Control and commitment: An ethnographic study on organizational culture in a high-tech corporation

This thesis is an ethnographic study of the organizational behavior and managerial culture in China's Silicon Valley, Zhongguancun Hi-Tech Park, located in northwestern Beijing. It focuses on one corporation to explore how a scientific, effective and standardized managerial system is being created, interpreted and practiced. The study is based upon nearly one year of fieldwork in two corporations that manufacture mobile communication equipment.;This study explores the creation of the control system in a hi-tech corporation that seeks to be modern and efficient, to see how managers create a new managerial system by combining Western theories with the Chinese context. All social action is constituted by a multiplicity of discourses and meanings. Understanding this action requires knowledge of the ways in which people in specific circumstances connect these discourses and negotiate their complex meanings. Here the concept of organizational culture is seen as a process rather than a stable structure or system. This case study views corporate management as a complex and uneven historical process that entails heterogeneous cultural practices shaped by diverse meanings, sentiments, and representations. In the study I find the managerial practice is presented and constructed through the manipulation, interpretation, and discourse of socio-cultural meanings. Thus it concludes that the managerial practice in the hi-tech company actually involves the integration of a constructed cultural tradition with an idealized managerial modernity.;This study explores the socio-cultural meanings behind the managerial behavior of the hi-tech corporation and how it is presented and practiced in people's daily-life. As a kind of social phenomenon, managerial control and management's attempt to seek the commitment of employees towards the organizations is universal, but in daily practice, it takes on different forms and content due to the different cultural context. This study can help better understand how China's socio-cultural traditions influence the managerial practice and the cultural discourse in contemporary Chinese corporations.