In the late 1970s, American management researchers and consultants suddenly discovered the corporate culture concept, and by the early 80s, the concept took off. As the New York Times put it: “In the 1970’s, corporate strategy became the buzzword. Now, corporate culture is the magic phrase that management consultants are breathing into the ears of American executives” (Salmans 1983). Corporate culture was the “new vogue,” indeed. It saturated the business media, appearing in cover stories by magazines like Business Week and Fortune (1980; 1983). Books on the topic framed managing corporate culture as the key to business success, linking corporate culture with growth through extensive case studies. These books sold widely; four published in 1981 and 1982 alone all became best sellers. Two of these four were general introductions: Corporate Cultures: the rites and rituals of corporate life (Deal and Kennedy 1982) and In Search of Excellence: lessons from America’s best-run companies (Peters and Waterman 1982). The other two examined corporate cultures amid US-Japanese business rivalries: The Art of Japanese Management (Pascale and Athos 1981) and Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge (Ouchi 1981). In Search of Excellence was particularly popular, outselling all other non-fiction books in 1982 and reappearing since then in two additional editions (Kotter and Heskett 1992; Tharp 2009). A Google Books NGram of “corporate culture” comparing it with “corporate strategy” illustrates the term’s rapid popularization:
NGram: Corporate Culture (vs. Corporate Strategy)
Over the following decade, definitions of corporate culture tended to converge on similar aspects of corporate life.[1] A corporation’s culture is, variously:
The early accounts of corporate culture may emphasize different sites, processes, and practices in their definitions, but in one way or another, they all included values, beliefs, myths, symbols, rites, and rituals. Along the way, they drew from management studies, cognitive psychology, sociology, and—as this paper will examine—sociocultural anthropology. Indeed, anthropological theory, ethnography, and the anthropological imaginary figured critically across the new literature. Peters and Waterman named anthropologists the “leading analysts” of culture (1982, 319). “Searching for a corporate culture is not unlike an anthropological expedition” wrote Davis (1984, 12). In Business Week, “Just as tribal cultures have totems and taboos that dictate how each member will act toward fellow members and outsiders, so does a corporation’s culture influence employees’ actions toward customers, competitors, suppliers, and one another” (1980). General references to anthropology and fieldwork abounded, and so did direct citations of Mauss, Tylor, Malinowski, Boas, Mead, Benedict, Gluckman, Kluckhohn, Firth, Leach, Turner, Lévi-Strauss, Geertz, and more.
Interest in so-called cultural aspects of corporate life was not in itself new. Managers had long problematized issues of morality and custom among their employees. Even the earliest commercial corporations like the British East India Company recorded such concerns (Stern 2011). In its early days, the Ford Company employed a Sociological Department to surveil employees and design interventions with the goal of “making new men” suited for industrial labor (Esch 2018). Within the corporate culture literature, historical accounts often referenced the Hawthorn studies conducted at the Western Electric Company in the 1930s. Western Electric hired Elton Mayo from Harvard Business School, who in turn partnered with W. Lloyd Warner, a University of Chicago anthropologist, to study employee behavior and motivations. Warner introduced ethnographic methods like interviews and observation to study the firm’s structure, social relationships, and shared beliefs. This research lost prominence as quantitative methods grew popular with the proliferation of computers in the 1960s, and it never explicitly referenced a corporate culture concept itself (Trice and Beyer 1993). Only in the late 70s did management researchers and consultants, drawing from anthropologists and other social scientists, conceptualize corporate culture as a unified field of study and intervention. Their work fueled the topic’s sudden popularization in the 80s.
“a set of symbols, ceremonies, and myths that communicate the underlying values and beliefs of that organization to its employees.” (Ouchi 1981, 41)
“a cohesion of values, myths, heroes, and symbols that has come to mean a great deal to the people who work there” (Deal and Kennedy 1982, 4)
“the amalgam of beliefs, mythology, values and rituals that, even more than its products, differentiates it from other companies” (Salmans 1983)
“the pattern of shared beliefs and values that give the members of an institution meaning and provide them with the rules for behavior in their organization” (Davis 1984, 1)
This paper examines the sudden emergence of the corporate culture concept in management science and traces anthropology’s role in this process. Today, academic anthropologists are increasingly studying corporations and, in one way or another, the cultural processes occurring within and across them. They attend to questions of corporate sovereignty, personhood, subjectification, branding, social responsibility, and more (Yanagisako 2002; Ho 2009; Welker 2014; Dolan and Rajak 2016; Appel 2019). Yet whereas applied anthropologists today research corporate culture in applied contexts, academics seem to keep their distance. Perhaps the theories and methods of corporate culture are too close for comfort—what happens when one’s own theories and methods assume lives of their own. Perhaps anthropologists today find in corporate culture the ghosts of outdated, contested, or otherwise problematized theories. Rightfully so, but such scholarly distance is a mistake. Scholars ought to know how and to what ends their theories travel beyond intended audiences. Anthropologists have long taken such theoretical reflexivity in studies of nationalism, where theories of culture and ethnographic data figure uncomfortably, and sometimes dangerously, into nationalist ideologies (Handler 1988; Spencer 1990). Granted, anthropologists have tracked the social lives of some social theories in ethnographic work on corporations, but those theories are mostly economic (Ho 2009; Appel 2019). As anthropology’s prominence in texts on corporate culture shows, this discipline’s theories warrant the same treatment, too.
