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

by Gideon Kunda

In this intriguing ethnography of a large American high-tech corporation, Gideon Kunda offers a critical analysis of its much celebrated "corporate culture." In his extensive study of the company's engineering division, Kunda uses detailed descriptions of everyday rituals and interactions 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.

Genres: Business, Anthropology, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

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.