Gideon Kunda´s book, The Engineering Culture (2006) is an anthropological field study where he is studying the culture in the high-tech company “Tech”. Tech is a well established company in the forefront of high technology in the early 1990s and is committed to recruiting students with top grades from high-ranked universities in USA. The book aims to describe the normative control from a different angle than the previous organization theory. The universal starting point of the normative control shows that control affect members from the organization purpose and ignores the subjectivity of sub cultural groups. Thus, the employees' inner drive is closely linked to the organization's overall objectives and is therefore in the organization's best without coercion.
In the book Kunda shows that there are contradictions to the theoretical description of normative control. He shows that there is not always connectedness between the organization and its members. Kunda mean that member’s role is distanced from the organization among members at the lower level of the hierarchical structure. The members on these levels are more inclined to criticize the culture and question norms and values, while members higher up in the hierarchy tend to be more internalized in the culture.
Kunda mean that the members are not driven by loyalty; membership and satisfaction of work, instead the members tend over dramatize their roles. The culture and interaction rather take form as a political power struggle between the members that tries to fit in to the structure and to climb higher in the hierarchy. The members strive to climb the structure in a way that seeks affiliation and acceptance within the company. Tech supports members as long as they doing right, but let members be personal liable when they fail, “Tech takes care of those who take care of themselves” (Kunda, 2006, p. 20). The ambition is thus working to reach the top and become a part of the organization with fear of exclusion and failure. The book illustrates distressed people with bad health, alcohol problems and suicidal tendencies. The normative control in Tech seems to bring some competition to the company but how far would it go?
I think Kunda illustrates an interesting standing point in his way of presenting the reality related to the previous assumptions about normative control. He shows a distance in affects between the physical world and what the theory has given us. He makes difference between culture that the management can affect and the culture that the members internalize. I think the differences are important to understand and don’t take the rituals and the pictures of culture for granted. The management in a company can do whatever they like to control their employees but cannot guarantee that the employees are associated with the culture fully. There will always be groups that wouldn’t internalize the culture. In this case only the top segment of the organization has internalized the culture, which is an interesting discovery, than it probably those who developed the normative control within the organization.
