Summary
Summary Engineering Culture
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- Institution
Samenvatting van Engineering Culture van Gideon Kunda.
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Engineering Culture - Summary1. Culture and Organization
Organizational culture = a description of a company, a rationale for people's behaviour, a
guideline for action, a cause for praise and condemnation, pride and despair, a quality that is
said to distinguish from other industries and even from competitors. It makes us who we are.
The manager should have a clear view of what culture is all about and has the job to influence
and shape it for those whose performance he believes to be his responsibility.
Key aspects of culture:
Formal structure tells you nothing
Owning the control over the group
Culture offers a description of social characteristics of the company that also embodies a
specification of required work behaviour; initiative, informality, hard work, networking etc.
Culture also includes articulated rules for thoughts and feelings, mindsets and gut reactions.
Thus culture is a gloss for an extensive definition of membership in the corporate community
that includes rules for behaviour, thought, and feeling, all adding up to what appears to be a
well-defined and widely shared 'member role'.
Culture is something to be engineered - researched, designed, developed and maintained - in
order to facilitate the accomplishment of company goals. Many work techniques are designed
to induce other to accept and to become what the company would like them to be. The ability
to elicit, channel and direct the creative energies and activities of employees in profitable
directions is based on designing a member role that employees are expected to incorporate as
an integral part of their sense of self.
Terrence Deal and Allen Kenndy (1982) claim that with a strong culture, a company can gain as
much as one/two hours of productive work per employee per day. Productive work is the result
of a combination of self-direction, initiative, and emotional attachment, and ultimately
combines the organizational interest in productivity with the employees' personal interest in
growth and maturity.
Companies with a strong culture harness the efforts and initiative of its employees in the
service of high-quality collective performance and at the same time provides them with 'good
life'; a benign and supportive work environment that offers the opportunity for self-
actualization. Researchers propose that this strong culture is the solution for the
overbureaucratized and underperforming organizational society, and is the answer on the
question; 'how to cause members to behave in ways compatible with organization goals.
Amitai Etzoni (1961): Normative control is the attempt to elicit and direct the required efforts of
members by controlling the underlying experiences, thoughts and feeling that guide their
actions. People are not coerced by economic rewards and sanctions. The employee's self - the
ineffable source of subjective experience - that is claimed in the name of the corporate interest.
Reinhard Bendix (1956) identified an inexorable trend; a growing managerial interest in the
psychological absorption of workers by organizations
Managerial interest in the normative control has been seen as a consequence of the massive
bureaucracy of the workplace in the twentieth century and the mergence of the business
corporation as the dominant form of industrial organization.
Robert Menton (1957): Effective control requires that ideal patterns of actions are buttressed by
strong sentiments which entail devotion to one's duties.
Chester Barnard (1950) says that organizations should not only shape the behaviours and
activities of employees, but also the self-definitions of members as social actors, world views
and their emotional responses to their conditions. This is a process of deliberate education of
young people and propaganda of the adults.
,Engineering Culture - Summary
Understanding the practical consequences of the ideology of normative control in bureaucratic
settings become a matter of acute importance. There should be a balance between the
individual freedom and collective action, private and public life, civilization and its discontents.
Otherwise the normative control becomes a sophisticated and manipulative form of tyranny in
the workplace, a threat to both freedom and dignity, an unwarranted invasion of privacy.
Several researchers are not consistent with each other but agree that there is cause to worry
about the kind of society, the kind of organization and the kind of citizens such forms of control
produce.
Conclusion: Culture must be studied in context and the entire normative transaction examined:
managerial conceptions of the culture, their enactment, and the responses of members.
Ethnography = the attempt to document and interpret the culture of culture management.
2. The Setting
In the fifties a group of engineers started a small technical company. They combined the HR
oriented management theories with their interpretation of Protestant Ethic to create a new kind
of work environment. Techn was to be a people company, offering a caring, humane
environment based on enlightened self-interest and job security.
Tech's management structure reflects the continuing tension between the advocates of
creativity and advocates of control.
Analysis of tech culture:
- Organization of work: Tech's organization change often and doe snot let any group get too
large or too powerful.