Corporate culture has already received much attention from critical scholars outside of anthropology. The concept appears in critical work on formations of labor and capital that emerged simultaneously with the corporate culture concept. Sociologist Avery Gordon has interrogated corporate culture in this light (1995). According to her, corporate culture management, along with the closely associated diversity management, enacted new forms of corporate governmentality. These management approaches provided techniques for exerting power over workers and maximizing their productivity in a context where corporations were becoming more horizontal, flexible, informal, and at least on the surface, “progressive.” For Gordon, corporate culture and diversity management offered solutions to the disruptions of late capitalism: deindustrialization, decentralization, globalization, financialization, and so on. “Crudely put,” she writes, “this is the situation in which the corporation and the social forms it generates are being reinvented by design and by necessity for an uncertain future” (1995, 5). Gordon, along with scholars in the critical management studies literature, find in corporate culture a management approach that maximizes employees’ self-motivation, minimizes internal conflict, and enables decentralization (Fleming 2009; Alvesson and Willmott 2012).
Gordon’s account of corporate culture and its stated objectives cites two of the aforementioned corporate culture best-sellers: Corporate Cultures (Deal and Kennedy 1982) and Managing Corporate Culture (Davis 1984). Indeed, these texts, along with the literature’s other influential examples, attend extensively to employee motivation, coordination, and diversity, or as Deal and Kennedy describe it, the inclusion of “corporate outsiders” (1982, 78). And as this paper will describe further, these texts directly responded to social and economic transformations of the kinds Gordon references. But as instructive as Gordon’s account is, understanding corporate culture requires further attention to the very theorization of the concept. Gordon references the “fairly simple yet broad notion of culture,” citing Stanley Davis (and also featured above), but takes the definition as given. She acknowledges the “anthropological sources” of corporate culture, but refrains from tracing them (1995, 7).
The benefits of further attention to corporate culture’s origins are not limited to those from whom the theory has been lifted. Outlining the historical context and anthropological influences of the corporate culture concept also offers more insight into late capitalist models of the corporate form, its dynamics, and its boundaries. Moreover, it sheds light on the roles played by research, consulting, and knowledge production in market transformations of the 80s. By tracking the emergence, elaboration, and anthropological sources of the corporate culture concept in best-selling texts, this paper demonstrates how economic downturn, competition, and the turn to flexibility all enabled certain strands of anthropological theory to resonate with concerns of corporate managers during this period. Sampling from anthropological theories influenced by cybernetics and systems theory as well as older structural-functionalism, management researchers and consultants developed and popularized a management approach preoccupied with complex systems, information flows, decentralization, and homeostasis.
New Approaches Needed
Researchers and consultants turned to culture amid a sense of corporate crisis in the late 1970s. In their accounts, American corporations were struggling amid economic transformation, “stagflation,” and recessions starting in the early 70s. After decades of growth and stability, the system of mass production and mass consumption could no longer continue growing as is. Managers suddenly faced declining demand and productivity. Workers suddenly encountered cuts in long stable workforces, in turn creating conflict between management and labor (Harvey 1989; Schoenberger 1997). Looking back on this period in their 1993 textbook on corporate culture, Trice and Beyer describe how
Many U.S. workers and managers were unemployed for the first time in their lives…U.S. managers began to see culture as a way to integrate managers’ and workers’ concerns to create some consensus and cooperation in their organizations. Managers and workers needed reassurance; increasing the coherence of internal cultures in their organizations seemed a good way to achieve it.
Trice and Beyer 1993, 31
The economic downturn and internal conflict it precipitated motivated calls for a new management approach. As The Art of Japanese Management complained, “Western organizations run themselves in 1981 in much the same way as in 1940” (Pascale and Athos 1981, 25). By the late 70s, it was clear to researchers and consultants that new models of organization and management were needed; it was even time for a new kind of corporation.
Guiding their visions of this new corporation was one concept in particular: flexibility. The macroeconomic and corporate management strategies emerging from the crisis constituted what David Harvey calls the regime of flexible accumulation. This regime entailed “a series of novel experiments in the realms of industrial organization as well as in political and social life” (1989, 145) As it offshored manufacturing, the American production market shifted its focus from industry to services. The labor market witnessed a decline in unionized employment declined and uptick in part-time and temporary labor arrangements. As jobs lost their regularity and reliability, unemployment increased. Workers, managers, and consumers all faced increasingly rapid flows of capital, labor, commodities, and information—what Harvey calls space-time compression. Managers in particular began to experience a rapid and often disorienting pace of innovation. Such was the context Gordon finds lurking behind corporate culture and diversity management: “Not since the fierce struggles to establish the corporation in the nineteenth century has American business faced such an array of intersecting and conflicting changes, nor has capitalism been so deeply ‘disorganized,’” (1995, 5). The discoverers of corporate culture were sensitive to this context, too: “We are operating in a post-industrial, service-based economy,” noted Stanley Davis in Managing Corporate Cultures, “but our companies are managed by models developed in, by, and for industrial corporations” (1984, 2).
