ABSTRACT
After the publication of Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence (1982) and Deal and Kennedy's Corporate Cultures (1982), the many stud ies, discussions, and conferences about organizational or corporate culture have taken fashionable proportions (Frissen, 1986). For some serious scien tists this could be a reason to drop the term culture from the map of theo retical concepts in organizational studies, which is more understandable because there is a tendency to attach highly divergent meanings to the con cept of culture that are scarcely compatible with each other, as Schein (1985) recently argued. On the other hand, the concept of culture can be given the benefit of the doubt when we realize that it has renewed and deep ened our interest in the irrational factors in corporate life, which is relevant not only for the achievements of organizations but also for the meaning people find in their daily work.
