American Corporate Culture Research Articles

REPORT ON CASE-BASED STUDY OF CULTURE-FORMING ELEMENTS WITHIN SELECTED COMPANY CULTURE

This paper is concerned with communication and culture-forming elements within companies. Thepurpose of this paper is to report on the study that was conducted in order to decide whether culture-formingelements of company culture in the Slovak business context have a considerable impact on job satisfaction of theemployees. The most crucial concepts of this paper are the culture-forming elements and the term job satisfaction.The role of language and culture is closely explained in relation to these core concepts. This paper also drawsattention to intercultural communication, company culture, job satisfaction and it maps current situation within thefield emphasising the strong influence of the American tradition of the corporate culture. It examines mutualinfluence of the values on the national and organizational levels. Findings are set forth based on the case-based studyanalysis of company culture enhanced with a data-driven approach. This in-depth analysis of company cultureserves as a sample confirming the interrelationship between the culture-forming elements and job satisfaction and itexplores tendencies and strategies such as taking control of fluctuation and job performance. Besides, a uniquelinking between the language element and other elements such as vision has been recognized. These insightsexemplify strong dependence on the culture-forming elements and job satisfaction. The findings reported in thispaper refer to the differences in the perception of culture-forming elements and it also examines the origin of variouscompany-culture elements comparing trends to American corporate culture. This paper addresses the formation ofcompany culture in terms of knowledge from Communication studies, Cultural studies, Intercultural Communicationand Sociolinguistics and recommends transferring knowledge from these fields into practical applications. Insightshighlighted in this paper can help professionals from Human resources and Communication departments whenforming and re-building attractive company cultures strengthening employee job satisfaction whereby it highlights aneed for interdisciplinary cooperation in order to transfer the knowledge from these scientific fields into practicalapplication and let modern society benefit from the contemporary findings from Humanities. Based on this culturalresearch, this paper does not only offer recommendations for the selected company, but it brings contributions interms of company culture. The outcome of this thesis contributes highly to the best practices shared within businessstudies and provides the east innovation efforts in Slovakia with ways to empower their company cultures and so tomotivate their employees and it is believed that application is not bound only to Slovak business context.

Social Responsibility of Companies in Contemporary Business

The definition of social responsibility has often changed over the time. Differences in the economies of the United States of America (USA) and Europe have a strong impact on the social responsibility and stakeholders’ expectations from socially responsible business (SRB). The economic sector of the USA makes a significant contribution to addressing social and development initiatives in the local community, while in European countries there is an expectation that the state will meet such needs. The globalization processes transfer American corporate culture all around the world, as well as the engagement in solving social problems in the communities in which they operate. The economic model of social responsibility puts the profit motivation into the first place and emphasizes that it is the most effective tool for solving the world problems. The new circumstances in which businesses operate and the fact that information is available always and everywhere have a strong influence on the evolution of the social responsibility model from the economic to the socio-economic model. The role of business is not just to make profit, but also to cooperate between companies and society, and a balanced benefit for all stakeholders. This work consists of three parts. The introduction describes a traditional and new approach to social responsibility and benefits for companies that operate under the principles of social responsibility. The second chapter outlines European Union (EU) guidelines on SRB while concluding remarks synthesize the benefits of social responsibility in modern business as well as the critiques of the model.

Recurring Aesthetics, Emergent Traditions: Wendell Castle’s Continued Relevance to Corporate Culture

In the 1960s, woodworker Wendell Castle began making the biomorphic, stack-laminated furniture that would make him one of the best-known American furniture makers of the twentieth century. Today, Castle reengages with this aesthetic using contemporary digital fabrication tools. This paper engages with these two phases of Castle’s work through an examination of the cultural utility of his pieces to changing conceptions of American corporate culture. The conserved form in Castle’s furniture demonstrates an interest in individualism and organicism that started in the 1960s and continues today, while the change in production emphasizes an expanding focus on individualism from corporate management toward manufacturing.

