Technology and organization culture

Technology In Society, Vol. 10, pp. 233-253 (1988) Printed in the USA. All rights reserved.

0160-791X/88 $3.00 + .00 Copyright © 1988 Pergamon Press plc

Technology and Organization Culture The Human Imperative in Integrating New Technology into Organization Design Stephen Hill

ABSTRACT. This article deals with the relationship between the culture of corporate organizations and the introduction o f new technological systems. Its argument is that, very frequently, organization design follows unthinkingly from the demands of the technological systems introduced. Yet, as in all human social organization, the strength o f the organizational culture is critical to organization success, and this culture can be easily undermined by a centralized control-oriented technological system. The article shows the way in which the design parameters o f technological systems can penetrate organization culture at the roots from which culture is constituted-namely at the level o f realistic constructions o f meaning within the organization in relation to organization environment, patterns of organizational discourse within which meanings are constructed, and stocks o f knowledge that provide the basis for constructions o f meaning and action. In particular, this article focuses on the situation o f a nation, such as Australia, where a historic dependency on the import o f technological systems has led to technological marginalization and the import of technologically oriented design principles as well. The article demonstrates how unthinking copying of overseas practice can undermine the national basis for developing a resilient and independent organization culture that is able to compete within the international economy.

While lip-service is often paid to human concerns when new technological systems are introduced into corporations, it is most generally the case that these concerns are accorded a low priority in the face of perceived marketplace demand to compete in terms of technological and system efficiency. Thus, h u m a n development strategies are likely to be displaced if they get in the way of technologically comm a n d e d survival. The acceptance of such a philosophy is particularly evident in a nation like Australia. As a nation, Australia stands somewhere between the technological innovativeness of nations of the First World, and the gross dependence on external Stephen Hill is Foundation Professorand Head of the Department of Sodology, and CoFounder and Director of the Centrefor Technology and Social Change at the University of I~ollongong, Australia. His academic background is in natural science, business administration, and sociology. Dr. Hill is the author of several books and over seventy articles on science, technology and society. He has been conducting researchand consulting on science, technology and development, principally in Australia and the Asian and Pacific regions, over the past twenty years, working with UNESCO, ESCAP, UNDP, and a number of national governments. 233

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technological change that characterizes the Third World. Standing in this middle territory of dependence, with one foot in the international high-technology boat and the other in the mud of technological dependency, is not a comfortable posture. A nation adopting this stance runs the real danger, as with a passenger boarding an unsecured rowboat, of falling face down in the mud as the high-technology boat drifts away. The effect in Australia of such an unbalanced position has tended to lead to the unquestioning import of the pace and shape of technological change from elsewhere, even though technologically innovative resources are available locally. What have been imported, therefore, are not only the technological systems, but also the organization assumptions and designs that are implied by these systems-a social and cultural milieu that remains unpacked when the technological baggage is delivered. Therefore, inscribed deeply into Australian business is an imported and poorly understood imperative of technological command over human concerns in organization design. There is, however, a terrible fallacy in this priority. It is a fallacy not only because of wider, more abstract costs to a social philosophy that supports human engagement. More significantly, it is a fallacy because these costs will inevitably affect the bottom line of business competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to show why this is so, why a human imperative in designing organization development around technological change is just as important as introducing technically efficient systems. The perspective is as important in the United States as it is in Australia. The dependent posture represented in Australian import of technological perspectives, however, is likely to lead to greater rigidity in a turbulent international economy as a human imperative is asserted for economic advantage elsewhere. The beginning of this discussion will highlight the way that a "Technological Imperative" rules in Australia, and where it comes from. Most basically, the priority accorded to technological change at the expense of human development can be traced to a traditional national posture that was identified in the 1985 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) examiners' report as a widespread belief in Australia that technology is somehow external to national life. 1 What follows is a lack of understanding of the social integration that is necessary for technological change to work effectively. Such a posture has been assumed throughout a history of dependence on the external import of technology.

The Technological Imperative Australia has, throughout its entire history, stood in a lush agricultural backgarden, rich with minerals, peering over the fence at the technological transformation of the rest of the world. Having mowed the grass, dug over the soil, and repaired the fence, the national posture has been to stand waiting for technological innovations to be thrown over the fence into the economy's open arms. As virtually every report on the Australian manufacturing industry has observed over the past twenty years, industry has tended to be a recalcitrant spectator to national technological change, rather than a collective of engaged creators. 2

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Thus, although Australian nationals had the capacity to invent agricultural machinery, the motor mower, the photocopying process, early mechanical and electronic computers, and the electric jug, the nation, as a whole, has remained on the margins of the creation and exploitation of technological change, even when such innovation was essential to the national interest. Seventy-four percent of Australia's export income still depends 'on relatively unprocessed agricultural and mineral products, while 64 % of income spent on imports pays for trade goods that embody a high-technology component. 3 Ninety-eight percent of Australia's computer hardware is imported. 4 Australia pays to the United States alone twenty-six times the amount for technical know-how than is paid to Australian interests. 5 And, of the fifteen OECD nations, Australia is the fourth most technologically d e p e n d e n t only exceeded by Portugal, Spain and Finland, a position that is deteriorating, rather than improving. 6 The nation is not only externally dependent, but internally dependent for sources of technological change as well. What this internal dependency means is that most of the nation's research is done at arm's length from industry, under the auspices of government funding (65 % of funding in 1985-86). 7 Such a position is not only in stark contrast to the much greater internalization of research into business that can be observed in nations such as Japan, Australia's main competitor in the region, but, even more basically, the position of high dependency in Australia is in stark contrast to the internalization in Japan of innovation at all levels of production within business enterprise. ~ Why Australia maintains allegiance to the assumption of technological dependency is too long a story to be fully presented in this paper. I have told this story elsewhere. 9 In essence, the nation's colonial inheritance, both by British design and Australian acceptance, led to the import of technology, lifestyle and ideology from Britain in return for the wealth that was generated from servicing Britain's agricultural and mineral needs, wealth that led to Australia's becoming the richest nation (per capita) during the late 19th century. Britain's ideology, particularly relating to engineering education and the institutional location of science in government and remote from industry, persisted at least until the 1940s. Local innovation, while rich in potential, was stifled by obeisance to the cultural cringe that the nation had no right (or ability) to compete in major technological concerns. The neo-colonist intrusion of a (largely foreign-controlled) manufacturing base for the nation that eventuated after the Australian people felt their technological isolation during World War II, was built on a poverty-stricken industrial base that the nation had inherited, and was erected through import of technology into a context of totally inadequate technical skill. At the time of World War II, Australia had, for example, only 4,000 engineers, two-thirds of whom were engaged in civil construction work. 1° The nation has thus remained, even over the past four decades, heavily dependent on technology and skill imported from elsewhere, on foreign ownership that commands the basic shape of the Australian economy--in particular, in the higher technology areas of manufacturing, where between 70% and 96% of industry is controlled from overseas.11 And, with an indigenous and rich science capability harmonizing to the tune of an (inherited) ideology of "excellence," rather than practical

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utility, the nation remains dependent on technologies that are produced outside the national boundaries.

