Since the 1980s, ‘Corporate Culture’ has become popular within management university departments and the business community. Corporate culture, in part, offers to soften the exploitative nature of capitalism, and to bring back values and meanings to the workplace after they had been repressed with the onset of the factory system and scientific management. We shall discuss the nature of corporate culture, outlining its weaknesses. Then we shall examine how organisations relate to each other, emphasising issues of organisation of work, integrating division of labour and industrial organisation (notes on this to follow later).

Senior managers attempt to define the meaning of employment because they are convinced that changing the ‘culture’ of an organisation is an effective way of improving its performance. ‘Corporate Culture’ can be established through:

• training courses
• induction days, in-house newsletters, notice-boards, company staff manuals
• employees assessed against new virtues of innovative, flexibility and risk-taking
• incentive system rewards new virtues and penalises old ones of caution and
• stability
• counselling and guidance procedures

The essence of Corporate Culture literature is harmony, consensus and unity within the organisation. Though this conception of organisation is often at odds with existing conceptions and employees’ experiences.

Work is represented in distinctive ways such that its meaning can vary, and be experienced in different ways. Capitalists and senior managers have an interest in defining the meanings associated with work and employment. These meanings address various key aspects of work – work itself, work schedules, time disciplines, workers’ relations with each other, with their employers and even their own physical activity.

Two historical examples:

• ‘clock time’ replaced ‘agricultural rhythms’ and ‘factory system’ replaced ‘domestic system’. Control of and over work shifted from workers to managers and supervisors.
• ‘Taylorism’ replaced ‘craft-based’ production. Workers’ authority and skills were replaced by the role and functions of management.

Today, the culture of work is more likely to focus on employees’ relationship with the customer purchasing the service. Workers are trained in ‘customer care’ issues and to develop customer skills. Previously, factory regimes defined the meanings of the workers’ physical actions (such as what time to arrive and what jobs to undertake). Now, factory and office regimes define workers’ emotions and relationships within and outside the organisation.

Organisational values are powerful influence on people’s perceptions, expectations and actions. ‘Rational’ managers rarely pay attention to the value system of an organisation, yet the ‘soft’ and ‘informal’ aspects of the organisation improve its performance.

Writers and consultants on corporate culture argue that organisational cultures play a major part in determining organisational performance. Their argument is that:

• All organisations have cultures.
• An organisation’s culture has an effect on corporate performance.
• Organisations become more effective when they develop the right cultures.
• These cultures create consensus and unity, and motivate staff.
• When necessary, cultures can be changed.
• It is the responsibility of senior managers to change them.

The claims made for ‘cultural change’ are enormous. When cultures are strengthened, organisational performance will be enhanced and greater commitment, involvement and flexibility from staff will follow. The ‘right’ culture may reap a return on investment that averages nearly twice as high as those firms with less efficient cultures.

While Corporate Culture solutions focus on the organisation’s culture, the factors underlying organisational failure are often defined in terms of aspects of national cultures. In the 1980s, the ‘Corporate Culture’ movement offered an explanation of the poorer economic performance of the Western companies in comparison to Japanese and other Asian companies. Western companies had lost their competitiveness in range of industries including steel, cars, textiles and electronics. The writers on the Corporate Culture noted that the cultural virtues of the Japanese national culture, such loyalty, deference, obedience, commitment and shared values, were important. Westerners were said to be individualistic, mobile, heterogeneous, with short-term horizons that inhibited success.

There are two objections to this cultural explanation of Japanese success and Western failure:

• National culture cannot be used as a general explanation to account for specific organisational differences. The concept of ‘national culture’ is treated as an ‘explanatory dustbin’ in which everything that cannot be explained is deposited.
• Non-cultural explanations (such as organisational and managerial factors, business-government relations and finance-business relations) are ignored.

Corporate Culture narratives play a role in defining limits of workers’ expectations, constructing boundaries for the tolerable, locating workers within particular organisational space, supplying ways of thinking about things. There are three core cultural narratives.

1. Organisation as an imagined corporate community.

The organisation is presented as an idealised community, and its employees as members of this community, where members (or employees) share the key values of the community (or organisation). However, the Corporate Culture approach tends to ignore the possibilities of conflicts within the organisation, ignore structures of power and interest, ignore structures of hierarchy and inequality, and ignore difference and differentiation of groups and of culture.

2. Enterprising Organisation.

This narrative means not simply that the organisation as a whole must behave competitively, but more fundamentally that within the organisation employees must behave as if they are small-business entrepreneurs. Individual employees must be commercially sensitive, quality-focused, customer-focused, pro-active, cost-sensitive and responsible.

3. Learning Organisation.

A learning organisation is a place where people expand their capacity to create results, where new and different patterns of thinking are encouraged, where enterprise, innovation and aspiration are set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn.

The Corporate Culture offers managers a dramatic and heroic status. It defines the nature and importance of senior management role and function, celebrating and glorifying senior management by placing them in a central position as ‘transformative leaders’. Managers manipulate cultures and their symbols, and are similar to ‘cultural intermediaries’.

There have been a number of different critiques of the nature and impact of Corporate Culture projects. We raise four points:

First, Lynn Meek raises three weaknesses about Corporate Culture projects.

• Writers on Corporate Culture ignore the multiplicity of theories of culture and draw excessively from one tradition – structural functionalism.
• She criticises the argument that cultures can be created by senior managers.
• Corporate Culture writers tend to miss the inherent conflicts within the organisation, and the role of power and structured inequalities.

Second, one group of ‘critical’ writers argue that the concept of culture deployed by Corporate Culture consultants is excessively focused on managerial preoccupations – emphasising values to promote employees’ commitment and compliance. Yet, the consultants say little on managerial culture (hierarchy, control, instrumental values, sexism and racism) that damage consensus and undermine employee commitment and obedience.

Third, another group of ‘critical’ writers argues that the Corporate Culture is an ideological project. For the critical writers, Corporate Culture provides management with a powerful means for improving the efficiency and scope of management control, in general exploiting the workforce.

Finally, ‘critical’ writers suggest that not all staff want the opportunity to be liberated, empowered, flexible and entrepreneurial.