A counterculture can seroe some useful functions for the dominant culture, such as articulating the foundations between

appropriate and inappropriate behavior and providing a safe haven for the development of innovative ideas.

Organizational Culture and Counterculture: An Uneasy Symbiosis

Joanne Martin Caren Siehl
our sentences capture the essence of much of the recent organizational culture research. First, cultures offer an interpretation of an institution's history that members can use to decipher how they will be expected to behave in the future. Second, cultures can generate commitment to corporate values or management philosophy so that employees feel they are working for something they believe in. Third, cultures serve as organizational control mechanisms, informally approving or prohibiting some patterns of behavior. Finally, there is the possibility, as yet unsupported by conclusive evidence, that some types of organizational cultures are associated with greater productivity and profitability. Most of this research shares a single set of simplifying assumptions. First, the perspective of the organization's top management is assumed because the functions studied serve to (1) transmit top management's interpretations of the meaning of events throughout the organization, (2) generate commitment to their practices and policies, and (3) help them control behavior in accordance with their objectives. Second, the functions of culture are portrayed as integrative, unifying the diverse elements of an or-

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Organizational Dynamics, Autumn 1982. 1983, Periodicals Division, American Management Associations. AU rights reserved. 0O90-26X6/83/0015-0052/SO2.O0/0

ganization. Third, organizational culture is treated as a monolithic phenomenon one culture to a setting. Finally, many of these studies implicitly assume or explicitly assert that culture can be managed by using direct, intentional actions not unlike those used in other management tasks. This particular set of simplifying assumptions may blind us to some important aspects of organizational culture. For example, studies of blue-collar workers' practices, such as "hassling" ratebusters, clearly indicate that cultural mechanisms can be used to undermine top-management objectives. Cultures can serve differentiating rather than integrating functions by, for example, expressing conflicts among parts of a society. Instead of being monolithic phenomena, organizational cultures are composed of various interlocking, nested, sometimes conflicting subcultures. Finally, it is likely that cultural development, like other aspects of organizational functioning, is not as responsive to direct managerial attempts at control as many would like to believe. It may be that cultures cannot be straightforwardly created or managed by individuals. Instead, cultures may simply exist and managers may capitalize on cultural effects they perceive as positive or minimize those perceived as negative. Perhaps the most that can be expected is that a manager can slightly modify the trajectory of a culture, rather than exert major control over the direction of its development. This article assumes that cultural mechanisms can underline as well as support the objectives of the firm's top management. We argue that in addition to serving integrative functions, cultures can express conflicts and address needs for differentiation among organizational elements. Instead of treating culture as a monolithic phenomenon, we explore a counterculture's uneasy symbiotic relationship with the rest of an organization. Finally, we address the relationship between

cultural development and managerial action by asking what a leader does, inadvertently or advertently, that seems to impact the development of a counterculture. To examine a subculture in some depth, a few conceptual distinctions are needed. Edgar Schein has distinguished three levels of culture: basic assumptions, values or ideology, and artifacts (such as special jargon, stories, rituals, dress, and decor). We would add a fourth category, management practices. These are familiar management tasks, such as training, performance appraisal, allocation of rewards, hiring, and so forth. (Practices may or may not include artifacts. For example, a training program for new employees may be an occasion for telling organizational stories and may conclude with a ceremony.) Artifacts and practices express values, which may also be expressed as a corporate ideology or management philosophy. Underlying those values are even deeper assumptions, which rest at a preconscious level of awareness. Schein argues persuasively that because assumptions are taken for granted, they are difficult to study except through the use of long-term observation and in-depth, clinical interviewing techniques. (See the article by Alan L. Wilkins on page 24 of this issue for a description of such a technique.) Because of the methodological difficulty of studying assumptions, we restrict our attention to artifacts, practices, and values, reserving some tentative speculations about assumptions for the concluding discussion. Next, a distinction needs to be drawn between an organization's dominant culture and the various subcultures that might coexist with it. A dominant culture expresses, through artifacts, core values that are shared by a majority of the organization's members. At least three types of subcultures are conceivable: enhancing, orthogonal, and countercultural. An enhancing subculture would exist in an organizational enclave in