The Effects o f Dependency Today, the nation remains highly dependent on the technological fashion houses of the international economy, a dependency which has been historically formed and culturally accepted. The effect of dependency is that business enterprise in Australia must race to import technological systems simply to survive in a turbulent international economy, and local business enterprise tends still not to have the expertise or the time to unpack either the systems or their assumptions to make them best fit the nation's particular needs. For this reason, Australian industry stands at the end of an international power train of technique, created and embodied elsewhere. Behind the face of this technique is a body of apparently immutable assumptions that fundamentally structure both the corporate action of productive enterprise in Australia, and the perception by corporate leaders of the apparent lack of alternatives. These assumptions become Commandments when industry must compete against international, technologically rich competitors. The Commandments of Technique are the following: 12 • • • •

"Everything shall bow down to efficiency!" "Because it can be done (technologically), it MUST be done!" "Thou shalt adjust!" "Thou art not responsible! What else canst thou do?"

These Commandments follow directly from an unquestioning acceptance of a drive in technological development toward rational efficiency and external control, toward mega-information in microseconds. This is a drive that pushes the apparent inefficiency of human engagement, skill development, and organization culture well into the background shadows behind the arc-light of technological opportunity. What this assumption of technological mastery feeds is the organization design and adjustment criteria that place a high priority on control and "conception" as the province of management (and the control system), but treat the labor force as an expensive resource-like raw materials and factory floorspace-necessary to "execute" the operations of production, but most profitable when reduced in cost, skill and numbers. Such a "profitable" consequence to the organization of "scientific" or technical mastery is not new. It was unleashed onto the organization landscape by Frederick Winslow Taylor under the auspices of "scientific management" (or engineering people to fit the industrial system) eighty years ago. 13 All that is new is the fashion of the disguise worn by scientific management TM as the demand for technological efficiency and profitability accelerates. For the command of the Technological Imperative is built on scientific management's philosophy of hierarchy in human organization, and de-skilling of the lower echelons. That Australian industry has followed this path is well demonstrated in the evidence. Capital expenditure in Australia on new industrial construction declined con-

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sistently throughout the 1970s, while there was a continuous rise in expenditure on plant and capital e q u i p m e n t - a trend that reflects the "rationalization" of productive enterprise and employment, rather than its expansion.15 In a summary of Australian data and literature on this period, Lynne Tacy and Richard Gough demonstrate the consequences. Particularly with the impact of computerization since the early 1970s, there has been a tendency for formalization, routinization and standardization of employees' work with negative consequences for human engagement and satisfaction. There has been a tendency for skills to be lost, for career paths to be destroyed, and for a smaller number of expert people, an elite, to be created at the center of organizations, while the remaining jobs were effectively de-skilled. There has been a tendency even in clerical work for jobs to become more specialized, disassembled into small components of easily performed tasks that require minimal coordination between workers in the same area. ~6

Management Versus Labor The consequent alienation of management control from worker engagement has yielded a path of technological change that has been troubled by antagonism between management and labor interests. As was observed in a report commissioned by the 1985 Australian Government Review on Australian Industrial Relations, technological change emerged as a central industrial relations issue during the 1970s. 17 While the visibility of technological advance, particularly in association with the new developments of microelectronics, was a key reason for the emergence of technical change as a central industrial relations issue in the mid-1970s, technological growth and innovation had been proceeding rapidly for some time before. Within the period following World War II up until 1973-74, however, technical change had been associated with increased living standards, rather than unemployment. That is, in keeping with prior national experience of externally induced technical change, the benefits of technological dependence dazzled the people so that they could not see into the darkness of the shadow side of uncontrolled technical advance. Union labor negotiations had achieved real wage increases of 72.2 % across the decade of the 1960s, including over-award payments, is Even in the early 1970s, there was strong growth in the labor force following trends that were established during the previous two decades. Large additions to the labor force (of 152,000 persons annually) were able to be absorbed up until early 1974.19 But from 1974 onward, the situation changed. For the next three years, the labor force could only absorb an additional 118,000 persons per annum (a 22% reduction); the average percentage change in numbers of civilian employees plunged from 4.12 % increase in 1970 to 0.09% reduction in 1978, 20 a change that was most dramatically felt within the manufacturing sector where a 2.5 % average annual growth in employment from 1971 to 1974 reversed to an average 15.46% annual reduction in employment during the latter half of the decade? 1 Thus the mid-1970s yielded a change in perception of the role of technology in establishing the conditions of work. As Mark Wooden and Roy Kriegler from the National Institute of Labor Studies observed from a survey of the period, the result

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was "a growing anxiety that the rapid introduction of new technology into the workplace will lead to the fragmentation of work, the erosion and displacement of traditional skills, and widespread unemployment. ''22 Within the context of this changed worldview of technical change, employers, who traditionally were "not willing to see any erosion of their prerogative to manage unilaterally," were ranged against a union movement that was structurally ill-equipped for technical change. As the Committee on Review on Australian Industrial Relations Law and Systems observed in 1985, union memberships were characterized by narrow delineation of jobs, a factor that militated against multiskilling and adaptation, and there had been a proliferation of trade unions with small but exclusive areas of control, a factor that worked against redistribution of members to other jobs as technical change eroded the prior traditional modes of employment. 23 The resulting industrial relations conflicts were in direct opposition to what had been observed in the early 1970s by the Australian G~vernment Department of Labor and National Service, which, having studied the employment effects of technological change, "found very little dislocation and adjustment problems. ,,24 Through a series of disputes, new industrial machineries to handle technical change were set in place within the maritime, stevedoring, coal-mining, printing, building and steel industries. 25 As a lead case in technical change-oriented industrial relations negotiations, a major dispute in the telecommunications industry led to the formation of the Telecom Consultative Council in April 1979, which, with union and employer representation, reached agreement on the introduction of new technology, whereby the unions would be consulted at the earliest stages of planning to foster provision of full information, bargaining over costs, customer requirements, retraining, redeployment of labor, security and privacy of systems, and job creation programs. 26 The industrial relations issues that arise from technical change have been by no means resolved, particularly as, during the 1980s, technical change intrudes ever increasingly on white-collar employment within finance, insurance, and office work. The 1970s in Australia, however, saw a time where technical change reached into the foreground of perception, and into the foreground of negotiations about the nature of employment, and where technical change ceased to be a background assumption of unchallenged general social and economic welfare. Yet, the assumption of a traditional "national obeisance to technological command" remains in place. Stimulated by the context of the industrial dispute with the Australian Telecom Employees Association, the Australian Government established a major Committee of Enquiry into technological change in Australia. This committee (the "Myers Committee") reported in 1980, having conducted a comprehensive review of the effects of technological change throughout Australia. But the Myers Report did not address the question of directing technological change towards a nationally determined social future. Instead, the Report conveyed the traditional national posture whereby people are expected to adjust to an unchangeable force of technological change. Based on neoclassical economic argument, the Report recommended that the solution to Australia's economic ills and technological dependency required "the adoption of flexible and adaptive measures that assist people to a d j u s t . . , resisting to c h a n g e . . , would be counter-productive," it decreed. 27

