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.

A revised edition of the classic text on the sociology of management and organization

About the Author
Gideon Kunda is Associate Professor, Department of Labor Studies, Tel Aviv University.

Reviews
"Overall, this is one of the finest ethnographies of an organization culture I have read."-Administrative Science Quarterly "This book remains the classic attempt to come to terms with the reality of work in the new economy, as it emerges to replace the alienation of mass production. Kunda recognizes, even celebrates, the autonomy and engagement of work which has grown up around IT. But he also identifies the ways management quite deliberately limits and controls that autonomy and exploits engagement. And he underscores the price which the new work place exacts from the workers excluded from the realm of autonomy, from those who become overcommitted to it, and from those who, often inadvertently, overstep its boundaries."-Michael Joseph Piore, David W. Skinner Professor of Political Economy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology



Book Information
ISBN 9781592135462
Author Gideon Kunda
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Temple University Press,U.S.
Publisher Temple University Press,U.S.
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 33mm