ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURESIn this final substantive section, I want to change
the emphasis from labourers per se to the
new and interesting work about organizational
cultures. Here one of the key foci of research is
about the ways in which corporations operating
in the new, globalizing economy endeavour to
construct a sense of corporate belonging across
increasingly diverse geographical spaces and
among increasingly differentiated labour forces
(Thrift, 2000b). While labour historians, radical
sociologists, feminist analysts and some geo-
graphers have had a long-standing interest in the
working class, more recently there has been a
new and growing emphasis in the social science
literature about work and organizations on
middle-class workers, on managers and, especially,
on the notion of corporate culture. As the anthro-
pologist George Marcus (1998) noted, there has
been a parallel ‘corporate interest in culture and
a cultural interest in the corporate’ (1998: 3),
mirroring in part the growing dominance of
multinational corporations (Dicken, 1998).
Analyses of the culture of corporations have, of
course, a long history in the social sciences,
albeit a shorter one in geography. However in the
tradition of work on the modern corporation that
reaches back over the twentieth century, the
dominant concerns have tended to be with the
rational bases of organizational behaviour, scien-
tific management and economic modelling. It
has only been in the last 20 years or so that new
questions about social interaction, power and
social control in the workplace have become
important. There is a new interest, for example,
in norms, values, collective ethos, organizational
culture, authority and power in interpersonal
relations, and issues about ethics and social
responsibility in corporations among both the
owners and managers of these corporations and
those for whom they are a research subject. The
idea of an economy and an economic organization
as a social institution, flexibly constructing itself
through symbols, conventions and rules, has come
to dominate recent work. And, as economic socio-
logists Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg have
noted, ‘the particular perspectives of social net-
works, gender and cultural context have also
become central’ (1994: 3). A rapidly expanding
literature, both academic texts and practical
manuals, currently addresses questions about
corporate culture, in association with new forms
of management practices and the growth in impor-
tance of human relations departments within
corporations. From new forms of organizationincluding networks to replace hierarchies, through
issues about the feminization of management and
new concerns with work/life balance, to new dress
codes and ‘dressing down’ days, the social and
cultural formation of corporations and firms is a
key area of investigation and innovation.
There seems to be a number of reasons for this
new emphasis. As I argued earlier, the concept of
culture itself has been subject to innovative rede-
finition leading to new emphasis on diversity and
change. But the shift also reflects the reorienta-
tions of corporations attempting to manage
change both in a period of greater risk and uncer-
tainty and across diverse geographical spaces.
By inculcating a strong sense of corporate
culture, organizations hope to increase control
over their diverse labour forces and to be able to
manage the uncertainties of social change within
their own organizational boundaries. The
increasing dominance of transnational corpora-
tions that operate across national boundaries has
paradoxically necessitated closer attention both
to the significance of cultural differences between
sites/nations and to the establishment of greater
uniformity in cultural practices within the organi-
zation.Interesting new areas for analysis that
straddle the older boundaries between economic
and cultural geography thus arise, about transna-
tional business cultures, global discourse and
cosmopolitan workforces (Hannerz, 1990) on the
one hand, and about managing diversity in local,
regional and national needs, cultural attitudes
and different business practices on the other. A
new emphasis, shifting from the culture within
an organization at ‘home’ to one that is devel-
oped across boundaries, is an essential element
of developing work on economic globalization.
Thus, as Hannerz noted, the rise of transnational
organizations has led to ‘cultural work’ – what he
terms the rise of ‘a culture shock prevention
industry’ (1990: 108) that may include, for exam-
ple, cross-cultural training programmes. Interest-
ingly Hannerz suggests that a ‘culture of critical
discourse’ may develop across a global corpora-
tion, that is ‘reflexive, problematising, con-
cerned with metacommunication’ (1990: 109). It
is also
generally expansionist in its management of meaning. It
pushes on and on in its analysis of the order of ideas,
striving towards explicitness where common sense, as a
contrasting mode of meaning management, might come
to rest comfortably with the tacit, the ambiguous and
the contradictory. In the end, it strives towards mastery.
(1990: 109)
It may be, however, that in the end such a meta-
narrative will fail to accommodate the diversityCULTURES OF LABOUR 1093029-ch04.qxd 03-10-02 10:30 AM Page 109