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Economic Pragmatism

Subsequently, under the auspices of a Labor government that emerged from the shadows of twenty-three years of complacent Liberal Party conservatism, there have been strong moves toward economic pragmatism (within the context of internationalization of the economy), and towards the construction of national technological autonomy. CSIRO, the nation's central government-funded research arm, has been promoted, through organizational changes, to forge a more industrial profitabilityoriented relationship with the economy. Universities are increasingly being funded on the basis of assumed "relevance" of degrees in science, commerce, engineering and computing, as well as of commercially relevant research. Science "parks" are being promoted through the major states of the country. "Sunrise" industries in the new technology fashions of microelectronics and bioengineering are being encouraged. And, through 150% tax rebates, research in industry is being funded. A movement toward technological autonomy is now seen within Australia as a national priority. Yet, this is still a rush toward technological pragmatism within the emerging international competitive context, a rush that affirms the third "Adjustment Commandment." It is generally assumed that the nation has no alternative. "Profitability requires technological rationalization!" is the call to pragmatism heard in both business and government. "The human consequences are unfortunate, but necessary to survival!" The inability to seriously entertain alternative organization and work designs that put people into a more equal partnership with technical change is itself a product of the nation's colonial and subsequent neocolonial history. The economy is, as a result of this history, deeply penetrated by transnational corporation control. Indeed, the union opposition to technological change per se during the 1970s was partly a response to the seeming intractibility of this external force. It is a contemporary fact that transnational corporations (TNCs) "as major users of new technology, will merely import it, with a minimum creation of spin-off industries to absorb displaced labour, and (a fostering of) a further weakening of the union's bargaining position. ''28 The result of both foreign disinterest at the core of the economy in anything but profitability, and a continuance of a sense that technology is somehow an external force (even when generated from within) to be adjusted to, is that organization design in Australia has largely been dominated by the exigencies of "The Technological Imperative." Appeal to the third "Adjustment Commandment" can be inspected more closely, however, for there are alternatives, even within the constrained industrial culture climate of Australia. Human-Oriented Work Design

Indeed, the "Human Relations" movement of the 1930s was generated by a person who spent a considerable length of time in Australia, Elton Mayo. The "Sociotechnic" movement of the 1960s was inspired by an Australian, Fred Emery. 29 But these concepts of human-oriented work design have been adopted and perpetuated

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elsewhere far more than within the Australian scene, in keeping with what happened to most major Australian technological innovations. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (the ACTU) has, within the past few months, reimported back to Australia, the concepts of worker participation and worker skill-upgrading that the sociotechnic movement inspired in Scandinavia and West Germany. As the ACTU is presently finding, the human resources development side of work design is meeting considerable resistance from management. The resistance is a feature of the Australian historic, economic and cultural milieu. While it is clear that the human-oriented organization designs that are already in place in countries like Sweden, Norway, West Germany, and Japan are demonstrably profitable, Australia is slow to recognize that these alternatives are economically viable. The nation is still wedded to the notion of dependency, particularly in terms of all that follows (in terms of organization design) from externally inspired technical change. So, in spite of the character of organization change that can be identiffed with economic success in both Scandinavia and Japan, Australia remains locked into a technology-dependency space that, under the mask of national competitiveness, may well hide the key to unlocking the national economy from a position of longer-term uncompetitiveness. For what is missing is the absolute significance of the human side of organizational performance-in any national context. Perhaps more accurately, it is not that concern for human resource management is missing, but rather that, in the context of Australian technological dependency, human resource management is treated as secondary when it gets in the way of technical efficiency and centralized, bottom-line control. The Human Side o f Productive Organizations

The basic flaw in the argument that favors technological determinism is its wrongminded view of productive organizations. This view is one that sees organizations as control systems not unlike the machines that dominate them. What the organization means is what it means to the controllers; what stock of knowledge the organization must encompass is what the control system has access to; what autonomy, participation and skill are appropriate of those who obey the control system's command is that which abides by and supports centralized control. But human organizations have never been like this, and survived. And a productive enterprise is a human organization. The human has been visible in organization theory for some time-since the emergence of the human relations movement in the 1920s. ~° But the importance of holistic human design of organizations has only recently been discovered in management literature, particularly within the United States under the rubric of the "Human Resource Management" movement. 31 One element within the general approach to human resource management is the concept of "corporate culture." Within the general movement, this concept is still often treated as a new "flavor" within the general menu of human factors to be included in organizational design. 32 Yet a recognition is emerging of the more central importance of culture-as a "substantial framework of employee commitment" as distinct from "morale-building activities of the traditional sort.'33 Thus, one of the main "house journals" of organization theory, Administrative

