Gideon Kunda

Gideon Kunda is an internationally recognized expert in the area of organizational

culture. He received his PhD in management and organization studies from the Sloan
School of Management at MIT in 1987, and he currently teaches in the department of
Labor Studies at Tel Aviv University. Kunda has lectured widely on culture, culture
management, and culture change in the United States, Europe, and Israel. Kunda is one
of the world's leading authorities on organizational ethnography, and is presently
interested in globalization processes in organizations and in new work forms in the
knowledge economy.
He has served as the director of the Institute for Social Research at Tel Aviv University
(1992-1995), chair of the Department of Labor Studies (1995-1997, 2000-2002), and
has been a visiting professor at Stanford University in California.
Kunda is an internationally recognized expert in the area of organizational culture. His
book Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation (1992;
2006) was chosen as Book of the Year by the American Sociological Associations Culture
Section and has been translated into Italian, Japanese and Hebrew, and reprinted in
India. His recently published book (with Stephen Barley), Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm
Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy examines the social organization of
temporary work among engineers in Silicon Valley.

Engineering Culture is an award-winning ethnography of the engineering division

of a large American high-tech corporation. Now, this influential bookwhich has
been translated into Japanese, Italian, and Hebrewhas 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.