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which adherence to the core values of the dominant culture would be more fervent than in the rest of the organization. In an orthogonal subculture, the members would simultaneously accept the core values of the dominant culture and a separate, unconflicting set of values particular to themselves. For example, an accounting division and research and development (R&D) department may both endorse the values of their firm's dominant culture, while retaining separate sets of values related to their occupational identities, such as "going by the numbers" for the accounting department and "valuing innovation" in the R&D department. The third type of subculture, a counterculture, is the focus of this article. We propose that some core values of a counterculture should present a direct challenge to the core values of a dominant culture. Thus a dominant culture and a counterculture should exist in an uneasy symbiosis, taking opposite positions on value issues that are critically important to each of them. This article explores the adequacy of this proposition by collecting artifacts from a dominant culture and a counterculture and determining what values those artifacts express. We expect that some artifacts from a counterculture will ridicule a subset of the dominant culture's values, while other countercultural artifacts will express support for an altemative set of values. To find a setting in which we can study this issue, we need to know what types of organizational conditions are likely to give rise to a counterculture. Ruth Leeds Love's discussion of the absorption of protest offers a solution. She posits that organizations that are strongly centralized, but permit a decentralized diffusion of power, are likely to spawn what she terms a "nonconforming enclave." An organizational member challenges some aspect of the dominant culture. If the challenger is a charismatic leader. Love proposes that the organization will absorb the

loanne Martin is associate professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Bttsiness, Stanford University. Her research currently involves two different topics: organizational culture and perceptions of injustice. Her recent culture publications include: The Uniqueness Paradox in Organizational Stories," coauthored with Martha Feldman, Mary }o Hatch, and Sim Sitkin (Administrative Science Quarterly, September 1983): "Truth or Corporate Propaganda: The Value of a Good War Story," co-authored with Melanie E. Powers, in Organizational Symbolism (JAI Press, in press); and "Stories and Scripts in Organizational Settings" in Cognitive Social Psychology (ElsevierNorth Holland, lnc, 1982). She has also conducted research and published many articles on injustice. Currently Dr. Martin is studying charismatic leaders and the birth of cultures in four new microcomputer companies. She is also just completing, with Cathy Anterasian and Caren Siehl, an analysis of the relationship between culture and profitability in the Fortune 500. Dr. Martin holds a B.A. in fine art from Smith College, where she studied ivoodcutting with Leonard Baskin, and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University. Her Ph.D. dissertation, which focused on labor's reactions to various patterns of labor-management pay inequality, won prizes from the American Psychological Association and Sigma Xi. Between college and graduate school, she worked as a project manager and, later, as director of government marketing for McBer and Company, formerly the Behavioral Science Center of Sterling Institute, in Boston, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.

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potential for protest by giving the charismatic person limited power, some formal structural autonomy, and a tadt mandate to

gather followers and create a nonconforming enclave. This strategy has advantages from the dominant coalition's point of view. If the enclave functions innovatively, within the institution's latitude of tolerance, the institution benefits. If not, the institution has isolated the deviance. The structural autonomy serves as a boundary, defining the limits of acceptable behavior and possibly making the imwanted enclave easier to destroy. To translate Love's proposition into the terminology introduced above, a counterculture should be most likely to arise in a strongly centralized institution that has permitted significant decentralization of authority to occur. The counterculture will be likely to emerge within a structural boundary and, interestingly, it may well have a charismatic leader.

THE G M CASE: ORGANIZATIONAL SETTING

General Motors (GM) is a well-documented case that fits the description outlined by Love. The firm is strongly centralized in that authority and responsibility for financial control and the long-range strategy of the firm rest in the hands of the corporate headquarters. Nevertheless the divisions, such as Pontiac and Chevrolet, have considerable autonomy on operating issues. The rationale for this structure was provided in former GM president and chairman of the board Alfred P. Sloan Jr.'s famous "Organizational Study" (released in 1920). The plan's description of an inevitable tension between centralization and decentralization accurately describes the firm today. One division of GM was headed for some years by John DeLorean. This formal position of leadership gave him visibility, resources, and power; these were apparently augmented by such charismatic attributes as personal magnetism and dramatic flair. (Although DeLorean encotintered business and

Caren Siehl is currently completing her doctoral degree in organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. While at Stanford, she was awarded an NIMH fellowship for 1981-1983 and was selected to attend the 1982 Doctoral Consortium in organizational behavior/organization theory. She earned her B.A. degree in French and linguistics at the University of Califomia at Los Angeles, from which she graduated summa cum laude and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Before graduate school, she was employed by IBM in both marketing and customer support functions. Her association with IBM led to an interest in questions about corporate culture, including how cultures develop and the effect of the firm's founder on the corporate culture. Siehl's interest in culture is evidenced in a study of the transmission of cultural values by first-line and upper-level managers. The results of this study are detailed in "The Role of Symbolic Management: How Can Managers Effectively Transmit Organizational Culture?" This paper, co-authored with Joanne Martin, was presented at the International Symposium on Managerial Behavior and Leadership Research, sponsored by N.A.T.O., Oxford, England, July 1982. A revised version will be published in Volume 7 of the Leadership series published by the Southern Illinois University Press, }. C. Hunt, D. Hosking, C. Schriesheim, and R. Steward (eds.). In addition, Ms. Siehl's dissertation research, entitled "Cultural Sleight-of-Hand: The Illusion of Consistency," focuses on types of inconsistency within a culturv, both functional and dysfunctional, that are masked by the illusion of a cohesive, widely shared set of values. Beginning in September, 1983, she will be joining the faculty of the School of Business Administration, University of Southern California.

