Corporate Culture Abstracts

SOCIOLOGY INDEX
Corporate Culture / Organizational Culture: Understanding And Assessment - Hagberg Consulting Group
Culture drives the organization and its actions. It is somewhat like "the operating system" of the organization. It guides how employees think, act and feel. It is dynamic and fluid, and it is never static. A culture may be effective at one time, under a given set of circumstances and ineffective at another time. Understanding and assessing your organization's culture can mean the difference between success and failure in today's fast changing business environment. This article will explore some of the problems associated with understanding the reality of an organization's culture. It will also focus on the role of the leader in creating or maintaining this culture. Finally, it will discuss the perils of confronting the leader with an assessment of the organization that flies in the face of his/her preconceptions. bnet.com/abstract.aspx?scid=1525&docid=61044

Corporate Culture and Safety - What is it about corporate culture that makes such a difference? In order to answer that question a working definition is needed. Several models of corporate culture have been put forth. According to Cherrington et al organizational culture is the “set of key values, beliefs, and understandings” shared by the group that communicate “correct ways to think and act and the way things ought to be done.” Abstract - construction.asu.edu/Essay/docs/3_03_002_Fisher.pdf
Corporate culture plays a vital role in predicting safety in the construction industry. Construction companies that have strong safety cultures have better safety records. Safety culture is strong when top management is committed to safety values, when those values have been internalized by employees at all levels of the company, and when the values that have been internalized lead to actions and behaviors that result in safety.
The Vital Role of Corporate Culture in Construction Safety
Two construction companies operating in the same community both build an average of one thousand homes per year. Both employ the same number of workers. One is consistently profitable year after year. The other is not. One has a good safety record and the other does not. What is the difference? The difference is culture. The successful company will have a strong corporate culture of safety that permeates the entire organization.

CHINESE CORPORATE CULTURE, MARKET ORIENTATION, INNOVATION AND FIRM PERFORMANCE
Rohit Deshpandé and John U. Farley 
To help us develop an understanding of successful Chinese companies as they emerge into a more market-oriented economic environment, a sample of senior managers in 100 Shanghai-based companies were asked to evaluate their companies in terms of innovation, market orientation and the nature of their organizational cultures and climates. In comparison to firms in some other Asian countries, Chinese firms are on average relatively Bureaucratic, but are also relatively Entrepreneurial. We also find that Joint Ventures are more Competitive and less Bureaucratic than State-Owned Enterprises. We find that the better performers follow a pattern which we have found elsewhere in the industrial and industrializing world: successful firms are innovative, market oriented, and have cultures and decision-making climates which are externally oriented. There are, however, distinctly identifiable patterns in both the values of the individual managers and in the nature of the Chinese organizations which distinguish them from samples of managers from other Asian nations. - www.hbs.edu

Kreps, D., "Corporate Culture and Economic Theory" in J. Alt and K. Shepsle (eds.), Perspectives on Positive Political Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 90--143, 1990.