English to Chinese Bus/Financial Management Corporate Cultures

About 10 years ago, a sociologist named Neil Fligstein, currently at the University of California at Berkeley, published a book called The Transformation of Corporate Control (Harvard University Press, 1990). It has some compelling resonances with Professor Schein’s theories. Professor Fligstein posited that the modern corporate world has changed its dominant culture several times during the past century. As political and economic realities changed, cultural trends in CEO thinking changed with them.

Thus, in the 19th century, the most successful CEOs were monopolists, dominating their industries by acquiring or wiping out competitors. Once antitrust laws made that stance unfeasible, corporations passed into what Professor Fligstein calls a “manufacturing conception of control” — his name for the operations culture. At the great vertically integrated companies of the 1920s, like DuPont, International Paper, and U.S. Steel, the CEOs were all operations men.