Greetje Corporaal

49: Engineered Culture and Normative Control – Gideon Kunda

October 30, 2018 Greetje Corporaal
Originally published in 1992, Gideon Kunda's ethnographic study of a high-tech corporation altered the discourse on organizational culture. "Tech," the firm being studied, was a firm on the rise and saw itself as a leader and ground breaker in the rapidly growing high-tech industries of the 1980s. But as the firm grew, it began indoctrinating its tried-and-true hard-work formula in aggressive and unhelpful ways.Read More

47: Organizational Identity — Albert & Whetten

September 18, 2018 Greetje Corporaal
"Who are WE?" The pursuit of an answer to this tantalizingly simple question began with a book chapter written in 1985 by organization theorists Stuart Albert and David Whetten. "Organizational Identity" established the construct of identity at the organizational level and described it as the sum of three types of claims -- claims of an organization's central character, claims of its distinctiveness from other organizations, and claims of temporal continuity that tie the present organization to its history.Read More

44: Transaction Costs and Boundaries of the Firm – Williamson and Malone

July 16, 2018 Greetje Corporaal
We explore an important reading that bridges organization theory with economics -- Oliver E. Williamson’s article, “The Economics of Organization: The Transaction Cost Approach,” where he asserts that the assumption of firms operating on a profit motive has not helped organization theorists understand and explain the behaviors of firms. He thus argued that transactions, not the products or services the firm provides, is a better unit of analysis.Read More