it was not previously determined by interests or by rules and concepts about what was beautiful and good. Culture was a way to get rid of the past, not by neglecting its rules, structures and organisation, but by an open, undetermined reflection of it in order to reorganise it.

Therefore culture became negative and reflexive. It was always in motion; it

IO Got-m Hat-se

always differentiated itself from itself. I want to propose a concept which I call the “culture of communication”: in such a culture, culture is independent of given contexts, liaisons and persons with whom one interacts. A modern “culture of communication” is one where individuals interact and coordinate with others about whom they may not already have confidence, but with whom they can expect to have a more trusting interaction, Furthermore, these individuals might have different viewpoints, standards and references, but they can nevertheless cooperate in new situations about new phenomena.

I will furthermore propose that for the past three hundred years such aculture of communication has become such an intrinsic part of what it means to live a modern organised life that we even have difficulties observing how it structures our communicative, cultural and organisational competences.*i

It seems that one of the blind spots of modern organisational sociology is that there are such tremendous dif~culties in under~king an observation of our own cultural competences, that organisational sociologists often think it necessary to import ethnographic models and studies of culture.22

Now, all these aspects were thoroughly discussed, reflected, filtered and reorganised at the end of the eighteenth century. Formal organisation was thoroughly reflected as specific codifications of an ksprit de corps. The very sense of the codification since about 1770 was that it could be reflected upon, discussed and reformed. Both in France and in the German states, organisation and reorga~~sarion were a conceptual pair. When an institution was considered “organised”, that meant it was organised in such a way that it could be reorganised. It is amazing to see the discussions and the titles of programmes, articles and books concerning government administration from that period: there seems to have been a “cult of reorganisation”, or an “organisational fever”, as an observer of the relatively backward Bavarian administration has called it.

THE EVOLUTION OF SELF-ORGANISATION

Finally I will briefly indicate how the cultivation of this organisatiom’re- organisation fever is implied by the Kantian notion about the origin of modern organisation as a self-organ;lsing system. According to Kant, the state-building process is one in which the battle for territory, i.e. for nature, geographically spreads out the social systems preoccupied with the preservation and reproduction of themselves, unconditioned by the constraints and dangers posed by nature and by external enemies. This logic of the unconditioned conditions of self-organising territorial systems had an extremely symmetrical structure in the post-Carolingian system of early feudal Europe. Authors such as Otto Hintze and Norbert Elias have brilliantly shown the consequences of this system of several hundreds of interdependent autonomous regional systems. These territorially small “states” had to be organised in such a way as to prevent their domination by external forces.

Today it is certainly interesting to analyse these developments as social evolutions of what Luhmann, following the Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana, calls “autopoietic self-organised systems”. Such an analysis would be

Organisational Culture 11

very close to Kant’s concepts as well as to his arguments. When the post-Carolingian states organised themselves as distinct from their

environments, they became able to adapt to these same environments. They were, so to speak, condemned to set themselves free from other and outer determinants.

This was to be a Continental condition, rather than a condition for the British Islands.

As long as delegation of position (i.e. of power) was not codified, or sanctioned in a codified way, it was impossible to construct bigger alliance systems. The centre of such construction was to be France, and the turning point seems to be the middle of the sixteenth century, when a few bigger, loosely organised allied state systems were developed: England; France; the Holy Roman Empire including Austria; Spain; Russia; Sweden etc. Until that moment, an ongoing concentration and centralisation had taken place.

The military order of the continental social systems was certainly of the utmost importance for an integration of the organisational development of the absolutist government. The use of unskilled, unexercised foreign troops in the 6000-man Swiss regular phalanx was broken by the Dutchman Maurice of Orania and later by Gustavus Adolphus, who made exercises (the forerunners of Taylorism), provision, production of supplies, magazines and strategically differentiated offensives central parts of the military organisation. France had already developed a model for permanent troops. All this was very costly and demanded a complex financial system.

The most important organisational innovation was therefore the appointment of the so-called “extraordinary ofticer”,23 who was occupied with provisioning the troops. Offensive strategy was differentiated from the organisation of supplies, which covered recruitment of troops, cannons, food, horses, housing, transportation systems and especially money. The attendants of the royal domains and travelling courts were formerly the specialists of this kind of organisation, and they came to be the new functionaries occupying the inner part of the absolutist government. The self-organisation of these new administrative organs came to be the real battlefield for the absolutist states. They were the centre of a Raison d’l?tat that bore the eternal “static” sovereignty of the monarchies: taxes paid for an army, which could be used externally but also internally as a final mechanism of sanctions against groups who would not pay taxes. The more it was codified, legalised and monetarised, and the more its functions were based on systems of codified appointment, the better the self- reverential, self-legalising, and self-organising system of government func- tioned.24

