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The Cultural Foundations of Management: A Contemporary Homage to Mary Douglas
Originally published in Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research
"Grid-group:, "cultural theory" is the branch of social anthropology stemming from Mary Douglas (Douglas 1996) that interprets social phenomena through the lens of two axes: "grid", the "rules that relate one person to others on an ego-centered basis" (Douglas 1970, p. viii).

"Grid-group:, "cultural theory" is the branch of social anthropology stemming from Mary Douglas (Douglas 1996) that interprets social phenomena through the lens of two axes: "grid", the "rules that relate one person to others on an ego-centered basis" (Douglas 1970, p. viii). These two axes produce four distinct cultural classifications-individualist, hierarchist, egalitarian and fatalist. The brute applicability of such an apparent simple framework has generated a swathe of secondary research and has increased our understanding of topics as diverse as workplace fiddles (Mars 1982), risk management (Adams 1995), global climate change (Rayner and Malone 1998), international terrorism (Sivan, Almond, and Appleby 2001), and water use in developing countries (Gyawali 2002). The papers in this volume begin with Gerald Mars, who applies cultural theory to the study of corporate spaces.
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