In this new business environment, firms modulated production schedules according to always-changing levels of demand. They contracted more or less temporary labor as needed. They adopted smaller team structures (Harvey 1989). Flexibility, however, entailed more than a change in strategy; it also presumed new models of the corporate form. Under flexible accumulation, the model corporation became a dynamic and complex system, one through which capital, products, and people flowed as information. Waterman and Peters cited management researcher Joanne Martin’s characterization of organizations as “systems composed of ideas, the meaning of which must be managed” (1982, 104). To describe this model more evocatively, managers often recruited metaphors from outside business and economics. One source was immunology, which, as Emily Martin documents, had recently developed a model of the flexible human body. This body was a complex, dynamic system constantly working to maintain homeostasis in its changing environment. Among human resource experts, Martin found frequent use of immunology and its models to describe the kinds of corporations and employees they sought to develop. In her account, “Human resource managers see themselves as midwives helping old, stiff, rigid organizations die and new, flexible, innovative ones be born” (2003, 223). Observing the shift away from assembly lines, mass production, and mass marketing, Martin found a turn to “a fleeting, fluid network of alliances, a highly decoupled and dynamic form with great organizational flexibility” (ibid, 209).
The flexible corporate system was also an open one. Researchers and consultants situated corporations in a so-called “organizational environment” of politics, religion, civil society, geography, and so on. Corporations were open to this environment, and the corporate boundary was permeable. As Schein wrote, organizations are “open systems in constant interaction with their many environments” (1985, 7). Likewise, “organizations are not fortresses, impervious to the buffeting or the blessings of their environments. On the other hand, organizations are not wind tunnels responding to every perturbation in their context” (Trice and Beyer 1993, 300; quoting Scott 1981, 133). Influence moved in both directions, as the corporation could reshape its environment while the environment could reconfigure the corporation’s internal dynamics. As open systems, corporations faced constant interaction and influence with the outside, but this did not entail a total loss of coherence. Rather, the corporation’s boundary resided “where the organization’s discretion to control an activity is less than the discretion of some other entity to control that activity” (Trice and Beyer 1993, 300). The boundary remained, but it become dynamic, a function of its sovereignty relative to other institutions.
Following the recession of the 70s and the emergent regime of flexible accumulation, the corporate form became a complex, open system. This system was constantly in motion, open to external influence, decreasingly centralized, and ultimately a new kind of problem for management. Struggling to accommodate market stagnation and transformation, managers sought new frameworks for knowing and controlling their corporations. Researchers and consultants responded accordingly in their development of the corporate culture concept. Before turning to descriptions of the concept in more detail, however, more context will help explain how culture appeared on the scene.
A Cultural Turn in Management Studies
Management studies turned to cultural analysis amid two kinds of competition—one between nations and one between American consulting firms. Together, these competitions pointed a group of researchers and consultants to culture as a promising management model. First: competition between US firms and new international competitors—specifically those from Japan. By the 70s, Japanese companies across industries began to outcompete established American firms, growing their market shares at the Americans’ expense. Responding to this new set of competitors, the early corporate culture literature fixated on Japan’s economic success and its corporations’ reputation for quality, innovation, and good management. Two of the four corporate culture best-sellers of 1981 and 1982, The Art of Japanese Management and Theory Z, made Japan their primary topic of research. They were motivated by a clear sense of crisis: “in 1980, Japan’s GNP was third highest in the world and, if we extrapolate current trends, it would be number one by the year 2000…a GNP growth rate which is twice that of the United States” (Pascale and Athos 1981, 20). Explanations for Japanese business success focused on Japanese management techniques. The Art of Japanese Management explained: “A major reason for the superiority of the Japanese is their managerial skill” (ibid, 21). Indeed, Japan’s reputation for good management was widely shared among business leaders. Theory Z began by quoting a leader of “one of the most respected and largest firms in the United States” who, when queried about “the key issue facing American business over the next decade,” stated: “the key issue will be the way in which we respond to one fact—the Japanese know how to manage better than we do” (Ouchi 1981, 3). Researchers were tasked with explaining why Japanese management was supposedly superior.