That was why Kant and his contemporaries could see reorganisational competences as the crucial Realpolitik, as the turning point of organised society: every organisational or technical innovation by enemies or competitors was to be met by one or another kind of reorganisation of governmental agencies. When the French government could not convince the parlements and the indebted aristocrats that the French military system could hardly survive reduction of costs, and therefore had to increase taxation of those who had the money, i.e. the first estate, at that moment the French governmental reorganisation ran into the

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cultural and legitimate limits of administrative reorganisation.25 The govern- mental organisation had created a taxable bourgeoisie, a civilised public opinion which was able to think, reflect and discuss about reorganisation of whatever had

to be reorganised. This was what lead to the French Revolution and the Prussian organisational reforms.

THE ETHICAL CONFLICT OF MODERN ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE

The Napoleonic administrative centralisation of French government as well as several Prussian reforms lead to a peculiar paradox or conj?ict in the constituents of modern organisation. In both cases the bureaucracies could be characterised as having Janus faces. Their strictly codified procedures were the necessary condition for the development of modern legal government, liberated from former despotism and privileged interests. 26 In that sense the bureaucratic procedures have been an inevitable reference for the cultivation of modern ethics as well as for instrumental alienation, since their members, and citizens in general, were considered only in their roles and not as individual human beings as

such. In this last aspect there are tendencies toward what Max Weber and Habermas called “loss of freedom” and “loss of sense”. What Weber meanwhile especially criticises is the self-organisation of the civil service as a new and reconstructed kind of civil first “estate” equipped with an impenetrable

ksprit de corps. 27 This reconstructed pseudo-culture was still absolute and totalitarian, and hindered freedom of speech; it still was based on a collegially-

supervised and in every sense controlled mode of organisation. It was what Weber seemed to expound as the real danger for modern culture and its freedom of speech, its universal ethics, and its modernist occupation with innovations that

do not always fit exactly into the “iron cage” of the closed organisational “estate’s” ksprit de corps. While Stein and Hardenberg’s liberal reforms of bureaucracy could claim with Hegel a vision of Freiheit durch Verwaltung (“freedom through organisation”), 28 this privileged ksprit de corps, for which all were equal but some were more equal than others, led to a loss of freedom and a

loss of sense. What seems to be of crucial importance in the Kantian lessons is that

organisational culture is indeed based on a trusting acceptance of differences, without which every “cultural” dedifferentiation conflates justice and organi- sational ethics into a kind of terreur, where all employees have to share a familiar, confident goal, where everyone in his role not only has to stay in the same boat and keep it floating as a self-organisational system, but also has to feel himself intimately interwoven with his organisation as a replacement of his private

family. First, the Kantian lesson seems to demonstrate which kind of overall

organisational, ethical and cultural regression such a management strategy would entail: it would dry out the reflexive sources necessary to cope with the innovations of reorganisation. Second, it would be a judicial and ethical disaster if it were not even in principle possible to differentiate between who the actor is

Organisational Culture 13

and who decided what in pursuance of which nr/e. Third, such a management strategy is useless, if not hopeless. Modern culture

has already once a long time ago condemned its members and its organisations to a competitive search for ways to stay outside competition in an ongoing search for new branches, new niches, new products, or new research results, and it has condemned individuals to an ongoing search for a new and different personal identity where others cannot intervene. The explicit formalisation of interaction symbols in rules meanwhile gave individuals the possibility to distinguish themselves and their intimate life from these codes; thereby civility and the cultivation of life as a world in its own sense became possible.

Humanities Research Centre, Odense Corm Harste

NOTES

1. Kant, in S~hrka~~ ~erkausgabe Band XI (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 44. Cf. Norbert Elias, Crber den Pr5zess der Zivilisarion, 1 (Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 8. Before Kant, “culture” was not reflexive and was not used as a negative criteria for judgement; rather it was an adjective: a man could be “a man of culture”. “Cultivation” was conceptualised as the accumulation of skills; this accumulative aspect was and is also present in the concept of agri-culture.

2. The emphasised words are key concepts in the Kantian philosophy. In this and the following two definitions I have transformed some of the concepts in order better to serve a sociological purpose. One of the advantages of Kant’s philosophy is that it conceptually is one of the most precise philosophies of all; therefore, naturally, translation of his terms is difficult, but not as impossible as with some of the other German idealist thinkers.

3. Cf. Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, “Organ, Organismus, Organisation, politische Korper” in Reinhart Koselleck a.o. (Hrsg.), Geschichtliche Grundbegrffe.

