Gideon Kunda's Books

Engineering Culture

Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation

By: Gideon Kunda

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Engineering Culture

Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation

By: Gideon Kunda

Engineering Culture is an award-winning ethnography of the engineering division of a large American high-tech corporation. Now, this influential book—which has been translated into Japanese, Italian, and Hebrew—has 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.

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Page Count

319

Publisher

Temple University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1592135463

ISBN 13

9781592135462

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies

Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy

By: Stephen R. Barley,Gideon Kunda

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Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies

Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy

By: Stephen R. Barley,Gideon Kunda

Over the last several decades, employers have increasingly replaced permanent employees with temporary workers and independent contractors to cut labor costs and enhance flexibility. Although commentators have focused largely on low-wage temporary work, the use of skilled contractors has also grown exponentially, especially in high-technology areas. Yet almost nothing is known about contracting or about the people who do it. This book seeks to break the silence. Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies tells the story of how the market for temporary professionals operates from the perspective of the contractors who do the work, the managers who employ them, the permanent employees who work beside them, and the staffing agencies who broker deals. Based on a year of field work in three staffing agencies, life histories with over seventy contractors and studies of workers in some of America's best known firms, the book dismantles the myths of temporary employment and offers instead a grounded description of how contracting works. Engagingly written, it goes beyond rhetoric to examine why contractors leave permanent employment, why managers hire them, and how staffing agencies operate. Barley and Kunda paint a richly layered portrait of contract professionals. Readers learn how contractors find jobs, how agents negotiate, and what it is like to shoulder the risks of managing one's own "employability." The authors illustrate how the reality of flexibility often differs substantially from its promise. Viewing the knowledge economy in terms of organizations and markets is not enough, Barley and Kunda conclude. Rather, occupational communities and networks of skilled experts are what grease the skids of the high-tech, "matrix economy" where firms become way stations in the flow of expertise.

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Page Count

353

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400841275

ISBN 13

9781400841271

Engineering Culture

Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation

By: Gideon Kunda

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Engineering Culture

Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation

By: Gideon Kunda

A revised edition of the classic text on the sociology of management and organization.

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Page Count

320

Publisher

Temple University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1592135471

ISBN 13

9781592135479

Kalanchoe (Crassulaceae) in Southern Africa

Classification, Biology, and Cultivation

By: Gideon F. Smith,Estrela Figueiredo,Abraham E. van Wyk

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Kalanchoe (Crassulaceae) in Southern Africa

Classification, Biology, and Cultivation

By: Gideon F. Smith,Estrela Figueiredo,Abraham E. van Wyk

Kalanchoe (Crassulaceae) in Southern Africa: Classification, Biology, and Cultivation provides a highly readable, illustrated account of the Kalanchoe species. The book includes an overview of the family Crassulaceae and genus Kalanchoe in global and subcontinental contexts that is followed by information on the taxonomic history of the genus. The characters and ecology of the species are also discussed, including their distribution ranges, where they occur, their habitat preferences, and where the species were formally recorded for the first time. For each indigenous and naturalized species, comprehensive taxonomic, descriptive and other information of interest is provided. This is the must-have resource for plant scientists, plant taxonomists, ethnobotanists, herbarium curators, ecologists, pharmacologists, invasions scientists, horticulturalists and landscape designers. - Includes currently accepted scientific names and synonyms, common names in English, morphology, cytology, chemistry, toxicology, biogeography, pollination biology, dispersal, cultivation, biocultural applications, and more - Contains a dichotomous identification key and descriptions, providing much needed tools for accurate species identification - Provides an extensive sets of illustrations for all species

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Page Count

340

Publisher

Academic Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0128140089

ISBN 13

9780128140086

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies

Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy

By: Stephen R. Barley,Gideon Kunda

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Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies

Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy

By: Stephen R. Barley,Gideon Kunda

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

353

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400841275

ISBN 13

9781400841271

Book's by Gideon Kunda

Engineering Culture

Engineering Culture

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies

Engineering Culture

Engineering Culture

Kalanchoe (Crassulaceae) in Southern Africa

Kalanchoe (Crassulaceae) in Southern Africa

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies

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