Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation - Hardcover

Kunda, Gideon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592135455 ISBN 13: 9781592135455

Publisher: Temple University Press, 2006

Synopsis

"Engineering Culture" is an award-winning ethnography of the engineering division of a large American high-tech corporation. Now, this influential bookOCowhich has been translated into Japanese, Italian, and HebrewOCohas been revised to bring it up to date. In "Engineering Culture," Gideon Kunda offers a critical analysis of an American company's well-known and widely emulated corporate culture. Kunda uses detailed descriptions of everyday interactions and rituals in which the culture is brought to life, excerpts from in-depth interviews and a wide variety of corporate texts to vividly portray managerial attempts to design and impose the culture and the ways in which it is experienced by members of the organization. The company's management, Kunda reveals, uses a variety of methods to promulgate what it claims is a non-authoritarian, informal, and flexible work environment that enhances and rewards individual commitment, initiative, and creativity while promoting personal growth. The author demonstrates, however, that these pervasive efforts mask an elaborate and subtle form of normative control in which the members' minds and hearts become the target of corporate influence. Kunda carefully dissects the impact this form of control has on employees' work behavior and on their sense of self. In the conclusion written especially for this edition, Kunda reviews the company's fortunes in the years that followed publication of the first edition, reevaluates the arguments in the book, and explores the relevance of corporate culture and its management today."

About this title

From the Publisher

An analysis of corporate culture from the inside

Culture Section Book Award, American Sociological Association

AAUP Book Jacket Award

From the Inside Flap

"[P]rovides a much needed balance to the organizational-culture literature that is sweeping the organizational-behavior field and...making its way into popular culture."
—Paul DiMaggio

"Kunda finds a dark side to the new management desire to 'bind employees' hearts and minds to the corporate interest.'... The pervasive employee response is irony—acceptance and detachment at the same time. Thus the culture undermines itself."
—Sloan Management Review

"Using detailed descriptions of everyday rituals and interactions in which the 'corporate culture' is brought to life, as well as excerpts of in-depth interviews, the author portrays vividly the tension caused by managerial control and the forms of individual experience it produces."
—Science Books & Films

"[Engineering Culture] is a wonderfully ironic account of corporate life in the fast lanes of the high-tech trades.... Kunda's display of the emotional underlife of organizational fun-and-games is a most revealing one."
—John Van Maanen, MIT

Edition details

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1592135455
• ISBN 13: 9781592135455
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320