It is difficult to display the structure of relation of tech. They have a 'matrix management' =
indecipherable networks of informal relations and an aura of ambiguity that can be seen as a
sense of creativity as a pain in the neck. Culture replaces structure as an organizing principle to
explain reality and guide action. Complex organizational structure depending of the projects
they have.
The authority and responsibilities of groups and individuals are continuously negotiated. 'Who
owns what space' is often the subject of a conflict/debate and a key element of the highly
political and rapidly shifting social environment that many agree characterizes the industry, its
organization and its people.
- Taxonomy of the various social categories within the Engineering population
The population of tech consists of 3 groups:
1. Wage class 4: the engineers and managers
2. Wage class 2: hourly workers (for example secretaries)
3. Temporary workers; those does not have the rights and benefits of employment and are
exempt form the corporate culture. (for example cleaners from outsourcing company)
Engineers mentality is 'Art is what you do for yourself; work is what you do for others'. They see
their work through the lens of the company interest. They recognize profitability not only as
precondition for the opportunity to work on more neat things but also to ultimate measure of
their success. Many engineers measure themselves and others; and it is this imaginary that
informs those whose task it is to control and channel the energies of engineers a well as keep
them loyal, committed and happy.
Skills of a manager:
- Having knowledge of the tech (product) at least conversant enough to not lose their credibility
or allow themselves to be misled
- Learning the language and modes of though of the business world
- Developing people skills(understanding and managing the psychology of employees and the
intricacies of social interaction)
- Learning the culture; how thing get done in the company
- Honing the political skills (the art of doing battle in an environment perceived as very
competitive and highly conflictual.
, Engineering Culture - Summary
Reputation is for a manager very important. The reputations are constantly debated, and the
attribution of failure is always a danger. It can be considered as a matter of luck or as a political
and presentational skill.
- Physical and social work environment: The setting is designed to encourage communication,
enhance fact-to-face exposure and minimize status distinctions (open office space).
The flexibility of space is complemented by a flexible approach of time. There are rigid and
potentially enforceable standards but as long as employees fulfil commitments and do not
arouse attentions, they are often allowed to manage their own schedules and design their
workday as they see fit.
The work environment reflects the same tension between control and chaos that is central its
social worlds. Flexibility is the key theme in the spatial and temporal organization of work,
space and time boundaries are both negotiable. But the attempts to control (like the design of
the office) are in evidence, and members experience a constant need to protect their space
and time from outside demands.
3. Ideology: Tech Culture Codified
Company-sponsored references to the nature of the individual and collective work experiences
of employees - their motivation, values, feelings, what they are up to and why - are taken for
granted, a routine interpretive backdrop to their daily work. The ever-present signs of the
company's explicit concern with its employees state of mind and heart.
According to Geertz (1973), Ideologies are schematic image of social order publicly offered in
the name of those (managers) with a claim to authority and for company perspective as "maps
of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience.
The meaning contained in the organizational ideology are uncovered and explicated in this
chapter. And how ideology is constructed and used.
Different variants of the ideology, with authority from a different source:
1. Managerial authority
The official company perspective -> can be found in handbooks, introduction to new
employees, policies etc. For example it can described in a handbook as follow:
- 'Company Philosophy' (including the corporate values, balance of freedom and discipline and
the right attitude) and - - Culture (for example people-oriented company with hard working
people, team work, high level of professionalism etc).
- Introduction (introducing what kind of people work in the company, for example 'people who
care about the company').
- Policy (including the career development and relationship between company and its
employees).
These document distil management's collective preferences into abstract principles, catch
phrases and key words openly designed to influence and educate. Required behaviours are
vaguely defined (hard work, taking initiative etc) just like the values, beliefs and feelings.
Furthermore, the thoughts, observations and ideas of senior managers are the most frequently
encountered form of ideological expression. The managerial perspective is presented in the
name of real people, whose experience is often used as evidence for it applicability. This can
be done by routinely speeches, presentations and newsletters.
Senior managers address the three main themes of the managerial perspective:
1.company's moral purpose (corporate goals and mission)
2.the nature of its social organization (wat betekenen wij voor de industrie/wereld)
3.the attributes of the member role -> People oriented aspects:
Commitment to its people
Bottom-up management
Autonomy coupled with responsibility
State of company (all employees looking for excellence)
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