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

by Gideon Kunda

'Engineering Culture' offers a critical analysis of an American company's well-known and widely emulated 'corporate culture'. It uses detailed descriptions of everyday interactions and rituals in which the culture is brought to life.

Genres: Business, Anthropology, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Ian Taylor]

Reading Moral Mazes after this, and then I'm killing
myself

[Misty]

Get over the yawning cover and dito title. This is a great read of how people actually perceive their 'corporate culture'. In human language. Kudos to Kunda's fine ethnography.

[Lucas Lynn]

It’s one ethnography that I can’t leave at home. I find myself often thinking about Kunda’s work when topics of business anthropology are brought up.

[Douglas]

A deeply interesting study which began in '86, published in 1992, saw an update in 2006 and still resonates deeply today.

[Gideon Gordon]

A really good, really prescient ethnography of the workplace culture of a tech company in the 1990s, capturing the bizarre and occasionally dystopian dynamics of a workplace engaged in a complex effort at social engineering. I read this in order to think through how organizational cultures can be consciously created in general, and this is a good picture of both the possibilities of doing so and the contradictions that effort produces.