The ensuing comparative research surfaced questions of cultural difference. Researchers identified various values and traditions they considered relevant to Japanese management. For example, Pascale and Athos pointed to Japan’s traditionally high degree of social integration. Whereas Western societies experienced a historical differentiation of social institutions, “because Eastern societies were so populous, and because spiritual, public, and private matters were so integrated, their organizations tended to regard the task of control in the context of the whole of human needs, rather than as a more narrow transaction between labor and capital” (Pascale and Athos 1981, 25). Such an argument reads more Weberian than Taylorist. Earlier examples of comparative management research took a similar approach; Comparative Management by Stanley Davis (1971), author of Managing Corporate Cultures (1984), surveyed management practices and their cultural contexts across Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America. It even reprinted essays by Paul Buchanan (“African Families”), Clifford Geertz (“Social Change and Economic Modernization in Two Indonesian Towns”), and other social scientists . Put simply, international business competition confronted management with cultural difference.
Cultural analysis in management research did not remain on regional and national levels. When comparing their findings on Japanese management with what they knew of individual US corporations, the researchers claimed to find that, despite national cultural differences, some US firms did employ practices similar to their Japanese competitors. For The Art of Japanese Management authors, “the most striking finding is that many of our most skilled American managers, and many of our most outstanding companies, do things that are surprisingly similar to what the Japanese do” (Pascale and Athos 1981, 21). Likewise,
We hear stories every other day about the Japanese companies, their unique culture and their proclivity for meeting, singing company songs, and chanting the corporate litany. Now, that sort of thing is usually dismissed as not relevant in America…but American examples do exist.
Peters and Waterman 1982, xviii
As comparative analysis gained granularity, researchers engaged with culture at the level of individual firms. Management researchers encountered the idea that an organization, like a nation, could have its own unique culture—one with critical consequences for its success. While management researchers initially considered national culture an external influence on management, they soon turned to cultural processes within individual organizations, studying them as internal phenomena as well. From this process came the internalization of culture and with it, the corporate culture concept.
Not all researchers and consultants followed this path to corporate culture, however. Of the original researchers and consultants who turned to culture, many, if not most, were associated with one consulting firm: McKinsey. Indeed, McKinsey sponsored much of the original corporate culture research, and the frameworks found in the early literature were also developed by the firm. Peters and Waterman, authors of In Search of Excellence, were both McKinsey Partners. Likewise, Deal and Kennedy’s Corporate Cultures: Rites and Rituals surveyed McKinsey consultants “about companies and organizations they know on a first-hand basis” (1982, 6). Waterman advised Deal and Kennedy on this work. He also advised Pascale and Athos on The Art of Japanese Management. Pascale and Athos documented their collaboration with McKinsey partners, and the book itself even opened with an introduction by Ronald Daniel, McKinsey’s Managing Director. Noting the firm’s role in this work, the New York Times in 1983 suggested “A cynical interpretation of the latest management vogue [corporate culture] is that it nicely positions McKinsey itself for the 1980’s” (Salmans 1983). Providing context, the article noted how the firm had found itself overtaken “intellectually” by the Boston Consulting Group, or BCG, in the 70s. By then, BCG’s quantitative and analytical approaches gained popularity among clients. Seeking to revive their leading reputation, McKinsey partners may have found corporate culture promising because, as business historian Christopher McKenna argues, corporate culture was particularly suited to McKinsey’s human relations-centric brand of “professionalism” (McKenna 2006; also Chong 2018). If international competition introduced culture to management studies, then interfirm competition positioned a collaborative and influential group of experts to develop and proselytize it.
The Corporate Culture Concept
Across the early corporate culture literature of the 80s, management researchers and consultants developed a concept that for them appeared well suited for understanding and managing corporations as flexible, complex, and open systems. Schein suggested this in his introduction to Organizational Cultures and Leadership: “Why and how [organizations] grow, change, sometimes fail, and—perhaps most importantly of all—do things that don’t seem to make any sense continues to elude us” (1985, 1). In this light, “the concept of organizational culture is especially relevant to gaining an understanding of the mysterious and seemingly irrational things that go on in human systems” (ibid, 4) In Search of Excellence began similarly: “all of us know that much more goes into the process of keeping a large organization vital and responsive than the policy statements, new strategies, plans, budgets, and organization charts can possibly predict” (Peters and Waterman 1982, 1). Corporate culture could explain why a business strategy, no matter how logical or analytically sound, may fail. Strategy is understood as the clearly defined goals of the corporation and the steps it must take to achieve them, but not all strategies align with the underlying culture; in other words, employees may simply lack the motivation to execute the strategy as planned (Davis 1984; Kotter and Heskett 1992). Culture offers a diagnostic framework for the previously unexplainable processes and outcomes of dynamic, open-system corporations.
Accounts of corporate culture characterized it as informal information system—often internalized or hidden—that informs and coordinates employee motivations and behaviors. For Waterman and Peters, corporate culture offered an alternative for “policy manuals, organization charts, or detailed procedures and rules” as a source of employee direction (1982, 75). Similarly, Deal and Kennedy theorized a so-called “cultural network” that exists within all organizations as a “hidden hierarchy.” This network is the “primary (but informal) means of communication within an organization…the ‘carrier’ of the corporate values” (1982, 15). It connects agents of various kinds, all with their own role in creating relationships and transmitting information. This view of corporate culture explained how information flows through complex human systems like corporations. Highlighting the informatic capacities of culture, Trice and Beyer (1993,7) even cited a certain “leading anthropologist”:
…The appropriate image … of cultural organization is neither the spider web nor the pile of sand; it is rather more the octopus, whose tentacles are in large part separately integrated, neurally quite poorly connected with one another and with what in the octopus passes for a brain, and yet who nonetheless manages to get around and to preserve himself, for a while anyway, as a viable, if somewhat ungainly entity.