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personal difficulties after his departure from GM, this article focuses exclusively on his years with GM.)

THE GM CASE: PROCEDURE

Wright focus primarily on the activities of relatively high-ranking executives. They do not attempt to explore how these leaders' activities were perceived by their subordinates. Thus the present article focuses on leader activities rather than subordinate reactions to such activities.

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In the first stage of this research, the available published literature on GM was sur/eyed and several present and former GM employees interviewed by means of an open-ended format. The objective of this stage of the research effort was to gain a relatively broad base of knowledge about the corporation, with particular focus on the dominant culture. In the second stage of the research effort, two views of the corporation were selected for an in-depth content analysis. The first is a "corporate history" of GM, Ed Cray's Chrome Colossus: General Motors and Its Times (McGraw-Hill, 1980). This book was selected for several reasons. It is recent. Unlike many others, it reports some information that is critical of the firm. It is comprehensive and provides a detailed picture, particularly of the firm's dominant culture. The second view selected was J. R Wright's description of DeLorean's activities. On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors (Wright Enterprises, 1979). This book was selected because it is the most thorough published account of DeLorean's activities at GM. Because culture is a socially constructed reality, it would be an exercise in futility to try to capture a single "objective" picture of a culture or subculture. Undoubtedly Cray and Wright have views of the issues and events discussed below that are somewhat different from others' views. It is impossible to avoid bias in the perception of a socially constructed reality; indeed, in some senses, that bias is the focus of this investigation. One important limitation of these data sources merits mention. Cray and

THE GM CASE: CORE VALUES

Three related core values were repeatedly stressed (although terminology varied) in the various portrayals of the dominant culture at GM: respecting authority, fitting in, and being loyal. The decription below begins with the dominant culture and describes the cultural artifacts that express these three core values. Next, the artifacts from DeLorean's division are examined to determine if they ridicule the dominant culture's values or express an alternative set of values, thus providing evidence of an uneasy symbiotic relationship between a dominant and a counterculture. In this latter part of the article, DeLorean's activities are studied to determine how they contribute, deliberately or inadvertently, to the development of a counterculture. Respecting Authority: Jargon and Rituals of Deference One core value of GM's dominant culture involved the importance of paying deference to the top corporate management. The special language or jargon used to refer to these executives' domains and activities reflected this core value. The top team's offices were located in an I-shaped end of the fourteenth floor of the huge GM headquarters building. Company jargon referred to this domain as "the fourteenth floor" and to these offices as "executive row," Apparently even GM's critics spoke these words with some deference. The high status of these top executives was also evident in the derogatory terms used to refer

to their subordinates. Each member of the top management team was assigned a junior executive, who acted as an assistant and secretary. These subordinates were called "dog robbers," a term that originally referred to the servants in large households who were assigned the undesirable task of cleaning up dog droppings. Another type of cultural artifact is a ritual that is, an activity composed of a formalized or patterned sequence of events that is repeated over and over again. GM had many rituals that supported the core value of deference owed authority. For exampie, subordinates were expected to meet their superiors from out of town at the airport, carry their bags, pay their hotel and meal bills, and chauffeur them around day and night. The higher the status of the superior, the more people would accompany him on the flight and the larger the retinue that would wait at the airport. A chief engineer would be met by at least one assistant engineer and perhaps a local plant official; a divisional general manager would travel with at least one executive from his office and would be met at the airport by the local plant manager, the heads of the regional and zone sales offices, and the local public relations director. If the chairman of the board decided to visit field offices, dozens of people would be involved in accompanying and meeting him. Adherence to the airport ritual was not merely a social nicety, as DeLorean learned to his dismay on an occasion when he failed to meet his boss, Peter Estes, at the airport. Estes stormed into DeLorean's shower, nearly tearing the shower door off its hinges, shouting with atypical rage, "Why the hell wasn't someone out to meet me at the airport this morning? You knew I was coming, but nobody was there. Goddamnit, I served my time picking up my bosses at the airport. Now you guys are going to do this for me" [from J. P. Wright's On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors (Wright Enterprises,

1979)1. The airport ritual communicated the message that no part of an executive's work was more important than helping superiors, even by meeting their most mundane needs. It is hardly surprising that Estes was somewhat perturbed, since DeLorean's refusal to adhere to the ritual clearly flouted a core value of GM's dominant culture and sent a crystal-clear message of disrespect for Estes' authority.