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Science Quarterly, devoted a full issue to corporate culture in 1983. 34 Business Week presented a trend-setting article on corporate culture to management in 1980. 35 Regular corporate culture reviews have appeared in Fortune since the early 1980s. And a series of articles have emerged pointing to the significance of a cultural perspective for "systems theory ''~6 on the one side, and analysis of the subjective, interpretive aspects of organizational life on the other. 37 American management stands in a somewhat ambivalent view of what corporate culture means to them. Mills and Balbaky observed from a survey of the top United States corporations, for example, that while 44 % of corporations expressed a strong interest in developing or changing their organizational culture, and 28% formally planned its development, many top managers were confused about what the term meant. 38 In Australia, management interest in following the American trend is expressed in the commissioning of a study on "the management of changing cultures in Australian organizations" by the Queensland Division of the Australian Institute of Management. But, concurrently, management ambivalence was demonstrated at the 1986 Conference for Manufacturing Industry, "Technology for the Future," where senior management of the main high technology companies of Australia paid considerable attention to conditions of access to technology, but treated humanoriented design in general, and corporate culture in particular, as ambiguous luxuries that were secondary to technological competitiveness. 39 The concept of corporate culture is, however, too important an idea to be allowed to slide into either the fog of noncomprehension or the background of technologically dominated organization design. This is so because culture stands, not as a desirable adjunct to human commitment within organizations, but as the center from which all the other factors of human resource management derive, such as morale, motivation, skill development, and participative decisionmaking. For all the factors derive from or inform what the organization means to its participants. The concept of culture is of particular interest when exploring the manner in which technical change transforms the organization. For technical change intrudes on the very processes from which culture is derived- on the structures of communication and discourse within which organization meanings are constituted, and on the structures and distribution of technical stocks of knowledge according to which the organization collectively relates to and transforms its environmental reality. The concept of corporate culture, while of universal importance, is of particular significance in Australia, though this realization is emerging only very slowly. This is so because, within a historically formed and deeply embedded worldview of dependency on technical change as an external force, the shift to profitable and autonomous human organization design involves a fundamental transformation of Australian corporate culture and meanings. Consequently, in combatting the wrong-mindedness of the view of productive organizations as primarily determined by technological demands, the cutting edge of analysis lies within a view of organizations as social wholes, where the core of social wholeness resides in how the corporations' cultures are constituted and maintained, specifically in the context of technical change. Along with the more instructive recent writings on corporate culture, 4° it is, therefore, worthwhile taking some wellthumbed leaves from the book of anthropology, to apply anthropology's wealth of

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knowledge about a wide variety of h u m a n societies to corporate enterprise. The result is a clear realization that corporations are, indeed, no different from any other form of h u m a n organization in the centrality of culture to their functioning and survival. My own approach, however, is not to focus on a structural lexicon of varying cultural possibilities, but on the processes by which culture is constituted. For it is at this deeper level that the interactions between technical change and the h u m a n side of organization performance can be most clearly identified. Culture is not, however, an easy concept to grasp, as most managers seeking to do something about corporate culture have found. Anthropologist Ralph Linton points to the source of culture's unintelligibility. As Linton observes, because people's lives are so totally enmeshed within their cultures, understanding culture as a concept that one can reflect upon is about as difficult as it would be for a superintelligent fish livin~ within the depths of the ocean to understand what water is. It is only when the fish, by some accident, is brought to the surface and introduced to air that it experiences anything different. 41 Anthropology came to grips with culture by a somewhat analagous process, i.e., through confronting and needing to explain totally different kinds of societies. What anthropology thus came to realize was that all societies hold together because they have come to share views of what social reality is, and how the people should act together to maintain this social reality and survive within it. Culture, therefore, concerns the meaning system of society that provides a "design for living ''4z in the "shared ways of thinking and believing that grow out of group experience and are passed from one generation to the next. ,,43 The vehicles that convey these meanings are the expectations, the norms, the taboos, the rules, the symbols, and even the structure of language. Produced out o f h u m a n interaction, these cultural vehicles then set the framework for what goes on in future interaction. 44 Culture, therefore, simultaneously is produced by humans acting together towards a collective purpose, and reproduces the frameworks for continued collaboration, for giving the society's members a sense of how to behave and what they ought to be doing. As a universal property of h u m a n organization, culture is, therefore, equally as applicable as a concept for understanding corporate enterprise as it is for understanding any other form of collective social action. As Business Week observed, "Just as tribal cultures have totems and taboos that dictate how members act toward fellow members and outsiders, so does the corporation's culture influence employees' actions towards customers, competitors, suppliers, and one another.'45 The meaning system that holds an enterprise together in collective action may sometimes be embodied in rules that are written out or symbolic slogans that represent the corporate identity and philosophy, but more often they are tacit and informally learned. To the technological pragmatist, this concept of organization culture may appear to be so m u c h extra baggage that can be easily discarded when setting out on the serious journey of making an organization work productively through effective control and clear objectives. This is not a very pragmatic position at all, however, for it denies reality, intractable and fuzzy as it may be. Understanding corporate cult u r e - with all its tacit rules, established traditions, and expectations-is, as Stan-

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ley Davis of Boston University observed, "like putting your hand in a cloud."46 It may be a cloud, but it is still there. Anyone who has sought to change an organization will have found that this cloud has assumed the solidity of a brick wall. Business Week offers the example of two American oil companies that sought to diversify out of oil, but finally floundered against "cultures and traditions of doing business as oilmen."47 The corporation, Levi Strauss & Co., the world's largest manufacturer of apparel (with a 1981 turnover of US$2.8 billion) confronted even deeper problems with their organization culture when they simply tried to shift offices. Previously the company had grown to its position of preeminent market power while its headquarters remained in an old six-story yellow-brick building in downtown San Francisco. As a senior executive described it, the office was a "funky place," with littered desks, rock music posters, cluttered memorabilia, and a casual atmosphere that encouraged bright young MBAs to evolve imaginative marketing plans and executives ;o get business done with underlings as they bumped into them in the hallways. Having outgrown the space, Levi Strauss moved into a modern 34-story skyscraper. But their new residency was short-lived; they moved again, to a low-level parkland setting within eight years, thirteen years before their lease expired. What they had found was that the communication patterns and the meaning of the corporation for its employees had changed. The necessity to commute between offices via elevator towers and the absence of a shared lobby formalized communications; the "symbol" of the skyscraper counteracted the company's marketing and corporate "style"; the high-rise distance between executive suites and workers' offices, and the need to pull down the venetian blind¢ for privacy started to erode the previous sense of participation and trust that had been built within the overcrowded yellow-brick environment: Rumors started to emerge among the staff that "something hush-hush was afoot.'48 Levi Strauss & Co. moved on to a new socially planned low-rise environment, because the company recognized that maintaining the organizational culture in line with management philosophy and objectives was essential for corporate survival. There are now many other examples of corporations that have recognized just how important corporate culture is: for example, IBM, IT&T, Digital Equipment Corporation, Delta Airlines, Atlantic Richfield Co., Pepsi Cola Co., J. C. Penney's and a host of others. What the Levi Strauss example shows, along with the experience of other corporations, is that where a corporation's culture aligns with management strategies, then the culture can be the corporation's major strength. When the corporation culture is thin, or weakly aligned, or in direct opposition to corporate strategies, it can bring the organization to its knees. These observations are particularly pertinent to organizations that are planning technological change. If the organization follows the apparent immutable requirements of the Technological Imperative, it carries a particular set of social assumptions into organization design. These are assumptions of hierarchy and control that directly discourage the organization's members from participating in constructing an integrative set of cultural meanings by which the corporation can hold together and deal strongly with its market environment. No matter how clever and profit-

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ability-oriented the managers, they are thus in very real danger of confronting a recalcitrant, suspicious, uncommitted work force which needs to be beaten into submission to changing priorities as the organization seeks to adjust to its environment. The effective management of organizational climate or culture is very difficult to plan. Planning culture is like seeking to manhandle a cloud, for the social processes that create the culture are largely spontaneous and informal. Even with the considerable fuzziness that will appear around the edges of a clear strategy, however, a corporation that is involved in technological change could find itself in severe peril if corporate management averts its eyes from corporate culture when developing new organization designs. This is so because changing the organization's technological base irrevocably tampers with the organization culture. In an attempt to identify a focus in the midst of cloudiness, it is, therefore, worth drawing three main perspectives concerning corporate culture into view. These perspectives are derived respectively from the fields of symbolic anthropology, cognitive anthropology, and structural anthropology, and deal with "meaning and survival," "stock of knowledge," and "communication structures."

