Engineering Culture

"Engineering Culture" is an award-winning ethnography of the engineering division of a large American high-tech corporation. Now, this influential book - which has been translated into Japanese, Italian and Hebrew - has 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.

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"this is one of the finest ethnographies of an organization culture I have read." Administrative Science Quarterly "This book provides a much needed balance to the organizational-culture literature that is sweeping the organizational-behavior field and from there making its way into popular culture. The book presents an important account and perhaps an important warning." Paul Dimaggio, professor of sociology, Princeton University "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

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Acknowledgments to the revised edition; Preface to the Revised Edition One: Culture and Organization; Two: The Setting; Three: Ideology: Tech Culture Codified; Four: Presentational Rituals: Talking Ideology; Five: Self and Organization: In the Shadow of the Golden Bull; Six: Conclusion; Seven: Epilogue

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