ABSTRACT
The authors' current interest is corporate or organizational culture which, has become a fad recently because of the alleged superiority of some Japanese-style organizations in generating high levels of commitment and productivity through creating what are hypothesized to be stronger organizational cultures. He has tried to develop the theoretical notion that culture in general, and organizational culture in particular, is learned simultaneously by positive reinforcement and by avoidance conditioning. The stability of organizational culture and the strong resistance to change, which is often observed, can be related to the difficulty of extinguishing responses learned by the avoidance mechanism. If opponent-process theory also applies to this kind of learning, it would provide a further line of exploration in that it would open up possibilities for the management of change, by taking advantage of the natural change forces inherent in the opponent process.
