Flexible Firm The Design of Culture at Bang & Olufsen [Hardcover]

Bang & Olufsen, the famous Danish producer of high-end home electronics, is well known as an early exponent of value-based management: the idea that there should be consistency in what the organisation does, a certain continuity between what the company develops and sells, and the beliefs and practices of the employees. This study investigates how company values are communicated and the collective identity is articulated through the use of such concepts as culture, fundamental values, and corporate religion, as well as how employees negotiate these ideas in their daily working lives. As this book reveals, the identification of values, meant to create cohesion and solidarity among employees, came to symbolise and engender a split between the staff and the other parts of the company. By examining the rise and fall of the value-based management approach, this volume offers the indispensible insight of anthropological enquiry to expose how social realities challenge conventional management strategies and therefore must be considered in the development of new management techniques.

Shortlisted for the 2012Society for the Anthropology of WorkBook Prize

[This book] certainly deserves to be added to the pile of worthy organizational ethnographies that should be around for longer than the latest issue of a journal. Ethnography doesnt have findings really, apart from endlessly gnawing away at the divide between us and them, between the familiar and the strange.? ??Administrative Science Quarterly

This fascinating book&provides a rich and reflexive account of culture in the making, how the company articulates its collective identity through the use of concepts such asculture, fundamental values, and corporate religion&While this is a fine ethnography of a particls¬