Ironic Institutions: Counterculture Fictions and the American Express Company

This essay argues that literary redescriptions of international American Express offices by queer writers like Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and James Baldwin allowed the 1960s literary counterculture to establish a relationship to American corporate culture grounded in irony: the knowledge that the vocabulary used to describe the social world is not fixed, but contingent and fluid. By ironizing the American Express—that is, by describing it only to destabilize one’s own description—novels like Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Corso’s The American Express (1960) consciously resignified the institutional brand and circulated this literary resignification in tandem with the company’s promotional materials. I show how ironic style underwrote the counterculture’s surprising attraction to corporate life and the corporation’s equally surprising embrace of queer intimacies.

CULTURAL HYBRIDITY TOWARDS AN UPWARD MOBILITY: IMPLICATIONS OF THE AMERICAN MEDIA AND AMERICAN CORPORATE CULTURE IN INDONESIA

Hybridity has been defined in many terms. Subsequently, cultural hybridity is associated with different meanings, as seen from a spectrum of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. In the realm of Transnational American Studies in Indonesia, the hybridization of American Media and American Corporate Culture into those domains in Indonesia would be an observable transnational cultural phenomenon. American corporate culture has a hegemonic dominance in the world as it has in Indonesia. Similarly, in the current global media culture, American media’s influence has brought with it its culture to places throughout the world including Indonesia. In the current discourses hybridity has “long left behind the negative implications and connotations of inferiority” and it presents currently the intercultural exchange of transnational and global mobility. This article explores American and Indonesian cultural hybridity as a notion of upward mobility in the domain of media culture and corporate culture in Indonesia.

The Impact Of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act Of 2002 On The Teaching Of Ethics In Core MBA Curriculums In Ohio

A decade of corporate scandals has highlighted a lack of ethical decision making skills among business leaders. Reasons for this deficiency vary from an absence of ethical teaching in the home to a failure of American corporate culture. In 2002, the situation reached a critical point with scandals such as Enron and Tyco forcing a Congressional response in the form of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Questions concerning corporate leaders’ ability to act ethically again resurfaced in the wake of the recent financial collapse of giants such as AIG and Citigroup, creating a debate over what lessons were learned from the Sarbanes- Oxley experience. MBA curriculums are major stakeholders in this debate. MBA programs are venues where the majority of our business leaders learn the critical skills needed to succeed. The purpose of this study was to assess the treatment of ethics in core MBA curriculums in Ohio in response to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The study determined that MBA programs in Ohio failed to adjust their core curriculums in response to the new demand for increased ethics instruction. Further, it determined that private and public institutions reacted to the legislation in a similar manner. It also revealed that private and public institutions traditionally approach ethics instruction differently.

Freedom and Corporate Responsibility: The Niger Delta Case

This article briefly introduces a new argument concerning corporate social responsibility, based in an analysis of values expressed by the recent and contemporary liberal economists Milton Friedman and Michael Jensen. I will provide the gist of the argument by considering implications of Friedman’s very familiar view, that “…there is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use its resources and engage in activities to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” Harvard professor Michael Jensen has argued from slightly different premises to a similar conclusion, that “social welfare is maximized when all firms in an economy attempt to maximize their own total firm value.” Vestiges of such influential argument are also easily spotted in American corporate culture (See Palmer, 2007). I suggest that these authors’ positions allow for possibilities that undermine their broader fundamental values, however. I will concentate especially on Friedman’s classic treatment of liberal politics and capitalist economics, Capitalism and Freedom, in which he alludes to the importance of accepting and promoting individual freedom. Such values demand governmental and social stability, and so, in some cases, particularly where business activity may destabilize society, it would appear that freedom may be seriously threatened by corporate activity that follows Friedman’s narrow prescription. Nowhere is this more evident, at present, than in the Niger River Delta, where the promise and profits of oil have produced a society in great disarray. A case study of the delta situation indicates the problems of the narrow view of business goals and business responsibility, and this article will go on to consider possible solutions to those problems that delineate general sorts of responsibilities. The solutions require corporations to take a much broader view of their activity: I suggest that Friedman’s flaw reflects a general weakness of liberal individualism, nicely exposed in Amartya Sen’s arguments that lead to the conclusion that, “we have to see individual freedom as a social commitment.” That social commitment includes the goal of promoting individual freedom, but reaching for the goal may proceed along lines that are not so narrowly economic as Friedman would have, indicating new roles for business and government cooperation even in less extreme cases than that of the Niger Delta.

