This article questions the powerful call to conformity that hides behind the simple and apparently humanistic idea of “shared values” within contemporary organizations, as well as the tacit modalities that, in managerial discourse, determine a member’s “belonging” to his or her company, his or her loyalty to the organization. We ask the following question: might it be possible to envisage an alternative concept to that of organizational values, one that would allow organizational culture in management sciences to be thought of in terms that are inclusive, pluralistic, reflexive and performative? This paper argues that the philosophy of François Jullien can prove particularly fruitful for rethinking the way we construe organizational culture in management. Jullien (2008, 2012, 2016) uses the philosophical concept of cultural resources to challenge totalizing academic and political discourses wherein national culture and identity are reduced to a sum of “shared values”. The notion of cultural resource has both an intellectual and a political background. For example, Jullien (2016) uses it as a response to former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who claimed to defend the roots, culture and national identity of France in these terms: “The moment you become French, your ancestors are the Gauls.” This article attempts to provide researchers, employees and reflexive managers with a critical and performative approach to organizational culture. An approach which values what Jullien calls cultural gaps, enabling members of a given culture/organization to challenge/deviate from the implicit norms, thereby fostering their existential capacity. Valuing gaps and deviations as positive and creative by no longer turning them into elements of exclusion of « poorly acculturated » subjects, but, on the contrary, into a fruitful ingredient of the collective future, effectively summons the “members” of an organization, to develop their existential capacity and to belong to the group not only by conformity but also by disadherence. (Jullien, 2016: 61). From a theoretical standpoint, harnessing the concept of cultural resources in organization theory also enables us to eschew a limitation at the heart of Critical Studies on Organizational Culture (CSOC). In this regard, we suggest that the concept of cultural resources offers the possibility of developing a CSOC approach which is more in line with recent proposals on critical performativity, especially in favor of alternative organizations (Parker and Parker, 2017).
