Business Literature and Understandings of Business

Business is not just sets of activities and relationships. It is also a cultural category, an aspect of people’s understanding of the world and what is in it. Such understandings are interesting in their own right. In addition, however, they are useful for helping us to make sense of people’s actions and orientations in various parts of their lives. My purpose here is to illustrate how we might approach those understandings, the sorts of questions we can ask about them, and the sorts of things we might learn from them. A simple example of those understandings springs from the fact that, for many people, the realm of business is associated with a set of values and practices that is taken to be characteristic of the realm of economy generally. Social scientists have long been interested in people’s experiences and views of that economic realm, and especially the ways that they contrast with the social realm. Talcott Parsons (e.g. 1959: 261) pointed to an aspect of that contrast when he argued that these two realms are organised on radically different principles and entail radically different sorts of relationships. David Schneider (1980 [1968]) applied Parsons’s argument to American culture when he described how people’s understandings of the economic realm, the realm of business, are crucial for their understanding of the family, the essence of the social realm. Less grandly, this distinction can help account for the attraction of fair