Geertz 1966, 66
Metaphors of this kind appealed to managers concerned with coordination at a time when rigid hierarchy transitioned to flexibility.
Corporate culture purportedly encoded and transmitted beliefs and values through shared symbols, myths, and rituals. These latter elements came to constitute artifacts of the corporate culture, itself understood to consist of the beliefs and values. The relative prominence of these elements varied across texts. Waterman and Peters fixated on founder myths: “These days, people like Watson and A.P. Giannini at Bank of America take on roles of mythic proportions that the real persons would have been hard-pressed to fill…these stories, myths, and legends appear to be very important, because they convey the organization’s shared values, or culture” (1982, 75). In addition to heroes who “personify the culture’s values”, Deal and Kennedy highlighted stated values as “the heart of corporate culture” (1982, 14). Examples of well-known values included “Progress is our most important product” (GE) or “Better things for better living through chemistry” (DuPont) (ibid, 19). Deal and Kennedy also wrote a chapter on “Rites and Rituals” where they describe how rituals “bring order to chaos” (ibid 62). They even reframed collective bargaining as a kind of ritual that maintains the relationship between workers and managers—certainly an extreme rethinking of union relations at a time when union membership was declining (ibid 64). The various accounts emphasized different elements, but they generally included all elements in some way. Moreover, all of the accounts stressed that these elements must be public and widely shared for them to qualify as cultural.
The theories of culture found in these texts—culture as a system of beliefs and values embodied in shared symbols, myths, and rituals—resonate with 1960s symbolic anthropology. In her now classic account of the movement, Sherry Ortner (1984) depicts two camps, one led by Geertz and the other by Turner, and corporate culture exhibited commonalities with both camps. For Ortner, “Geertz’s most radical theoretical move was to argue that culture is not something locked inside people’s heads, but rather is embodied in public symbols, symbols through which the members of a society communicate their worldview, value-orientations, ethos, and all the rest to one another” (1984, 129). Notions of public symbols, communication, values, ethos, and worldviews figure prominently across the corporate culture texts. Ortner continues: “the focus of Geertzian anthropology has consistently been the question of how symbols shape the ways social actors see, feel, and think about the world” (ibid). A corporate culture analog: “managerial reality is not an absolute; rather, it is socially and culturally determined…culture affects how these problems are perceived and how they are resolved” (Pascale and Athos 1981, 22). The relation was not simply one of resemblance; rather, Geertz was cited by Deal and Kennedy, Davis, and Trice and Beyer. The last pair of authors engaged deeply with Geertz, cited a total of eight different texts by the anthropologist.
Geertz himself was interested in culture’s informatic capacities, which may explain his appeal beyond his prominence. A recent study of Geertz’s work has documented his engagements with cybernetics (Paidipaty 2020). Paidipaty quotes one particularly instructive line from Geertz—one that resonates deeply with the corporate culture literature: “Culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns…but as a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call ‘programs’)—for the governing of behavior” (Paidipaty 2020; quoting Geertz 1973b, 44). Cybernetics influenced much of the work coming out of Harvard’s Department of Human Relations, where Geertz attended graduate school (Fischer 2007). Interestingly enough, Schein, who wrote Organizational Cultures and Leadership (1985), enrolled in the same department during the same period. Schein himself acknowledged the influence of his Harvard teachers like Florence and Clyde Kluckhohn (1985, xi). His own definition of corporate culture cited Parsons, who was also at Harvard (ibid, 9). Curiously, he did not cite Geertz in his own work.
Ortner suggests that Geertz and his followers were less interested social coordination and the pragmatics of symbols, which were important issues for the corporate culture researchers. Ortner does, however, find such concerns in Turner’s “characteristically British” branch of symbolic anthropology. “For Turner,” writes Ortner, “symbols are…what might be called operators in the social process, things that, when put together in certain arrangements in certain contexts (especially rituals), produce essentially social transformations” (1984, 131). In this view, culture is a source of cohesion and coordination—two resources of immense value for flexible accumulation. As mentioned previously, corporate culture was understood as informal replacement for formal rules and regulations. Corporate culture gives employees “the rules for behavior in their organization” (Davis 1984, 1). Turner himself was cited by Trice and Beyer as well as Deal and Kennedy. Deal and Kennedy also cited Gluckman, Turner’s teacher, in a footnote on rituals. Culture as coordination was not as absent from Geertz as Ortner’s account suggests, either, as his engagements with cybernetics shows. In his essay on religion, he similarly points to cultural systems’ dual functions as models of the world—coordinating experience—and models for the world—coordinating action (Geertz 1973a). Gordon finds such coordinative capacities in corporate culture, critiquing it as a new form of governmentality. Further, she identifies the appeal of culture as a mode of governance: “What is new about the new corporate culture is that increasingly culture is understood to be the form by which the corporation rules itself. Where does power go when a hierarchically structured bureaucracy disassembles or decenters itself? It goes into the culture or is discovered to have existed there all along” (1995, 6).