Key Perspectives on Corporate Culture and Technological Change Meaning and Survival As in the corporate examples presented before, the culture of any society or human organization must relate the society (or organization) realistically to its environment. Any society that confronts an environment that has moved but a culture that remains embedded in old ways will not survive. This is demonstrated as strongly in the fall of Ancient Rome as it is in the demise of the North American Plains Indians before the onslaught of white society. Equally, the fragility of culture in a changing environment is demonstrated in the fall of Montezuma and the Aztecs before Cortez and the Spaniards, in the demise of Australian aboriginals confronted by European settlement, and in the present-day erosion of timeless traditional cultures when confronted by the expansion of Western commodity and market economies. In each case, the demise of culture is less attributable to the more potent technological firepower of the invading forces than it is to the level of internal cultural resilience to withstand the changes in meaning structure that accompanied a new environment that the culture had to deal with realistically. The significance of adapting to this reality principle was shown forcibly in the resilience and will that were retained in the villages of Vietnam during the twenty-year-long Vietnam War, a resilience and will that finally drove both the French and the Americans out, even though the Western armies had access to far superior technological power. Cultures must relate realistically to their environments or they will not survive; technological power does not necessarily align with social strength. Along with technological change, both the corporation's internal and external environments change. For continued corporate viability, an alignment between the meaning system within the organization and the new reality must follow. In the development of this alignment, considerable tensions are likely to be confronted. Culture accumulates. It does not simply shift because the corporate executive's orga-

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nization wall chart has been redrafted. In other words, the tacit rules, norms and meanings of the organization emerge over time in the interactions and expectations of organization participants according to what works for the people in fulfdling their social needs. This is their reality principle, and cannot be shifted simply because management decrees it. Consequently, a considerable tension is likely to arise within a corporation that is moving into a changed technological and market environment. This tension is between retaining the strength of a culture that was associated with the success of the organization (for its members) in the past, and the changes that must be injected into the encrusted backlog of traditions and expectations that have accumulated within the organization so that it can remain competitive, and can continue to meet its members' needs in a changed environment. This is a tension that has been experienced by banking institutions in Australia as they confronted an internationalized market-oriented financial environment; the tension has been experienced within insurance companies that are diversifying from a traditional insurance base to a competitive financial brokerage business; the tension is being played out within a company like Broken Hill Propriety (BHP), whose traditions were built on an engineering mindset, but are now confronting international marketing competitiveness and financial takeover bids. At the center of each of these transitions, and, therefore, at the center of the tension between old and new cultures is the encroachment of new technologies, particularly those concerned with information processing. To the extent that the Technological Imperative is reflected in the transition, the patterns of management control are likely to be reinforced at the expense of the worker participation that is essential in building a new culture. The transition can, therefore, easily become one that, by its very success in introducing upgraded "information" systems, undermines the "communications" systems that will ultimately ensure the organization's continued strength. Organization culture has to do with survival. But, if the interests of management survival are alienated from the interests of labor survival, there will be not one but two organizational cultures. Management's culture of survival may be concerned with developing systems of technical control, injecting organizational change toward greater profitability, and rationalizing the work-flow toward higher efficiency. But labor's culture of survival may be in direct opposition, more concerned with retaining human autonomy and control, resisting transformations of the corporate system that imply threat, resisting the intrusion of standardization into their work, and the removal of skill from the work activities that have themselves acquired a stable meaning within the workers' present culture. The culture of an organization that is ruled by the Technological Imperative is, therefore, likely to be schizoid, suspicious, resistant and weak. The conflict could well destroy the chances for survival of both sides.

The Stock of Knowledge The meanings that emerge within a culture and which provide its participants with a sense of how to behave and what they ought to do do not descend out of thin air around the culture cloud, but from the "stock of knowledge" that the culture participants treat as their own. This is knowledge that is gauged by the participants

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as true, according to their collective experience about what their environment is, independent of what any rational outside observer might conclude. The stock of knowledge comprises both formal and informal elements of what collective experience has shown must be known to relate "realistically" with the participants' particular environment, and what must be known to relate to each other in collective action. Under the Technological Imperative, organization knowledge is controlled by an elite few, and is embodied in technically determined work routines, relationships, and machines that intentionally disenfranchise labor from either constitution of or control over this knowledge. The process of de-skilling thus tears a gaping hole in the organization's culture. For, as any educator would know, knowledge is not learned through spectatorship, but through practical engagement in its creation or use. What the knowledge-in-the-hands-of controllers means to the rest of the organization is external control- of their work lives, their opportunities and, ultimately, their employment survival. Evidence is now emerging, after the first flush of the Technological Imperative's apparent success, that the survival potential for organizations that distribute their stock of knowledge and its creation is far greater than for organizations that/sold organizational knowledge within the iron grasp of management prerogative. A prime example is what has happened in the frequently lauded "sunrise industries" of Silicon Valley, California. The corporations of Silicon Valley concentrated on attracting and retaining highly qualified, innovative technologists, a strategy that earned them world leadership in microelectronics design. In keeping with the Technological Imperative, however, they did not pay equal attention to the development and retention of process workers. Instead, they embarked on a concentrated search for docile, low-skilled, lowwage-earning l a b o r - both in their North American and in their offshore factories. Process workers were mainly Hispanic and Latin American women who were prepared to work for very low wages. As a result, not only was the lowest possible level of skill built into processing, but also the limited skills that were there were quickly lost, for the corporations were characterized by an average labor turnover of 200% per annum. Consequently, as the industry moved increasingly into production rather than design of microelectronics (a transition that depended on process labor skills), Silicon Valley corporations have fallen behind Japanese manufacturers in the development and operation of automated process technology. 49 Bill Ford of the University of New South Wales has completed a considerable body of research that shows why Japan took over this lead. What he found was that, most fundamentally, Japan's success is due to its resistance to the de-skilling consequences of the Technological Imperative. Japanese management traditionally regards its workers as skilled :and underskilled, a philosophy that implies skill development, rather than skill removal. Process workers are encouraged to develop a broad range of skills. For example, one large Japanese insurance organization, prior to introducing office automation, established a rule that no one operate a keyboard for more than three hours a day, a dictum that was intended to prevent the narrowing of skills that could accompany the introduction of the new technology. 50

