Renewing <em>Strength</em>: Corporate Culture Revisited

Abstract

The management of corporate culture is explored through a series of reflections upon literature that has fashioned and addressed this field. Specifically, the article considers the motivation, key elements and continuing relevance of the critique made in “Strength is Ignorance; Slavery is Freedom” (Willmott, 1993) where, by pointing to their incipient totalitarianism, the ethics of “Excellence” philosophies and their culture change programmes were questioned. The analysis offered in “Strength” is shown to have continuing relevance for the contemporary examination of developments characterised as “post-bureaucracy”; and this claim is illustrated by reference to current pronouncements on “The End of Management”.