Fitting In: Communicating Invisibility by Visible Cues It is no accident that few people could have recognized GM's chairman of the board Thomas Murphy, although the faces of his peers, such as Henry Ford of Ford and William Paley of CBS, frequently graced the television screen, the front pages of newspapers, and the covers of news magazines. GM employees who found themselves the object of attention from the news media could expect a severe reprimand for disregarding another core value of GM's dominant culture: Ideal GM employees were invisible people who could fit in without drawing attention to themselves. The core value of invisibility was expressed through such visible cultural artifacts as dress and decor. GM's dress norms in the 1960s required a dark suit, a light shirt, and a muted tie. This was a slightly more liberal version of the famous IBM dress code that required a dark suit, a sparkling white shirt, and a narrow blue or black tie. When all employees wear the same uniform, no single employee stands out. Rules on office decor also expressed the value of invisibility. Even on the fourteenth floor, office decor was standardized. The carpeting was a nondescript blue-green and the oak paneling was a faded beige. When DeLorean was promoted to headquarters he requested brighter carpeting, sanding and restaining of the paneling, and some

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more modem, functional furniture. The man in charge of office decoration was apologetic; but firm: "We decorate the offices only every few years. And they are all done the same. It's the same way with the furniture. Maybe I can get you an extra table or a lamp. . . " (Wright, op. cit.) The invisible GM employee was a "team player." Executives signalled their willingness to be team players by engaging in public; symbolic acts of conformity. Many of these activities centered on the act of eating. When executives were in town, for example, they were expected to eat in the executive dining room, where conversation usually consisted of bitching and office gossip, apparently irrelevant to serious business issues. These meals were rituals. The executives were isolated in a separate room at predictable times. They said predictable sorts of things. Although at the manifest level these activities may have seemed irrelevant to the company's business, at a deeper level the eating ritual communicated several important aspects of the value of fitting in. Participation in the ritual required sacrifice of one's personal time that could have been spent having lunch with friends from outside GM or with one's family. When the conversation concemed gossip or complaints about GM, the talkers were taking personal risks by exposing themselves as "back-biters" or "taletellers," while listeners were initiated into an "in-group" of confidants sharir\g private knowledge. Precisely because topics of conversation were private and in a sense forbidden, the eating ritual was important. It signalled a willing sacrifice of time, an extension of the company into the more private and personal aspects of employees' lives, and a visible manifestation of willingness to fit in. Failure to participate in the eating ritual was seen as a direct and unambiguous challenge: "Why doesn't he have dinner with 58 the other executives? He's not acting like a

team player." (Wright, op. cit.) Costs of such a challenge were clear. Standard management practices punished those who failed to fit in. For example, performance appraisals were not based solely on objective criteria the work records of those who were promoted were often inferior to those of people who languished in lower-level positions. Performance appraisals relied heavily on subjective criteria, which included an assessment of an employee's private life. Top executives were expected to behave in a decorous fashion, avoid fads, and (at least publicly) maintain the appearance of a stable married life. "He's not a team player," was a frequent, and many times the only, obstacle to an executive's promotion. (Wright, op. cit.) Being Loyal: Inferring the Dominant View from What Is Absent Another core value central to the GM philosophy was loyalty to one's boss, which was a special case of loyalty to GM's management, which in tum was sometimes portrayed as a spedal case of loyalty to the country. For example, a top GM execnjtive testifying before Congress in the 1950s drew no distinction between what was good for GM and what was good for the entire country Ifrom Ed Cray's Chrome Colossus: General Motors and Its Times (McGraw-Hill, 1980)]. One artifact of the dominant culture that expressed the value placed on loyalty was the retirement dinner. At these dinners, as at other rituals, the content of what was to be said and the sequence of events was prescribed. A prototypical retirement dinner began with a description of the retiree's early background, perhaps with evocations of his hard-working parents and the elm-lined stFeets of his hometown. His first job, perhaps as a newsboy, would be recalled, followed by a brief recap of the halcyon days of his undergraduate career when, inevitably, he was a uniformed member, if not a star, of