Taking care of business: self-help and sleep medicine in american corporate culture.

This article argues that corporate management in the United States has expanded its scope beyond office walls and encompasses many aspects of workers' daily lives. One new element of corporate training is the micromanagement of sleep; self-help books, newspaper reports, magazine articles, and consulting firms currently advise workers and supervisors on optimizing productivity by cultivating certain sleep habits. Although consultants and self-help books make specific recommendations about sleep, most medical research is inconclusive about sleep's benefits for human performance. Using the ideas of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze as a philosophical backdrop, this article examines the complex and often contradictory links between self-help, medicine, and corporate governance.

The education of Spanish entrepreneurs and managers: Madrid and Barcelona business schools, 1950–1975

This article approaches the complex relationship between higher education, business modernization, and economic development. It focuses on the first and most influential Spanish business schools, created in the late 1950s in Madrid (Escuela de Organizacion Industrial, EOI, and Instituto Catolico de Administration y Direccion de Empresas, ICADE) and Barcelona (Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa, IESE, and Escuela Superior tie Administracion y Direccion de Empresas, ESADE). Like many of their European counterparts, the Spanish schools emerged, under the influence of American corporate culture and became instrumental in the modernization of the domestic business culture, as they helped to selectively transfer new managerial theories and techniques to local firms. In Spain, notwithstanding the comparatively poor development of big business and the concurrence of other educational institutions such as the traditional trade and engineering schools and the new faculties of economics and management, the pioneering business schools were strikingly successful. Almost fifty years later, most of them, particularly IESE and ESADE, are held in high esteem by the Spanish and international business communities. Our preliminary study shows that this success is closely related to the schools' ability to adapt foreign ideas and practices to the local geographic, economic and social environment, as well as to establish or strengthen links with both their supporters and clients. To what extent did business schools contribute, to the improvement of the education of Spanish entrepreneurs and managers? Were they really useful in accelerating Spain's economic growth? Our research does not give a definite answer to these questions. However, by empirically recreating the formative process of these schools, identifying their clienteles, and examining some case studies, it does explain the dynamics of the schools and their interaction with the economic and social modernization

Survival at work: flexibility and adaptability in American corporate culture

Using such business self-help bestsellers as Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese?, Harvey Mackay’s Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive and Kevin Kelly’s New Rules for the New Economy, this article analyses a recent trend in the American business world’s use of Darwinian discourse: the increasing centrality of two specific traits – flexibility and adaptability – to corporate ‘survival’ in the 1980s, 1990s and today. The article argues that this focus on adaptability and flexibility has two especially troubling implications: individuals may be compelled to adapt ceaselessly, and the problematic idea that one can survive or succeed through sheer individual will may become naturalized.

Global Dance and Globalization: Emerging Perspectives

Listening to the work presented at the 2001 meeting of the Congress on Research in Dance, “Transmigratory Moves,” one could not help noticing that both established and emerging dance scholars were in the process of attempting to find a fuller and more accurate way of understanding the relationship between global political and economic forces and movement praxis. The following articles (all extended versions of work presented at the conference) exemplify different aspects of these new initiatives in our field. As Shanti Pillai points out in her piece, the term “globalization” has tended to provoke two kinds of responses: either panic over the global imposition of American corporate culture, or else celebration of cultural hybridity and the resilience of indigenous forms. Both of these responses can often present a reductive view of what are, in fact, highly complex phenomena. All three of the articles presented here attempt a more nuanced narrative of the effects of traveling choreographic and movement practices.