In addition to ensuring coordination, corporate culture enabled continuity for the corporation. In other words, corporate culture was understood to serve a homeostatic and reproductive function. As Schein explained, citing Parsons’ Social System: “What culture does is to solve the group’s basic problems of (1) survival in and adaptation to the external environment and (2) integration of its internal processes to ensure the capacity to continue to survive and adapt” (1985, 50). For Schein and others, this entailed some form of employee training and the informal passing down of corporate values within teams. Schein’s own definition of corporate culture was limited to those “assumptions and beliefs” that were “taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems” (ibid, 9). If corporate enterprise entailed some degree of struggle—both externally, with competitors, and internally, among employees and managers—then corporations’ cultures enabled survival in this struggle.
Indeed, under the regime of flexible accumulation, the ability to ensure continuity in the face of change was critical. Describing the strength of a particular Japanese firm, Waterman and Peters documented how
within a week, nearly all the top 500 executives had changed jobs, many had moved from Tokyo to Osaka or vice versa, the dust and settled, and business was proceeding as usual. We concluded that the Japanese were able to reorganize as seemingly ruthlessly as they did because security was always present…security that had its roots in solid cultural ground and shared meanings.
Waterman and Peters1982, 77, emphasis added
Faced with constant change, a corporation’s culture preserved continuity without sacrificing flexibility. Kotter and Heskett (1992) described specific mechanisms for the reproduction of corporate culture, and in the process, the reproduction of the firm; this included the selection of new members who aligned with shared values, induction and orientation rites, the exchange of stories, myths, and legends about the company, and example-setting by managers. Locating culture, like Schein, in “qualities of any specific human group that are passed from one generation to the next,” they cited early anthropologists like Tylor, whom they credit with the first publication of culture, Boas, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown (Kotter and Heskett 1992). Radcliffe-Browne prioritized social reproduction in his own work, theorizing how social organizations endure the replacement of their individual members (e.g. Radcliffe-Brown 1935). In a similar light, corporate culture was understood as critical to the maintenance of the corporate body. Indeed, in this view of the corporate form, culture was one of the few durable aspects of the corporation and the more cohesive it was, the better.
Managing corporate culture
With the turn to flexible accumulation, the corporation became a decentralized, dehierarchized entity. Information and motivation no longer came from leadership above, but instead from the culture below—an informal, horizontal system of intangible but shared beliefs, values, myths, and so on. Leadership could design competitive strategies, but whether employees would follow that strategy was up to the culture. What, then, become of leadership? This question was critical because, after all, the primary audience for the corporate culture literature was managers. No longer the direct source of governance, leadership assumed a new mandate: the management of corporate culture itself. “In fact,” wrote Schein, “the endless discussion of what leadership is and is not could, perhaps, be simplified if we recognized that the unique and essential function of leadership is the manipulation of culture” (1985, 317). The main goal of this work was not simply to define and advocate for a corporate culture concept, but rather to instruct managers on what to do with it—and perhaps win a few more clients in the process. In their focus on management, the corporate culture accounts diverged from anthropology. This may come to a relief for anthropologists who, depending on their own understanding of culture and their own commitments, might find cultural management or “manipulation” nonsensical at best or sinister at worst. Nonetheless, since anthropological theory informed the concepts upon which the management approaches are based, the theory ultimately informed, however indirectly, the management approaches themselves.
Managing corporate culture involved two steps, the first of which was diagnosis, or the collection of knowledge about a firm’s corporate culture. This step often referenced anthropological methods as an inspiration or point of comparison. Davis explicitly likened his proposed method to his idea of the anthropologist’s:
Searching for a corporate culture is not unlike an anthropological expedition. Anthropologists study cultures by examining both beliefs and artifacts… as a company’s beliefs are made tangible through translation into actions and corporate programs, they become cultural artifacts. Like pottery shards, each fragment has much to tell about corporate culture.