some sport team. The retiree's history as a GM employee would then be recounted in detail, beginning with his fiist job, hopefully a humble one that preserved the purity of the Horatio Alger aspect of his story. Next, his steady (always steady) rise through the corporate hierarchy would be coimterpointed with allusions to his charming wife and lovely children. Usually retirement dinner programs ended with a few joking allusions to the retiree's idiosyncracies and a promise. The retiree and the company representatives pledged continuing mutual respect, admiration, and loyalty. This pledge included a kind of proto-immortality, as the organization promised not to forget the retiree's invaluable contributions and offered him a safe passage to life outside the corporation's doors. If the content of what is said and the sequence of what is done is prescribed in a ritual, then departure from these routines should cause consternation, as in DeLorean's failure to perform the airport ritual for his boss. If the primary purpose of the retirement dinner at GM was to reward past and ensure future loyalty, then reactions to deviations from the expected behavior pattem should make this purpose clear. A speaker at one GM retirement dinner committed two cardinal sins. He admitted that the company had once been in severe trouble and he blamed the debacle on the ill-considered decisions of a top GM executive. Even the usually critical DeLorean was shocked by the speaker's behavior, which he criticized as a "vicious verbal attack," "uncalled-for," and "vituperative." Others present were also dismayed, "shaking their heads and looking puzzled," and ". . . caught between modest surprise and downright embarrassment." Such a departure from the ritual protocol was exceedingly rare: "It was the first time I had ever heard a General Motors executive openly criticize another one, past or present, in front of corporate management."

(Wright, op. cit.) The critical speech was so disruptive because it contraciicted the ritual's basic purpose: to celebrate retiring and present GM employees for their loyalty to top GM executives and to the firm as a whole. One cultural artifact, not yet discussed, is the organizational story. Such stories are anecdotes, ostensibly true, about a sequence of events drawn from the company's history. The stars of an organizational story are company employees, and the stories' morals concem the firm's core values and underlying assumptions. Loyalty was so central to the GM philosophy that it is evident in what is absent from, as well as what is included in, the dominant culture's artifacts. Students of Japanese corporate cultures have noted the difficulty of interpreting crultural phenomena. To appreciate the shape and placement of a rcxJc in a Japanese garden, the educated viewer focuses on the empty spaces around the rock. Similarly, the process of "reading" the content of a culture requires attention to disruptions and to what is absent or unsaid, because these are also clues to what is expected. Thus reinforcement of the value of loyalty can also be seen in the type of organizational stories that were not found in this organizational setting. For example, Wright began his discussion of the loyalty issue with the telling observation that GM had no "prodigal son returns" story about an executive who left his "corporate home," because those who left were considered deserters and were not generally welcomed back.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A COUNTERCULTURE; QUESTIONING DEFERENCE TO AUTHORITY

DeLorean expressed his opposition to deference to authority by telling this organizational story: In preparing for the sales official's trip to this partic59

ular city, the Chevrolet zone sales people learned from Detroit that the boss liked to have a refrigerator full of cold beer, sandwiches, and fruit in his room to snack on at night before going to bed. They lined up a suite in one of the city's better hotels, rented a refrigerator, and ordered the food and beer. However, the door to the suite was too small to accommodate the icebox. The hotel apparently nixed a plan to rip out the door and part of the adjoining wall. So the quick-thinking zone sales people hired a crane and operator, put them on the roof of the hotel, knocked out a set of windows in the suite, and lowered and shoved the refrigerator into the room through this gaping hole. That n i ^ t the Chevrolet executive wolfed down cold-cul sandwiches, beer, and fresh fruit, no doubt thinking, "What a great bunch of people we have in this zone." The next day he was off to another city and most likely another refrigerator, while back in the city of his departure the zone people were once again dismantling hotel windows and removing the refrigeration by crane. (Wright, op. cit.)