Business as Usual

Business as Usual

"Dressing Down" in the Business Communication Curriculum

Corporate America is changing the way it dresses. Students who are preparing for careers in business should be aware of this change, because dress-down days are becoming a part of American corporate culture. Casual dressing is popular, and people-friendly companies are capitalizing on its popularity. This article discusses this corporate trend and offers discussion on the need to include this concept in the business communications curriculum.

TriQuint on the move

The decision by TriQuint Semiconductor to build an entirely new headquarters and fabrication plant in Hillsboro, Oregon, is more than just an opportunity to consolidate and expand operations under one corporate roof. It als represents an opportunity to introduce the 700 new employees TriQuint is courting to their self-styled brand of American corporate culture.

Strictly business: Walter Carpenter at Du Pont and General Motors

From 1919 to 1962, Walter Carpenter exemplified the establishment professional--the manager who produced nothing himself but who oversaw everything in the company and much in the community. A successful chief executive officer at the Du Pont Corporation and an important director at General Motors, Carpenter personified the power and status many American executives dreamed of winning. Yet, despite his status as an archetype of the organization man described by sociologists and praised by business leaders, he frequently confronted the limits of his power and worked hard to maintain his personal autonomy. In this illuminating career study, Charles W. Cheape makes use of voluminous and previously unpublished business records at the Hagley Museum and Library to analyze Carpenter's rise, influence, and leadership techniques--and to shed new light on American corporate culture in the mid-twentieth century. While focusing on Carpenter's career, he offers insights into the processes of management, decision-making, and economic competition at the highest levels of American industry. 'Strictly Business' offers a penetrating and informative study of a uniquely American role and the type of character best suited to play it. This is an historiographically important study of the transition from owner management to professional management, a process that most companies will eventually have to go through. It is the author's special merit to have shown how Walter Carpenter managed to balance the interests of the Du Pont family with those of the corporation. The comparisons of the three Du Pont brothers, Alfred Sloan, and Walter Carpenter proved particularly illuminating.--John K. Smith, Jr., Lehigh University. Charles W. Cheape is professor of history at Loyola College in Baltimore.

Takeover rules in the European Community: An economic analysis of proposed takeover guidelines and already issued disclosure rules

As the European Community rapidly approaches 1992, and with it a further step in its process of economic and political integration, more and more areas of its life are being governed by European rules as opposed to prior national laws. One of these fields is the acquisition of economic resources by means of buying corporations via open market purchases of their shares or tender offers. Hence the European Commission has already regulated mandatory disclosures of open market purchases’ and recently proposed another regulation on tender offers.2 Because of the joint influence on the takeover process, both sets of rules have to be seen together and this paper aims to analyze their economic impact. This impact is bound to grow as European companies struggle to prepare for the competitive environment awaiting them in the integrated Common Market after 1992. Faced with the necessity of adapting themselves, companies are increasingly making use of tactics such as hostile takeovers which not long ago were spurned as excesses of the American corporate culture.3 These attitudes are changing and not only entrepreneurial individuals like Italian Carlo de Benedetti and French Rene Arnault but also large conservative companies are becoming hostile where they see the need. Even Germany, with its staid corporate atmosphere, is changing its way with Siemens, one of its most conservative corporations, making a hostile bid for the Plessey group in Great Britain.4 As hostile takeovers are relatively new to the continent, it is not surprising that only few-if any-national regulations exist. The only exception is Great Britain with the “City Code on Takeovers and Mergers,” which is not surprising as the British capital market has known takeovers for many years. Other countries, such as France and Belgium, have some regulation but no coherent regulatory framework as the one in England. Thus the proposed European regulation deserves