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Job rotation is not designed merely to relieve tedium, but to develop a multiskilled work force. People at all levels of production are encouraged to participate in improving production and products, a strategy that has resulted in continuous, incremental and participative change. 51 As a consequence of this "skilling" philosophy, 60% of innovation in Japan emerged from the place of production, 52 while manufacturing plants in Japan were producing at 95 % of capacity, compared with 80 % capacity use within identical plants in the United States and Australia. Skilled process workers, concerned about proficiently cleaning and maintaining their machines, accounted for the difference. 5~ Thus, in Japan, the stock of organization knowledge is consciously distributed throughout the organization, rather than being centralized. Greater rather than lesser technological mastery has been a consequence and, along with it, greater rather than lesser competitiveness ensured organization survival, profitability and resilience. The lesson concerning corporate culture takes one further, however, than just observation of the successfulness associated with a deeper technical skill structure in industry. "Skill" implies "control." As the UK Council for Science and Society has pointed out, control is essential for the existence of skill; there is no skill where everything is predictable: "in a large measure, therefore, skill is a response to the unexpected and the unpredictable. ''54 The consequence of this concept of skill is that management cannot merely seek to upgrade worker skills without relinquishing some of their management control. Such a position runs fundamentally counter to the Technological Imperative, for it implies a more unpredictable, spontaneous organization where not only the head, but the whole body of the organization is responding to its internal and external environment. The key for an integrated and directed organizational culture is, therefore, that management and worker objectives must be in alignment, and expressed in the whole culture. The process of skilling, therefore, must involve genuine rather than token worker participation in defining and maintaining organizational objectives. For it is this shared engagement in producing a collective organizational culture that will ensure that body and head are communicating in the same language and toward the same purpose. Communication Structures

This observation leads directly on to the third central perspective concerning corporate culture, that is, that culture is "created and recreated by peoples' ongoing interactions." When the interaction system of an organization is embedded in a formal system of control and regulation-based interchanges, the resulting organization is likely to be "culture thin," as Alan Williams and William Ouchi describe it. 55 In other words, the opportunity for shared engagement in producing the organization's culture is limited by the straitjacket of formal boundaries drawn around what is expected of these interactions. On the one side, such a straitjacket of restriction can be imposed by bureaucratic norms and rules, the result of which is to paralyze the organization's responsiveness to change by the tranquilizer of safe tradition and disinterest. On the other side, restriction can easily result from technical sys-

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terns of information processing and transmission that embody management control

over organization interaction. Here, the result can emily be a labor force ground into minimal obeisance to command, but unable or unwilling to contribute beyond the command's restrictions; or the result can be a culture of meaning for organization participants that is constructed in the informal exchanges that lie outside the system's command. That is to say, it is a culture that is not engaged so much in aligning with corporate objectives as it is in actualizing participant needs for sociality, autonomy and affiliation. The real social life within such an organization is likely to consist of talking about sport, social accomplishments, or home life in the moments when the system allows some collective freedom, or of developing a mythology about a management that feels remote and controlling. The culture is not built on communication centered on productive purpose or objectives of the organization. Such a culture is, at least, a culture of alienation and, at most, a culture of opposition to the culture of management. In each of these cases, the organization that holds allegiance to the Technological Imperative of system control is in severe danger of undermining the foundations of its human strength to be, in the longer term, profitable and responsive to change. Thus, organization objectives can either align with or contradict the culture of organization participants. If the system of social relations that is implemented by management denies initiative and encourages compliance, then no matter how strongly managerial objectives encourage individual initiative, these objectives will remain as empty words for participants who are likely to view them as mere legitimation of the alienation they experience. Corporate plans and objectives can communicate and clarify the organization's view of itself. They do provide the "master symbol"-embodied in specific goals, and guidelines to achieve them, or in philosophic corporate slogans, like "Never kill an idea," "Think," or "I make the difference"- that holds together the whole structure of meaning and action within the organization. But corporate plans, strategies and slogans can only achieve this aim if they align with the actual communication system, if they involve organization members in communication that constitutes these objectives, and if the entire pattern of rewards, expectations and rules that participants must live by directly supports the corporate objectives espoused. A culture is holistic. If there is inconsistency between management's stated philosophy and the technological- or system-determined structures of communication and participation, then inconsistency, will lead to confusion in the minds of those who are seeking to construct a meaningful world for themselves. This, in turn, is likely to lead to reluctance to change and, eventually, intransigence. As the Business VFeek article referred to earlier concludes, "employees can't be fooled. "% Conclusions: The H u m a n Imperative

Organizations, like all products of human enterprise, are more subtle, more complex, and more ambiguous and uncertain than the machine-like systems many often

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assume to be the ideal. The skeletal structure of control and formal responsibilities may present an excellent organization wall chart, and technological change and sophistication may provide a heart for powering organization design. But it is the people who provide the flesh and blood-with all their un-machinelike goals, fears, idiosyncracies and personal constructions of meaning. Thus, paradoxically, to the apparent controllability and smoothness of rational efficiency and control, it is this human enterprise component, uncertain and self-willed as it may be, that provides the key to continuing organizational success, more than rational effÉciencyand control per se. That this is so is demonstrated very clearly in the rising success of the Japanese high-technology industry. Consequently, although there appears, in the Australian experience, to be an immutability of the command of the Technological Imperative over organizational design, this is a seriously wrong-minded view. Not only does this view conflict with the basis for success in Japan, but it also conflicts with what any knowledge of sociological or anthropological theory would reveal about how human organizations operate. Nor is Japan a unique miracle. Similar productivity results have emerged from an attention to the human culture and stock of knowledge in Norway and throughout several other European countries. In the Norwegian arms factory at Konsberg, numerical and computer-controlled machine operators are trained in programming; they are responsible for all the editing, they change the sequence and inclusion of operations, and they sometimes alter the entire program structure to suit themselves. They participate in the organization's control and knowledge creation system. As in Japan, however, the giving away of technical control by management in favor of participation in the technical culture of the organization has yielded higher productivity through less downtime and higher quality work-through forging an alignment between worker and management goals, and through fostering the ability and incentive to achieve them. 57 Similarly, the introduction of computers into banking throughout several European countries allowed scope for developing systems that enhanced employee satisfaction and autonomy, and did not require the deterministic command of a technological design imperative. 58 In other words, it is not a unique property of Japanese culture that fosters integration between management and worker objectives, but an attention to the human culture of the organization itself. The Technological Imperative for rational efficiency and profitability-with consequent control, deskilling, and worker adjustment-is not an imperative at all. Instead, it is merely an assumption that must be questioned on the basis of both practical examples of alternate paths to success, as well as theoretical explanation. The message that emerges is clear. The strength of an organization, its capacity to generate and incorporate change, its capacity to survive and flourish in a turbulent market environment, all depend on fostering the strength of an integrative organization culture. The incorporation and generation of technological change creates a particularly significant stress on this culture so that, unless this human development parameter is incorporated, along with assumed technical efficiency, the organization itself may well find itself traversing very troubled waters.