Davis 1984, 12
Perhaps Davis’s reference point was closer to archaeology than anthropology, but, seeing anthropologists as experts on the matter, and sensing that his managerial audience shared the same view, he recruited the anthropologist to illustrate his idea for accessing culture. Indeed, some of the methodologies in Davis’s Managing Corporate Cultures and the other texts did resemble conventional ethnographic methods. His approach, like others’, was firmly qualitative: “solid case material and worthwhile examples…are more important than generalities or statistical data.” To this end, he focused on open-ended interviews of “informants.” (ibid). Deal and Kennedy offered more varied approach: “Study the physical setting…Read what the company says about its culture…Test how the company greets strangers…Interview Company people…[and] Observe how people spend their time” (1982, 129-133). In their view, insiders or outsiders alike could conduct this research, though insiders required more effort when maintaining some kind of objectivity. And collecting superficial data was not enough; rather, the data required interpretation. Hence Davis’s pottery shard reference. Schein advised similarly: “if we examine carefully an organization’s artifacts and values, we can try to infer the underlying assumptions that tie things together” (1985, 20). Such methods may superficially resemble the anthropologist’s ethnography, but the quick deadlines and clearly defined practical goals made this work, as Schein described it, that of the “clinician” more than the “ethnographer.” In his view, ethnography is conducted for the accumulation of knowledge whereas clinical work is directed towards practical outcomes and is influenced by the requests of a particular client corporation (ibid, 22). Anthropology may have provided a methodological starting point, but ultimately this aspect of corporate culture management—knowledge generation—was a form of consulting.
Following the diagnostic step, the second step was management itself, or the practical engagement with and possible manipulation of corporate culture. This, the researchers and consultants all agreed, was a difficult task. “Do not assume,” warns Schein, “that culture can be manipulated like other matters under the control of managers. Culture controls the manager more than the manager controls the culture” (ibid, 314). Before attempting to change the culture, then, managers should assess whether their desired strategies were already compatible with the existing culture. To this end, Davis developed a so-called “cultural risk matrix” that graphed the “importance of the strategy” against its “compatibility with culture” (1984, 15):
Whereas managers should prioritize strategies with high importance and high cultural compatibility, they should reconsider strategies with low cultural compatibility and therefore more risk. If the strategy was of high enough importance, however, it warranted attempts to change the culture.
Researchers and consultants provided various approaches to manipulating corporate culture. Waterman and Peters, Davis, and Schein described how skilled managers can influence their corporate culture by setting examples through action and evangelizing values that align with their strategic vision. Schein called such a manager a “culture creation leader” (1985, 318). Similarly, Deal and Kennedy introduced the so-called “symbolic manager” who could skillfully “read” the corporation’s culture and map out what they called its “cultural network” of actors and information flows. They compared the symbolic manager with the so-called “rational manager” who thought in terms of corporate strategy, technical requirements, costs, and revenues. For them, corporate culture management entailed engaging with the cultural network itself in order to transmit the right information to the right parts of the corporation. The symbolic manager needed to know when to work within the existing network, which actors to align himself with, and when to “step outside” the network to change it. Changing the network required the symbolic manager to “position a hero in charge of the process…make transition rituals…bring in outside shamans…[and] build tangible symbols of the new directions” (Deal and Kennedy 1982, 175-176). Though corporate culture management departed from the direct anthropological references found in the definition and diagnosis steps, the anthropological imaginary and its characters persisted. So too did the notion of culture as an informal, symbolic source of coordination compatible with the corporation as a dynamic, complex, and open system. Drawing from anthropological concepts and sources, among others, management researchers and consultants developed a model and approach to corporate governance suited for flexible accumulation.
Conclusion
As shown, the corporate culture concept emerged and proliferated among the political, economic, and epistemological transformations of the 1980s United States. In light of flexible accumulation and the popularization of complex systems for modelling social life, new modes of understanding and managing corporations were needed. Simultaneously, the culture concept entered management studies amid US-Japanese corporate rivalries. The concept was taken up by a group of McKinsey consultants and their business school collaborators in search of a competitive corporate advisory framework. The resulting corporate culture referred to an informal system of underlying beliefs and values that motivated and coordinated employees through shared symbols, myths, and rituals. It offered managers a model for understanding the unstructured and otherwise unseen business processes that supposedly determined whether their corporate strategies would succeed or fail. Using such a model, corporate leaders could engage in acts of “culture creation” and “symbolic management” in face of change, uncertainty, and dehierarchization. They borrowed from anthropological methods like participant observation and interpretation to produce knowledge about corporate culture. They then turned this knowledge into objects of manipulation and control.
This account surfaces the critical role played by anthropological theory and methods in the emergence of the corporate culture concept in the 80s. Anthropology, like other sources of social theory such as economics, is implicated in the social reality it takes as its object of analysis. In this light, economic models have been described as performative (MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2008). When successful, they direct the activities of economic agents who in turn actualize the dynamics predicted by the models. Though similar, anthropological models of culture were not quite performative in this way. They do not directly orchestrate the dynamics they purport to describe by configuring the actions of particular agents. In other words, anthropological theory did not prefigure the corporate cultures and forms of corporate culture management that the researchers and consultants developed. Rather, these specialists imported anthropological theories and imaginaries into a new model entirely. In this sense, anthropological theory was not so much performative as it was productive.
