Gideon Kunda- professor at Tel Aviv University
Gideon Kunda
- professor at Tel Aviv University
About
31
Publications
54,028
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
7,668
Citations
Introduction
Current institution
Publications
Publications (31)
Purpose
In this paper the author aims to examine his own life and work in order to understand how an ethnographic sensibility emerges and develops.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper examines the personal and institutional context in which his book Engineering Culture: Commitment and Control in a High Tech Corporation was researched and written...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand the persistent ambiguity of socialization practices in US and Swedish organizations, which promote a mature work identity while infantilizing their employees.
Design/methodology/approach
Application of the insights from modernist authors' analysis of modernity as experienced by a human subject wit...
This paper presents an ethnographic study of the Israeli-Palestinian subsidiary of a multinational hi-tech corporation. oritiquing the tendency of globalization theorists to conceptualize multinational corporations (MNCs) solely in terms of their impact on their external environment, this paper looks inward and examines the ideological and practica...
Supervised by John E. Van Maanen and Edgar H. Schein. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1987. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 267-272).
In a paper titled 'Design and Devotion' published in 1992 in Administrative Science Quarterly, Barley and Kunda examined the historical evolution of managerial ideology in the United States between the late nineteenth and late twentieth century. Managerial ideology, in their view, is 'a stream of discourse that promulgates, however unwittingly, a s...
Executive Overview Contract work and outsourcing represent widely acknowledged manifestations of the groundswell of economic change that is shaking the foundations of work and employment in the United States. While these emerging forms of employment have become harbingers of new ways of working, they remain poorly understood; efforts to explain the...
After World War II, bureaucratic employment relations, rooted in the ethos and institutions of the New Deal, dominated cultures of work for nearly three decades.1 The bureaucratic bargain was simple: As long as firms remained profitable and the economy strong, employers would provide employees with secure jobs in return for effort and loyalty. Sinc...
This paper uses data from career histories of technical contractors to explore how they experience, interpret, and allocate their time and whether they take advantage of the temporal flexibility purportedly offered by contract work in the market. Technical contractors offer a unique opportunity for examining assumptions about organizations, work, a...
Sociologists and other observers often contend that white-collar workers are unable to achieve work-life balance because they cannot effectively resist the normative pressures that organizations place on them as employees. Analysts imply that if people could but free themselves from organizational control, they would enjoy greater flexibility and b...
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...
This article seeks to further understanding of the significance and impact of national identity in the context of organizational globalization. Arguing against the tendency of organizational researchers to pose this identity as an objective, cognitive essence, the article claims that national identity constitutes a symbolic resource that is activel...
This study examines 52 highly skilled technical contractors' explanations, in 1998, of why they entered the contingent labor force and how their subsequent experiences altered their viewpoint. The authors report three general implications of their examination of the little-studied high-skill side of contingent labor. First, current depictions of co...
In this essay we argue that organization theory's effort to make sense of postbureaucratic organizing is hampered by a dearth of detailed studies of work. We review the history of organization theory to show that, in the past, studies of work provided an empirical foundation for theories of bureaucracy, and explain how such research became marginal...
In this article, the authors explore how structural changes in the labor market for professional and managerial employees might be changing the nature of emotional labor required in these occupations. They first draw on ethnographic data in a firm noted for stable long-term employment to illustrate how efforts to create a corporate culture focus on...
In this article, the authors explore how structural changes in the labor market for professional and managerial employees might be changing the nature of emotional labor required in these occupations. They first draw on ethnographic data in a firm noted for stable long-term employment to illustrate how efforts to create a corporate culture focus on...
Engineering Culture grew out of an attempt to take seriously the conceptual and methodological requirements of a cultural perspective on organizations. Briefly, the book is a critical ethnography of a large and successful high-tech corporation lauded in the popular managerial literature for its innovative postbureaucratic “corporate culture.” The c...
This paper challenges the prevalent notion that American managerial discourse has moved progressively from coercive to rational and, ultimately, to normative rhetorics of control. Historical data suggest that since the 1870s American managerial discourse has been elaborated in waves that have alternated between normative and rational rhetorics. We...
StephenR.BarleyandGideonKunda* ExecutiveOverview Contract work and outsourcing represent widely acknowledged manifestations of the groundswell of economic change that is shaking the foundations of work and employment in the United States. While these emerging forms of employment have become harbingers of new ways of working, they remain poorly unde...