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There are a number of guidelines that follow: • Organization culture is holistic. Therefore, the whole set of patterns embodied in corporate strategies, objectives, rewards, expectations, and communication systems must align with consistency, such as is represented in a control-based pattern of work organization vs. an exhortation to individual responsibility, "the workers will not be fooled." The introduction of new technological systems must, therefore, be the introduction of sociotechnical systems. More attention must be paid to the process of social transition than to the technical objectives as such. • If "skill" remains the province of an elite group who control and conceive, then the organization as a whole will remain inadequately skilled as an organization, and the culture runs a very real danger of being split and combative. People can participate in a culture only when they share in its stock of knowledge. Thus, technological change must be seen as an essentially skill-upgrading exercise across the whole organization, rather than a profitability-enhancing, de-skilling operation that treats labor as an expendable mute resource. Bedding-in a new technological system does not consist only of assuring that the mechanical nuts and bolts or electronic wiring systems are right; rather, it is a full alignment of the system with the organization, its stock of knowledge, and the people's culture as a whole. • A managerial philosophy that encourages worker participation is a necessary consequence. The organization culture is strong when its members engage in it, rather than remain spectators to management exhortations and designs. The development within the organization of communication systems that align with management objectives is essentially a product of genuine participation of labor in the formulation and fulfillment of these designs. The development of generalized organization skill among the workers implies, by definition, an abrogation of control to worker initiative, and thus their engagement, on their own terms, in the organizational enterprise, with consequent commitment to its success. Following the Technological Imperative that Australia's technological dependency has fostered is a sure recipe for both enterprise and national economic demise. Instead, recipes for success involve paying close attention to human development of the organizational culture that surrounds introduced technological systems, questioning the design parameters of new technical systems in terms of their human implications, and choosing technologies that foster organization strength. The organizational design bridge implied by a Technological Imperative may appear to be made of steel. But its foundations are set in the quicksand of human culture. Without strengthening these foundations, the bridge is likely to be seriously eroded along with the first rush of the new economic spring tide.

References 1. OECD Examiners' Report, Science and Technology Policy in Austraha, mimeo (1985). 2. See, particularly, Research in Secondary lndustrzes (Manufacturing Industry Advisory Council, 1964); The Report of the Vernon Committee of Economtc lnquiry (1965); The Jackson Report, Policiesfor Development

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of Manufacturing Industry, Australian Government Printing Service (1975); White Paper on Manufacturing Industry, AGPS (1977); the Ctawford Report, Study Group on Structural Adjustment (1979); and OECD Examiners' Report, op. cit. 3. Overseas Trade, Australia, 1982-83 (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics [Catalog no. 5410.0], 1984). 4. G.W. Ford, "Technology, Women and Employment: The Need for New Concepts and Criteria for Policy Formulation" in R.J. Chapman, ed., The Future: Fantasy, Fatalism or Fact? (Hobart, Tasmania: University of Tasmania, Department of Political Science Public Policy Monograph (1983), p. 173. 5. Research and Experimental Development, Business Enterprises, Australia, 1981-82 (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics [Catalog no. 8104.0], 1983), Table 18, p. 23. 6. OECD Group of Experts on Science and Technology Indicators, Indicators of the Technological Position and Performance in OECD Countries During the 1970s, Science and Technology Indicators Working Paper no. 2 (Paris: OECD [DSTI/SPR/84], 1984), Table 8, p. 29. 7. Researchand Experimental Development, All-Sector Summary (Inter-Year Survey), Australia, 1981-1982 (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics [Catalog no. 8122-0], 1985-86 ). 8. See, for example, G.W. Ford, "Cultural Differences in Skill Formation and the Establishment of an Australian Human Resource Office," paper presented to the Manpower Planning and Industrial Development Section, ANZAAS, Sydney, 1983, p. 4; and G.W. Ford, "Learning from Japan: The Concept of Skill Formation, Australian Bulletin of Labour 12:2 (March 1986), p. 126. 9. The historical basis for technological dependency in Australia are, however, explored in Stephen Hill, "Technological Imperialism and De-Skilling: Historic and Theoretical Roots of Australian Employment and Technology in the 1980s" in Jake Najman and John Western, eds., A Sociology of Australian Society (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1988). 10. See J.R. Moore, "Survey of the Engineering Profession-Tabulated Results and Statistics," Journal, Institution of Engineers, Australia 11:7 (July 1939), pp. 259-262, and J.R. Moore, "Survey of the Engineering Profession--Tabulated Results and Statistics lI." Journal, Institution of Engineers, Australia, 11:9 (September 1939), pp. 331-334. 11. Foreign Ownership and Control of the Manufacturing Industry, Australia, 1982-83 (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics [Catalog no. 5322-0, Table 5], 1985). 12. A more culturally centered argument for these "Commandments" is presented in Stephen Hill, Cultural Fallout from the Information Explosion, Public Lecture, University of Wollongong, January 1985 (Centre for Technology and Social Change Report, University of Wollongong). 13. The two prime original sources on scientific management are F.W. Taylor, Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1911); and F.B. Gilbreth, Primer for Scientific Management, 2nd edition (Easton, PA: Hive Publishing Company, 1973 [originally published 1914]). The classic analysis of the subsequent effects of scientific management or "Taylorism"on modem industry is Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopo~ Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). 14. Mike Cooley explicitly uses this phrase in relation to the impact of computerization. See Mike Cooley, "Computerization: Taylor's Last Disguise," Economic and Industrial Democracy 1 (1980), pp. 523. 15. People and Technology in the 1980s (Melbourne: Productivity Promotion Council, 1980), pp. 51-54. 16. See Lynne Tacy and Richard Gough, "The Impact of Technological Change on Organizations and Jobs" in Russell D. Lansbuty and Edward D. David, Technology, FYorkandlndustrialRelations (Melbourne: Productivity Promotion Council, 1980), pp. 136-137. 17. See the summary of the report by Mark Wooden and Roy Kriegeler in Australian Industrial Relations Law and Systems, report of the Committee of Review, Vol. III, Appendices of the Report (Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service, 1985), p. 36. 18. Jim Hagan and Ray Markey, "TechnologicalChange and the Unions," in Stephen Hill and Ron Johnston, eds., Future Tense?- Technology in Australia (St. Lucia, Queensland: Universityof Queensland Press, 1985), p. 157. 19. People and Technology in the 1980s, op. cit., pp. 10-11. 20. Seasonally Adjusted Indicators (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics [Catalog no. 1303.0], 1970-79). 21. Department of Employment and Youth Affairs, Employment Prospects by Industry Occupation (Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service, 1979). 22. Wooden and Kriegler, op. tit. 23. Committee of Review on Australian Industrial Relations Law and Systems, op. cit. , p. 38 and p. 40. 24. Reported in People and Technology in the 1980s, op. cit., p. 10. 25. Department of Employment and Industrial Relations, Submission to the Committee of Review into Australian Industrial Relations Law and Systems (Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service, 1984). 26. National Agreement Between Australian Post and Australian Postaland Telecommunications Union (September 1977); Report of the Inquiry into IndustEal Relations in the Public Transport Commission of New South l~ales (July 1980), pp. 105-106, and Annexure 51, "Telecom Consultative Council Document on New Technology," pp. 217-224.