Anthropology’s social productivity can be elucidated further in light of nationalism, where anthropology played a similar role. Anthropological theory did not direct political actors to “perform” nations; rather, it offered the frameworks and data that nationalists ultimately repurposed as content for nationalist ideologies. In his work on Sinhalese nationalism, Jonathan Spencer (1990) calls attention to such a process. He documents how various Sinhalese nationalists developed their own beliefs about Sri Lanka from anthropological sources, scouring ethnographic data for icons of the nation. This complicated his own work and the work of other anthropologists studying nationalism: “Cultural explanations of particular nationalisms written from a point of view ostensibly ‘outside’ the phenomenon paradoxically lead to a ratification of nationalists’ own self-understandings” (Spencer 1990, 283). Supposedly external research, no matter how critical, can produce undesired effects on its objects of study. Spencer advocates for a kind of “writing within” that considers anthropology’s own entanglements with nationalism. Doing so can open sites for intervention in these very entanglements, destabilizing the formations produced during the theory’s own social life. Given anthropological theory’s appearance in early forms of the culture concept, and thus its involvement with approaches to corporate management that remain popular today, anthropologists of corporations must consider such a strategy too, recognizing how their own work animates the corporations they study. The connections surfaced here can hopefully provide a starting point.
[1] Corporate culture appeared with the related term, organizational culture, and at least in the most influential texts on the topic, the terms are generally interchangeable, though organizational culture may also refer to other institutions like churches, governments, and universities. Nevertheless, the phenomena categorized as cultural in these institutions are of the same kinds included in corporate cultures.
References
Alvesson, Mats, and Hugh Willmott. 2012. Making Sense of Management: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. London: SAGE.
Appel, Hannah. 2019. The Licit Life of Capitalism: U.S. Oil in Equatorial Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press.
BusinessWeek. 1980. “Corporate Culture,” October 27, 1980. Bloomberg Businessweek Archive.
Chong, Kimberly. 2018. Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization. Durham: Duke University Press.
Davis, Stanley M. 1971. Comparative Management: Organizational and Cultural Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
———. 1984. Managing Corporate Culture. Cambridge: Ballinger.
Deal, Terrence E., and Allan A. Kennedy. 1982. Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.
Dolan, Catherine, and Dinah Rajak. 2016. “Toward the Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility.” In The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility, edited by Catherine Dolan and Dinah Rajak, 1–28. New York: Berghahn.
Esch, Elizabeth D. 2018. The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire. American Crossroads. Oakland, California: University of California Press.
Fischer, Michael M. J. 2007. “Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems.” Cultural Anthropology 22 (1): 1–65.
Fleming, P. 2009. Authenticity and the Cultural Politics of Work: New Forms of Informal Control. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1966. “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in Cultural Analysis.” Yale Southeast Asia Program Culture Series 14.
———. 1973a. “Religion as a Cultural System.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, Third edition. New York: Basic Books.
———. 1973b. “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, Third edition. New York: Basic Books.
Gordon, Avery. 1995. “The Work of Corporate Culture: Diversity Management.” Social Text, no. 44: 3.
Handler, Richard. 1988. Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. New Directions in Anthropological Writing. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press.
Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford [England] ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
Ho, Karen Zouwen. 2009. Liquidated : An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.
Kotter, John P., and James L. Heskett. 1992. Corporate Culture and Performance. New York: Free Press.
MacKenzie, Donald A., Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu, eds. 2008. Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. 3. print., 1. paperback print. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
Martin, Emily. 2003. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Nachdr. Boston: Beacon Press.
McKenna, Christopher. 2006. The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1): 126–66.
Ouchi, William G. 1981. Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.
Paidipaty, Poornima. 2020. “‘Tortoises All the Way down’: Geertz, Cybernetics and ‘Culture’ at the End of the Cold War.” Anthropological Theory 20 (1): 97–129.
Pascale, Richard T., and Anthony G. Athos. 1981. The Art of Japanese Management: Applications for American Executives. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Peters, Thomas J, and Robert H Waterman. 1982. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. New York, NY: Warner Books.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1935. “On the Concept of Function in Social Science.” American Anthropologist 37 (3): 394–402.
Salmans, Sandra. 1983. “New Vogue: Company Culture.” The New York Times, January 7, 1983, sec. D.
Schein, Edgar H. 1985. Organizational Culture and Leadership. 1st ed. A Joint Publication in the Jossey-Bass Management Series and the Jossey-Bass Social and Behavioral Science Series. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Schoenberger, Erica J. 1997. The Cultural Crisis of the Firm. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell.
Scott, W. Richard. 1981. Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall.
Spencer, Jonathan. 1990. “Writing Within: Anthropology, Nationalism, and Culture in Sri Lanka [and Comments and Reply].” Current Anthropology 31 (3): 283–300.
Stern, Philip J. 2011. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundation of the British Empire in India. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tharp, Bruce M. 2009. “Defining ‘Culture’ and ‘Organizational Culture’: From Anthropology to the Office.” Haworth.
Trice, Harrison Miller, and Janice M. Beyer. 1993. The Cultures of Work Organizations. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Uttal, Bro. 1983. “The Corporate Culture Vultures.” Fortune, 1983.
Welker, Marina. 2014. Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko. 2002. Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Spencer Kaplan 