Understanding the Enterprise Culture

Mary Douglas is a leading British cultural anthropologist, and the enterprise initiative is probably the most significant political and cultural influence Western and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union have seen in the last 10 years. In this book an interdisciplinary team take Mary Douglas' distinctive Grid Group cultural theory and examine how it allows us to analyze the complex relation between the culture of enterprise and its institutions. It is widely recognized that individuals have to believe in the value of what they are doing in order for the enterprise culture to work. It is not enough for a government to support the institutions of enterprise alone, for example the market, without motivating the public to invest its own time and energy. But what is the relation between enterprise and its institutions and which comes first? Could the practice of enterprise undermine its own culture? Is the enterprise culture hopelessly insensitive to the environment and the public provision of collective goods? This book explores all these questions and comes up with some thought-provoking conclusions.