The "refrigerator story" carries at least two messages. First, it is common practice at GM to engage in expensive and timeconsuming efforts to defer to even minor wishes of people in authority positions. Second, the tone of the story implies that people who engage in these activities sometimes go to ridiculous extremes. The "refrigerator story" is an example of a cultural artifact that has "boomeranged" against the dominant culture. At first the story appears to be another illustration of the importance of deference to authority, then it becomes clear that the story portrays a situation in which this value has been carried to a ridiculous extreme. When cultural artifacts boomerang, they call into question those core values that at first they seem to reinforce. Boomeranging cultural artifacts can breed a deep alienation from the dominant crulture's core values, undermining rather than supporting top management's objectives. We posited that a counterculture would undermine the dominant culture's values, as evident in the "refrigerator story," and 60 that it would produce cultural artifacts sup-

porting an alternative set of core values. The story-creation process is one means of expressing alternative values. The process begins when a visible, often powerful and charismatic figure responds to a situation in a dramatic fashion, role modeling the behavior that would be expected of employees who might someday face a similar situation. If the central character is sufficiently noteworthy, the event sufficiently dramatic; and the behavior clearly relevant to future activities, then the role-modeled event may be recounted and eventually transformed into an organizational story. The story-creation process is one way in which an individual actor can help create a counterculture, though it is important to note that the process can occur without the central actor's intentional cooperation. Even if an actor does intend to create a story, the transformation of an event into a shared organizational story depends largely on whether organizational members find it sufficiently interesting to repeat. DeLorean, for example, repeatedly created such stories. For example, wanting to replace deference to authority with task-oriented efficiency, he decided to discourage the practice of meeting superiors at airports. Instead of issuing an edict by memo, he role-modeled the behavior he wanted on an occasion when he was scheduled to speak to a luncheon of McGraw-Hill editors and executives in midtown Manhattan. DeLorean found his own ride from the airport to the McGraw-Hill offices. The McGraw-Hill people were used to GM executives who traveled with "retinues befitting only the potentates of great nations"; when they questioned DeLorean about the whereabouts of his subordinates, DeLorean complacently replied that he hoped they were back in Detroit getting some work done. DeLorean noted with some pride that he subsequently heard that the "McGraw-Hill incident" had been retold many times, both

by his subordinates and by McGraw-Hill employees. (Wright, op. cit.) This incident was transformed into an organizational story for several reasons. The star was DeLorean, a controversial and powerful figure. The events were sufficiently ciramatic to be interesting and had clear implications for the types of behavior that would be considered appropriate for DeLorean's subordinates. If a similar situation arose, subordinates surmised that they should not meet DeLorean at the airport unless there was specific business to conduct en route. Finally, the events were noteworthy because they expressed a value that contradicted a core value of the dominant cnjlture. In DeLorean's division, job performance was more important than deference to authority. An Altemative to Fitting In: The Limits of Acceptable Deviance DeLorean was opposed to the value placed by the dominant culture on team play and fitting in. Instead, he valued dissent and independence. Sensibly, he backed his values with practices changing, for example, the performance appraisal system in his division. No longer were subjective criteria, indicating willingness to fit in, considered relevant. Instead, performance was measured on the basis of criteria that were as objective as possible. DeLorean reinforced this value with cultural artifacts as well as practices. For example, he made a point of claiming that he would rely on objective performance appraisal criteria, even when the results ran counter to his own subjective opinions. He backed this claim with an anecdote, which he claimed became a shared organizational story. The central figure in the story, aside of course from DeLorean himself, was a disagreeable man whose performance record was superlative. Despite his personal dislike of the man, DeLorean promoted him four

times, admitting that he tried to "stay the hell away from him." (Wright, op. cit.) This anecdote has two intriguing central characters. DeLorean's strong dislike of his subordinate adds an element of personal interest. In addition, the anecdote clearly prescribes how DeLorean would have his subordinates behave when they assessed the behavior of a disliked subordinate. In this example, DeLorean articulated a core value that was counter to the core values of the dominant culture, he backed that new value by implementing consistent performance appraisal practices, and he dramatized and illustrated the value by role modeling the desired behavior. Although DeLorean's retrospective account may exaggerate the intentionality and impact of his behavior, it is plausible that these activities contributed to the development of a counterculture among DeLorean's subordinates. DeLorean also used other techniques to facilitate the development of a counterculture. For example, when he was promoted to head the Chevrolet division, he used decor changes to symbolize his declaration of independence. The division's lobby and executive offices were refurbished with bright carpets, the paneling was sanded and restained, and modem furniture was brought in. In accord with the espoused values of independence and dissent, executives were allowed "within reasonable limits" to decorate their offices to fit their individual tastes. In his own dress DeLorean rolemodeled an apparently carefully calibrated willingness to deviate from the dominant culture's emphasis on fitting in. DeLorean's dark suits had a continental cut. His shirts were off-white with wide collars. His ties were suitably muted, but wider than the GM norm. His deviations were fashionable, for the late 1960s, but they represented only a slight variation on the executive dress norms of the dominant culture. If a counterculture is to survive