4. Emmanuel Sityes, Qu’esr-ce que le Tiers Bat? (Paris: Quadrige PUF, 1982) (orig. 1789), pp. 65-67.

5. This inte~retation is somewhat pointed compared with Kant’s text, because I involve the communication point of view from the first part of The Critique of Judge~e~t. A similar interpretation is surely very much alive between the lines of Habermas’ recent: Faktizitiit und Geltung (Suhrkamp, 1992).

6. The definitions have some paradoxes: we observe the possibility of conflicts between the openness of a culture of ever different human beings and the closeness of the organisational coordination. In Kant’s theory of culture, his key concept “allgemein” is neither the closed “common”, nor the universal public, but rather, distinctly in-between those two: new members are admitted without hesitation, as the culture and the organisational culture can deal with human beings who are not exactly members of the inner circles. If membership and communication are restricted to conventional codes or forms, then Kant speaks about civilisation and not culture, and about actors (“Vernilnftswesen”) and not human beings (“Menschen”).

7. Kant’s Third Critique implies such a synthesis of the transcendental conditions of possibility and historical empirical evolution.

8. These developments have been described in an enormous number of studies. For comparative sociological purposes, in what follows I have especially used the

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outstanding classic treatments of Otto Hintze, Werke l-3 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1962); Kurt Jeserich, Hans Pohl, von Unruh (Hrsg.), L)eutsche ~e~aztungsgeschichte Bd. I-2 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1983); Roland Mousnier, Les Institutions de fa France sous la Monarchic Absolute, Tome 1-2, (Paris: PUF, 1974, 1980). The most penetrating analysis of statebuilding is Charles Tilly

(ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1975).

9. Cf. Elias, Op.cit. and his Die h8fische Geseiischaft (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1981). 10. Durkheim [Paris: PUF, 1930 (orig. 1893) and 1950 (orig. 191 l)]. In his Images of

Organ~sation (London: Sage, 1986), p. 113, Gareth Morgan characterises organisa- tional culture as the integration of differentiated organisations.

11. Cf. Reinhart Koselieck, Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der biirgerlichen Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 49-68. Jtirgen Habermas, Strukturwandelder Offentlichkeit (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1962), chap. 1-3.

12. Cf. Richard Sennett, The Fail of Public Man (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 264. 13. Cf. also the penetrating critiques offered by Jtirgen Habermas, Theorie des

kommunikativen Handelns Bd. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 118-296, and Niklas Luhmann, Vertrauen (Stuttgart: Enke, 1989), and “Wie ist soziale Ordnung m~glich?’ m Gese~~s~haftsstruktur und Semantik, Studien zur Wissenssozio~agie der modernen Gesellschaft Bd. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981).

14. Cf. Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy. The Prussian Experience 1660-1815 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958).

15. Stewart Clegg, Modern Organization, Organization Studies in the Post-modern World (London: Sage, 1990), p. 2.

16. Denis Richet, La France Moderne: L’isprit desznstitutions (Paris: Flammarion, 1973)

pp. 74, 107. 17. On the construction of the modern interaction codes based on the paradox between

involution and innovation, cf. Luhmann, “Interaktion in den Oberschichten: Zur Transformation ihrer Semantik im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert”and “‘Temporaiisierung von Komplexitlt”, in Geselfschaftsstruktur und Semantik Bd. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980); Luhmann, Liebe als Passion. Zur Codierung von Intimitiit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982).

18. Cf. Habermas, Moralbewusstsein und kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 173ff. 19. Cf. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Chases (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 64. 20. Cf. Habermas, Strukturwandei der ~ffent~ichkeit, op.&. Section 5. 21. Cf. Habermas,L)erphilosophischeDiskursderModerne(Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1985)

p. 390ff. 22. To my knowledge, the most systematic attempt to forget the unavoidable

hermeneutics of our modern culture and to neglect the importance of the civilisation process is written by the Dane Finn Collins, Organisationskultur og forandring (Copenhagen: Nyt fra Samfundsvidenskaberne, 1987).

23. The first and indeed classic analysis of this governmental invention is provided by Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la R~publique (Aalen: Scientia, 1961), pp. 372-392,

24. A theoretically somewhat simpler analysis of such “cycles” is provided by Samuel Finer in Charles Tilly (ed.), Op.cit.

25. Ernst Hinrichs has neatly analysed the French Revolution using Habermas’ paradigm for legitimation crises as such as displacement of crisis from economic to administrative crisis, and then on to a legitimate and motivational crisis. Cf. Ancien Rigime und Revo/ution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989) p.99ff. A parallel but philosophical dislocation of paradoxes can be traced from the second to the first part of Kant’s The Critique of ~udgement.

Organisational Culture I5

26. Cf. Martin Albrow, Bureaucracy (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970) and his Max Weber’s Construction of Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1990).

27. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1972), pp. 541-579. 28. Reinhart Koselleck, Preussen zwischen Reform undRevolution (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,

1975).