Gideon Kunda: Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · corporate culture, ethnography, labour, management, organization, post-bureaucracy, software industry, technology
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.
Publisher Temple University Press, 2006
Labor And Social Change series
ISBN 1592135471, 9781592135479
320 pages
Peter F. Drucker: Adventures of a Bystander (1978/1994)
Filed under book | Tags: · biography, economy, history, journalism, management, politics, technology
“Regarded as the most influential and widely read thinker on modern organizations and their management, Peter Drucker has also established himself as an unorthodox and independent analyst of politics, the economy, and society. Adventures of a Bystander is Drucker’s rich collection of autobiographical stories and vignettes, in which this legendary figure paints a portrait of his remarkable life, and of the larger historical realities of his time.
In a style that is both unique and engaging, Drucker conveys his life story – from his early teen years in Vienna through the interwar years in Europe, the New Deal era, World War II, and the postwar period in America-through intimate profiles of a host of fascinating people he’s known through the years. Their personal histories are, as Drucker tells us, the beads for which his own life serves as the string.
An amazing pageant of characters, both famous and otherwise, springs from these pages, illuminating and defining one of the most tumultuous periods in world history. Along with bankers and courtesans, artists, aristocrats, prophets, and empire-builders, we meet members of Drucker’s own family and close circle of friends, among them such prominent figures as Sigmund Freud, Henry Luce, Alfred Sloan, John Lewis, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan.
A brief encounter with Freud becomes the catalyst for an absorbing, multidimensional description of the economics, politics, and social psychology of pre-World War II Europe. Drucker introduces us to Fritz Kraemer, a brilliant, monocle-wearing eccentric who became an influential mentor to the young Henry Kissinger. His personal memoir of Henry Luce documents the development of modern journalism, while in “The Indian Summer of Innocence,” he rescues and preserves the very heart of the American experience during the last New Deal years before World War II.”
Originally published in 1978 by Harper & Row, Publishers
Publisher Transaction Publishers, 1994
ISBN 1412814103, 9781412814102
344 pages
commentary (Michael Hohl)
Comment (0)John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid: The Social Life of Information (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · botnet, business, economy, information, knowledge, management, technology
“Drawing from recent research and practical examples across a range of organizations, The Social Life of Information dispels many of the futurists’ sweeping predictions that information technology will obliterate the need for everything from travel to supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. The authors examine the potential and limitations of technology with regard to intelligent software agents, the automated home office, business reorganization for innovation, knowledge management and work practices, the paperless society, and the digital university. Arguing eloquently for the important role human sociability plays in the world of bits, Brown and Duguid present an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals. They show how a better understanding of the contribution that communities, organizations, and institutions make to learning, knowledge, and judgment can lead to the richest possible use of technology in our work and everyday lives.”
Publisher Harvard Business Press, 2000
ISBN 0875847625, 9780875847627
256 pages