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within the context of a dominant culture a delicate balancing act must be performed. DeLorean apparently did not hesitate to initiate stories and implement practices that directly challenged the dominant culture's core values. His use of visible cultural aitifacts (not easily hidden from visiting outsiders) was more subtle, perhaps deliberately more circumspect. Although the extent of his intentionality is unclear, DeLorean's deviance appears carefully calibrated to remain within, but test the limits of, the dominant culture's latitude of acceptance.

story by enumerating the deaths caused by its faulty design and the negative effects its production had on the firm. These disastrous consequences included a "Watergate mentality" that led to attempts to buy and destroy evidence of owner complaints about the car, millions of dollars in legal expenses and outof-court settlements, and extensive damage to CM's reputation. DeLorean explicitly stated the moral to the Corvair story in terms of the "group think" dangers of an overemphasis on loyalty:
There wasn't a man in top GM management who had anything to do with the Corvair who would purposely build a car that he knew would hurt or kill people. But, as part of a management team pushing for increased sales and profits, each gave his individual approval in a group to decisions which produced the car in the face of serious doubts that were raised about its safety, and then later sought to squelch information which might prove the car's deficiencies. (Wright, op. cit.)

Opposing Demands for Unquestioning Loyalty The Corvair disasters provided superb raw material for a "boomerang" challenge to the dominant culture's emphasis on loyalty. The story begins as a seemingly straightforward presentation epitomizing GM's finest characteristics. Initially the Corvair was seen as an innovative, appealing productthe best that CM minds could produce. The rear placement of the engine, the independent swingaxle suspension system, and the sporty styling gave the Corvair a racy image designed to appeal to the young. At this point the Corvair story boomerangs: It takes a sudden tum and becomes a scathing indictment of the values it first appeared to endorse. Several CM employees raised objections to the car because of their concem about the lack of safety of the rear engine and the fact that the swingaxle design had a tendency to make the car directionally unstable and difficult to control, with a propensity to flip over at high speeds. (Cray, op. cit.) Despite evidence supporting the validity of these objections, CM management told the dissenters to stop objecting and join the team or find some other place to work. (Wright, op. dt.) DeLorean concluded the Corvair

It is noteworthy that this contribution to the creation of a counterculture within DeLorean's division includes no direct action. Instead, DeLorean merely offers, in this boomeranging story, a reinterpretation of past events.

CONCLUSION

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This analysis of the dominant culture at GM revealed three core values. Deference to authority was represented in the airport ritual and jargon, such as "dog robbers." The value of being invisible was expressed through management practices, such as subjective performance appraisal criteria, and through visible artifacts, such as conservative dress, standardized office decor, and public eating rituals. Tlie value of loyalty was so central that it was evident in what was absent a retirement dinner ritual that was disrupted and a prodigal son story that was missing. Evidence of a counterculture was

also found. In addition to ridiculing the values of the dominant culture, DeLorean articulated an altemative set of core values, preferring productivity to deference, objective measures of performance to subjective indicators of conformity, and independence to blind loyalty. Clearly the dominant and countercultures take opposite positions on value issues of central importance to both. Several of DeLorean's activities apparently influenced the development of this uneasy symbiosis. First, he used Isoomeranging" cultural artifacts, such as the "refrigerator" and "Corvair" stories, to ridicule the values of the dominant culture. Second, he articulated the counterculture] values openly, through management practices such as objective performance appraisal criteria, and through the story creation process, as in the "McGraw-Hill" story. In addition, his use of such visible cultural artifacts as dress and decor communicated more subtly the limits of acceptable deviance. While a manager alone may not be able to create or "manage" a culture, DeLorean's activities suggest that several managerial techniques may have a detectable impact on the trajectory of a culture's, or a subculture's, development. Those techniques include implementation of practices that are consistent with preferred values, articulation of "boomerangs," attempts to create organizational stories, and carefully calibrated uses of visible artifacts. If DeLorean's activities are to serve as a source of cultural management ideas, it is important to discuss the limitations of his achievements at CM. It is true that for a time he maintained a delicate balance, fostering the development of a counterculture that rested within the dominant culture's latitude of tolerance. Eventually, however, DeLorean's dissent met with disfavor, and he left GM to found a company of his own. DeLorean's history at GM raises

