This article critically examines primary processes and effects of the so-called "new organizational culture" that is organized on the principles and practices of Total Quality Management (and its variations) and increasingly practiced in corporate organizations in the 1990s. The paper specifically analyzes the effects of the organizational cultural practices of "family" and "team" on the employee and discusses their role in corporate discipline, integration, and control. Data are drawn from field research conducted in a large multinational corporation and the analyses and interpretive propositions are informed by a critical social psychoanalytic perspective. The paper disputes the conventional view that the practices of the "new culture" and its purported reform of the hierarchical, specialized, conflict-ridden workplaces of traditional industrial organizations "empower" employees and provide "meaningful" relationships in the workplace. It is argued, on the contrary, that these new "designer" cultural practices serve as processes of regulation, discipline, and control of employee subject selves.

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This article argues that the new corporate culture currently being constructed in the corporate institution of work has wide social implications. The interplay of post-industrial technologies, new organizational practices and wider social influences is effecting changes in corporate production and culture. In particular, the integration of knowedge and work tasks and employee flexibility enabled by the `smart' technologies is generating new forms of work organization and blurring occupational boundaries. It is argued that the deliberate reconstruction of corporate culture deconstructs the culture of industrial workplaces as it simultaneously attempts to compensate for the loss of forms of social solidarity typical of industrialism. Industrial corporate culture is replaced with a designer., `simulated' culture that requires and produces a shift in employee identification and industrial solidarities. This empirically based interpretive essay discusses some of the social effects of the corporate reconstruction of culture and its displacement of a primary locus of industrial society's social solidarity. It proposes the emergence of a post-industrial, `post-occupational' social solidarity.

Bureaucracy is challenged and examined from almost all quarters in organizational analysis. As part of wide debate over postmodern cultural theorizations there is now much debate over the viability and retention of bureaucratic forms of organization. It is often argued that bureaucracies have been displaced by more rapid-response entrepreneurial and strategic configurations. Yet we can observe examples of bureaucracy that deliberately select, repress, discard or restore elements of bureaucratic norms and values. This article proposes that there is emergent evidence of a raft of new activities occurring in contemporary bureaucratic organizations, which challenge our conceptions of bureaucratic organization. The article draws attention to some unconventional practices, many of which involve the invocation of alternative sources of authority and legitimacy. It raises questions for the implications of an apparently counter-rational, counter-bureaucratic, re-enchantment impulse. The analytic, interpretive exploration of these questions draws bureaucratic organization back into society and social analysis.