Over the last several decades, employers have increasingly replaced permanent employees with temporary workers and independent contractors to cut labor costs and enhance flexibility. Although ...commentators have focused largely on low-wage temporary work, the use of skilled contractors has also grown exponentially, especially in high-technology areas. Yet almost nothing is known about contracting or about the people who do it. This book seeks to break the silence.
Engineering Culture is an award-winning ethnography of the engineering division of a large American high-tech corporation. Now, this influential book—which has been translated into Japanese, Italian, ...and Hebrew—has been revised to bring it up to date. In Engineering Culture, Gideon Kunda offers a critical analysis of an American company's well-known and widely emulated "corporate culture." Kunda uses detailed descriptions of everyday interactions and rituals 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. Kunda carefully dissects the impact this form of control has on employees' work behavior and on their sense of self. In the conclusion written especially for this edition, Kunda reviews the company's fortunes in the years that followed publication of the first edition, reevaluates the arguments in the book, and explores the relevance of corporate culture and its management today.
Purpose - In this paper the author aims to examine his own life and work in order to understand how an ethnographic sensibility emerges and develops.Design methodology approach - The paper examines ...the personal and institutional context in which his book Engineering Culture: Commitment and Control in a High Tech Corporation was researched and written, from formative moments in his life that led him to the study, through the process of finding, entering and exploring his field, to the acts of interpretation and writing that culminated in the book.Findings - The paper illustrates the institutional pressures that constrain conceptual and methodological freedom and undermine the logic of inquiry, and suggests ways of circumventing them. It also illustrates how interpretation is rooted in symbolic resources developed over a lifetime that are far beyond a grounding in social theory, and shows the intricate connections between question formulation, data collection, interpretation and writing that transcend the standard approaches to teaching and executing social research.Originality value - The paper offers a revealing behind-the-scenes view of the process of ethnographic inquiry, challenges the accepted view of the method and offers practical advice to researchers, teachers and students.
This paper presents an ethnographic study of the Israeli—Palestinian subsidiary of a multinational hi-tech corporation. Critiquing the tendency of globalization theorists to conceptualize ...multinational corporations (MNCs) solely in terms of their impact on their external environment, this paper looks inward and examines the ideological and practical constituents of the transnational regime of consciousness as expressed through what management titles `the one-company approach'. We argue that this regime lays foundations for a transnational `imagined community' which does not rival the national one, but internalizes it, creating an arena of discretionary power for managers: deciding when to activate and when to suppress nationality in the global organizational universe. This study analyzes the relationship between transnationalism and nationalism inside the organization, and its implications for understanding MNCs' role in globalization.
Bringing Work Back In Barley, Stephen R; Kunda, Gideon
Organization science (Providence, R.I.),
01/2001, Volume:
12, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this essay we argue that organization theory's effort to make sense of postbureaucratic organizing is hampered by a dearth of detailed studies of work. We review the history of organization theory ...to show that, in the past, studies of work provided an empirical foundation for theories of bureaucracy, and explain how such research became marginalized or ignored. We then discuss methodological requirements for reintegrating work studies into organization theory and indicate what the conceptual payoffs of such integration might be. These payoffs include breaking new conceptual ground, resolving theoretical puzzles, envisioning organizing processes, and revitalizing old concepts.
Contract work and outsourcing represent widely acknowledged manifestations of the groundswell of economic change that is shaking the foundations of work and employment in the United States. While ...these emerging forms of employment have become harbingers of new ways of working, they remain poorly understood; efforts to explain their emergence and significance have suffered from an excess of ideology and a dearth of data. Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda undertook an ethnography of technical contractors to produce a detailed, balanced, and accurate depiction of how contractors structure and interpret their experience. Their study documents the social dynamics of skilled "contingent labor," a term economists and sociologists now use for an array of short-term work arrangements. Their goal was to understand how employment relations were changing at the dawn of the 21st century. Closely studying contractors' everyday lives provided a strategic vantage point for viewing, evaluating, and perhaps even shaping changes taking place in the U.S. and global economies. As they set out to explore the world of technical contracting, Barley and Kunda were confronted with an unexpected profile of contractors: these were itinerant experts and social pioneers who partook of a way of life and a culture of work that challenges the prevailing theories and entrenched practices of employment. After an account of the exigencies of technical contracting, Barley and Kunda discuss contingent work within the context of the American industrial landscape and in light of institutionalist and free market perspectives. They also discuss contingent labor as it relates to the way in which professions and occupations are organized. Specifically, they argue that contracting directs our attention to a resurgence of occupational organizing in the wake of bureaucracy's retreat and the free market's advance. They suggest what a renewed appreciation for occupational dynamics could mean for individuals, firms and public policy.
This article seeks to further understanding of the significance and impact of national identity in the context of organizational globalization. Arguing against the tendency of organizational ...researchers to pose this identity as an objective, cognitive essence, the article claims that national identity constitutes a symbolic resource that is actively and creatively constructed by organizational members to serve social struggles which are triggered by globalization. It offers support to this claim with ethnographic field data generated from an Israeli high-tech corporation undergoing a merger with an American competitor. The implications of the article concern the need for researchers to take into account the space for choice that organizational members have in defining national identity and the interrelationships between the enactment of this identity and processes of resistance to globalization.
This study examines 52 highly skilled technical contractors' explanations, in 1998, of why they entered the contingent labor force and how their subsequent experiences altered their viewpoint. The ...authors report three general implications of their examination of the little-studied high-skill side of contingent labor. First, current depictions of contingent work are inaccurate. For example, contrary to the pessimistic "employment relations" perspective, most of these interviewees found contracting better-paying than permanent employment; and contrary to optimistic "free agent" views, many reported feeling anxiety and estrangement. Second, occupational networks arose to satisfy needs (such as training and wage-setting) that employing organizations satisfy for non-contingent workers. Third, regarding their place in the labor market, high-skilled and well-paid technical contractors cannot be called-as contingent workers usually are-"secondary sector" workers; and their market is not dyadic, with individuals selling labor and firms buying it, but triadic, involving intermediaries such as staffing firms.
This paper uses data from career histories of technical contractors to explore how they experience, interpret, and allocate their time and whether they take advantage of the temporal flexibility ...purportedly offered by contract work in the market. Technical contractors offer a unique opportunity for examining assumptions about organizations, work, and time because they are itinerant professionals who operate outside any single organizational context. We find that contractors do perceive themselves to have flexibility and that a few achieve a kind of flexibility unattained by most permanent employees doing similar work, but rather than take advantage of what they call "beach time" and "downtime," the majority work long hours and rarely schedule their time flexibly. The contractors' use of time is constrained by the cyclic structure of employment, the centrality of reputation in markets for skill, the practice of billing by the hour, and the nature of technical work. Our research suggests that markets place more rather than fewer constraints on workers' time.
