Culture and Conformity: An Essay on Individual Adaptation in Centralized Bureaucracy
通过对一家电话公司一年多的田野调查，发现组织中存在强烈的从众压力，员工有三种应对方式：有意识压抑个人利益、无意识扭曲和秘密拒绝，这些机制影响管理发展、沟通和组织适应能力。
The cultural aspects of organizations have been mostly overlooked in the study of management. This is particularly important because the Protestant ethic which organized the sociopsychological matrix for the industrial revolution no longer commands enough authority to continue organizing individual motivation and societal needs. Thus, local solutions have evolved to deal with cultural ambiguity and they have evolved with little thought as to their implications. In this essay, the cultural aspects of interpersonal relations in a telephone company are analyzed. This analysis was carried out during a year long full-time fieldwork period which employed participant observation, structured and semi-structured interviews, and document analysis for data collection purposes. Strong demands for conformity were found to dominate interpersonal relations. Three types of response to these demands were discovered: acceptance based on conscious suppression of personal interests, acceptance based on unconscious distortion, and secret rejection. These mechanisms for dealing with strong demands for conformity were found to affect managerial development, interpersonal communications, and organizational adaptability. Given these kinds of superior-subordinate relations, it was anticipated that the Bell System will have great difficulty adapting to a competitive marketplace.