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27. Committee of Enquiry into Technological Change in Australia, Technological Change in Australia (The "Myers Report"), 4 vols. (Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service, 1980), Vol. 1, p. 72. For a detailed analysis of the Report and its findings, see Stephen Hill and Ron Johnston, "The Future's Not What It Used to Be," in Stephen Hill and Ron Johnston, eds., Future Tense?- Technology in Australia, op. cir., pp. 1-24. 28. Jim Hagan and Ray Markey, 0)9. cir. 29. For a recent article on the relevance of "socio-technic" concepts today, see Fred Emery, "New Perspectives on the World of Work-Sociotechnical Foundations for a New Social Order," Human Relations 35:12 (1982), pp. 1095-1122. 30. The prime original works from which the Human Relations Movement was generated are Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933); and J.F. Roethlisberger and W.J. Dickson, Management andthe Worker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933). 31. For a recent review of the directions in which the Human Resource Management movement is heading, see Richard E. Walton and Paul R. Lawrence, eds., H R M - Trends and Challenges (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1985). 32. In discussing strategies of planned change, Richard Walton, for example, notes that planned change is basically a process of cultural change. Without locating their significance in terms of transformation of the cultural process, Walton identifies the topics that managers need to pay attention to as "meaningful work," "voice," "individuation," "mutuality," "reliance on teams," "innovations in compensation," and "employment assurances." (Richard E. Walton, "Planned Changes to Improve Organizational Effectiveness," Technology in Society, Vol. II (1980), pp. 391-412.) 33. D. Quinn Mills and Mary Lou Balbaky, "Planning for Morale and Culture," in Richard E. Walton and Paul Lawrence, eds., op. ctt., pp. 255-256. 34. Administrative Science Quarterly 28 (1983), pp. 330-495. ~" 35. "Corporate Culture-The Hard-to-Change Values that Spell Success or Failure," Business Week, October 27, 1980, pp. 148-160. 36. See Louis R. Pondy and lan I. Mitroff, "Beyond Open System Models of Organization," in Larry L. Cummings and Barry M. Staw, eds., Research in OrganizationalBehavtbr I (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1979), pp. 3-39; and for an analysis of the contribution made by a shift from systems theory to cultural analysis, see Michael E. Paconowsky and Nick O'Donnell-Tmjillo, "Organizational Communication as Cultural Performance," Communication Monographs 50 (June 1983), pp. 126-147. 37. See, for example, IAnda Smircich, "Concepts of Culture and Organizational Analysis," Administrative Science Quarterly 28 (1983), pp. 339-358. 38. D. Quinn Mills and Mary Lou Balbaky, op. ctL, p. 270. 39. This was demonstrated both in the focus and content of conference dialogue at the 1986 Conference for Manufacturing Industry (Australia), "Technology for the Future," August 1986. The Conference, sponsored by the New South Wales Department of Industrial Development and Decentralisation and held at the University of Wollongong, included papers on technology access and strategy, a well as on human resource management (including a paper on organizational culture by this author). 40. See, particularly, Edgar H. Schein, "Coming to a New Awareness of Organizational Culture," Sloan Management Review 25:2 (Winter 1984), pp. 3-16; Michael E. Paconowsky and Nick O'Donnell-Trujillo, op. cir. ; and the overview paper, Mariann Jelinek, Linda Smircich and Paul Hirsch, "Introduction: A Code of Many Colors," Administrative Science Quarterly 28 (1983), pp. 331-338. 41. Ralph Linton, The Study of Man (New York: Appleton, 1936). 42. Clyde Kluckhohn, "The Concept of Culture" in D. Lerner and H.D. Lasswell, The Policy Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951). 43. A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definttions (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1963). 44. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Constructton of Reality (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1967). 45. Business Week, op. cir., pp. 148-149. 46. Ibid., p. 148. 47. Ibid. 48. Gurney Breckenfeld, "The Odyssey of Levi Strauss," Fortune, March 22, 1982, pp. 110-124. 49. G.W. Ford, "Human Resource Development and the Balance of Skills," in Russell D. Lansbury and Edward M. Davis, Technology, Work and Industrial Relations (Melbourne: Longmans Cheshire, 1984), p. 219. 50. G.W. Ford, "Learning from Japan," op. cir., p. 125. 51. G.W. Ford, "Cultural Differences in Skill Formation," op. cir., pp. 4-6. 52. G.W. Ford, "Australia at Risk: An Underskilled and Vulnerable Society" inJ. Eastwood, J. Reeves andJ. Ryan, Labour Essays, 1984 (Melbourne: Drummond, 1984).

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53. G.W. Ford, "Learning from Japan," op. cir., p. 125. 54. British Council for Science and Society, New Technology: Society, Employment and Skill, report of a working party (London: The Council for Science and Society, 1980), p. 23. 55. Alan L. Wilkins and William G. Ouchi, "Efficient Cultures: Exploring the Relationship Between Culture and Organizational Performance," Administrative Science Quarterly 28 (1983), pp. 468-481. 56. Business l~eek, op. cir., p. 151. 57. David F. Noble, "Social Change in Machine Design" in A. Zimbalist, ed., Case Studies in the Labour Process (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), p. 45. 58. Niels Bjorn-Anderson, Enid Mumford eta/., eds., The Impact of Systems Change in Organizations (The Netherlands: Sithoff and Noardhoff, 1979), p. 328.