some interesting questions that are addressed in Love's analysis of the absorption of protest. A counterculture can serve some useful functions for a dominant culture, articulating the boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate behavior and providing a safe haven for the development of innovative ideas. Did GM's top management want DeLorean's counterculture to succeed, and were they disappointed when his deviance went beyond their latitude of tolerance? Or, as implied in the analysis of the basic assumptions imderlying the dominant culture's core values, had GM permitted DeLorean's counterculture to grow and die in order to provide an object lesson for other potential deviants? Or was the strength of the counterculture an unanticipated and unwelcome surprise to the dominant culture? No matter which of these alternatives comes closest to the truth, clearly it is a complex process, beyond the control of any one individual, to maintain the uneasy symbiotic relationship that exists between a dominant culture and a counterculture.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Organizational culture research has its roots in Philip Selznick's Leadership and Administration (Row, Peterson, 1957) and Burton Clark's The Distinctive College: Antioch, Reed, and Swarthmore (Aldine, 1970). Four books, oriented toward the professional manager, are largely responsible for the recent renaissance of interest in this topic William Ouchi's Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge (Addison-Wesley, 1981) and Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos's The Art of Japanese Management (Simon & Schuster, lnc, 1981) drew heavily on Japanese

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models of corporate culture. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman studied the cultures of unusually profitable American companies in In Search of Excellence (Harper & Row, 1982), as did Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy in Corporate Cultures (Addison-Wesley, 1982). Some have taken a critical view of the work that aroused this interest in culture. Edgar Schein disputed the reliance on Japanese models in "Does Japanese Management Style Have a Message for American Managers?" {Sloan Management Review. Fall 1981). The claim that cultures express an institution's distinctive competence or unique accomplishment was questioned by Joeinne Martin, Martha Feldman, Mary Jo Hatch, and Sim Sitkin in T h e Uniqueness Paradox in Organizational Stories" [Administrative Science Quarterly, September 1983). Others have taken a closer look at particular cultural phenomena. Organizational stories, legends, and myths have been studied by Alan Wilkins (see his article in this issue for references) and Joanne Martin for example, see "Stories and Scripts in Organizational Settin.gs" in Albert Hastorfs and Alice Isen's (editors) Cognitive Social Psychology (Elsevier-North Holland, 1982). For an excellent sampling of papers about a wide range of cultural phenomena, including organizational stories, rituals, humor, and jargon, see the collection edited by Louis Pondy, Peter Frost, Gareth Morgan, and Thomas Dandridge, Organizational Symbolism (JAI Press, 1983). Ruth Leeds Love's discussion of absorption of protest appears in Harold Leavitt emd Jjauis Pondy's Readings in Managerial Psychology, 2nd Edition (University of Chicago Press, 1974). Another approach has been to study the functions served by different types of cultures. For example, John Van Maanen and Stephen Barley have studied occupations in "Occupational Communities: Culture and Control in Organizations," in Barry Staw and Larry Cummings's (editors) Research in Organizational Behavior. Vol. 6 (JAI press, in press). Caren Siehl and Joanne Martin have studied the enculturation process for new employees, producing a quantitative, easily administered measure of culture in "Symbolic Management: Can Culture Be Transmitted?", a chapter in the Annual Leadership Series, Vol. 7 (Southern

Illinois University Press, in press). Although the recent academic research is scattered in a variety of scholarly journals, books integrating this literature are being written by a number of people, including Edgar Schein, Meryl Louis, and Joanne Martin. This article draws evidence concerning the dominant and countercultures at General Motors primarily from two sources: Ed Cray's Chrome Colossus: General Motors and Its Times (McGraw-Hill, 1980) and J. P. Wright's On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors (Wright Enterprises, 1979). Because Wright writes of DeLorean's experiences in the first person, for the sake of clarity Wright's book is cited as representing DeLorean's point of view. Because DeLorean has disowned Wright's efforts, however, it is highly likely that their opinions differ on some issues. In such cases the book is probably more representative of Wright's opinions than DeLorean's, in spite of the former's use of the first person. The past tense is used throughout this article's descriptions of General Motors, because some information may no longer be accurate. A number of other references on General Motors were useful, including particularly the works of A. D. Chandler, including Giant Enterprise: Ford, General Motors, and the Automobile Industry (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964) and Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of Industrial Enterprise (MIT Press, 1969), Peter Dnjcker's Concept of the Corporation (John Day Co., 1972), Ralph Nadar's Unsafe at Any Speed (Grossman, 1972), and Alfred P. Sloan Jr.'s My Years With General Motors (McFadden-Bartell Corp., 1965).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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The authors wish to thank the following people, who gave us particularly helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article: Susan Kreiger, Hal Leavitt, Meryl Louis, Gerald Salancik, and Edgar Schein. A preliminary version of this article was presented as part of the symposium "Can Culture Be Managed?" at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in New York City in August 1982.