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

Engineering Culture grew out of an attempt to take seriously the conceptual and methodological requirements of a cultural perspective on organizations. Briefly, the book is a critical ethnography of a large and successful high-tech corporation lauded in the popular managerial literature for its innovative postbureaucratic “corporate culture.” The corporate culture, the official story went, drove the company’s employees to peaks of corporate performance and personal self-actualization. Academic views of these managerial claims fell, unsurprisingly, into two distinct camps. On the one hand (the upper one, of course) were those who participated in the construction of this grand utopian narrative: numerous texts reinforced, jargonized, and legitimated managerial claims and fed them back to ever-hungry corporate consumers of good words. On the other hand, less popular but no less persistent and no less grand, was a continuing stream of criticism of the corporation. In this view, utopian managerial claims were---as ever---no more than a disguise for malevolent managerial intentions, now in the form of tyrannical attempts to penetrate and shape employees’ minds and hearts.