Culture is one of those words loved by people whose only paradigm for beginning an essay or speech is tabulating the definitions they found in the dictionary. Far more interesting are the layers of meaning the concept has in reality
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The easiest corporate culture to identify is the one described by folklorists who work back from evidence to underlying causes. That is, they discover a collection of tales or anecdotes, sometimes called memorats, with shared themes or motifs, and then identify the characteristics of the people who’ve heard or repeated the stories.
The transformation of experience into art is rare, and I’ve only found one genuine folk narrative tradition. When I worked for a manufacturer of replacement windshields in the late 1970s, it was still run by the founder, then in his 80s, and simply called the old man. He was treated as a trickster.
During the annual physical inventory, I was told about the times he loaded everything into trucks and hid it in his barn to reduce the taxes he owed the state. When a strike was brewing, I heard about the time he laid everyone off the day before Christmas to exploit the contract clause that stipulates people don’t get paid for holidays if they don’t work the day before and the day after. When people complained he directed them to unemployment. The state was helpless and had to take over his payroll for two weeks.
I heard about his conflict with his daughter, whose husband thought he would inherit the company and worried her father’s erratic behavior would devalue the assets. During one confrontation, someone turned on the intercom and broadcast the family feud to the plant floor. It may sound like he was outsmarted, but the person telling the tale made clear who was still in charge and who had had to trim his ambitions.
The trickster didn’t just con the state, his family and employees. He turned his skills to compassionate acts. He didn’t like having to allow people the 15 minutes breaks mandated by the Department of Labor, so he hired a woman to walk through the halls with a trolley and coffee urn. The point wasn’t that people had no excuse to leave their desks, but that he found a way to pay Sophie, the widow of an old employee.
I was told the reason we had a chapel was to allow him to deduct the cost of his chauffeur cum chaplain. The point again wasn’t the tax scam, but that he found a way to support the Black driver.
Stories about the old man were widespread. Since it wasn’t the sort of company where a person could build a career, many people passed through. I not only heard tales in the office, but when I ran into people at professional meetings. The Detroit Free Press ran at least two long profiles of the old man in the 1980s, one when the business finally closed, and one when he died. They didn’t amplify the narrative tradition, but the length of their stories signified the man’s mythic status.
The reason these stories took form and were retold is they were part of a larger culture. I later worked for a company where the CEO cut everyone’s pay the amount of Ronald Reagan’s first tax cut, on the day the cut took effect. In effect, he left us where we were, and booked the gain. No stories came out of that plant. When others hear the story, it has no resonance. At best it’s an example of sharp practice, but not a folk tale.
The boss as trickster may be a fading tradition, but the place it survived was one conducive to the perpetuation of tradition. Shatterproof Glass existed on the outskirts of Detroit, near the border with Dearborn, close to an old Hungarian community. One can hazard guesses about the continuity of patriarchal society brought from the Austro-Hungarian and Romanov empires. However, by the 1970s, the young had abandoned the neighborhoods and any direct links would have been hard to establish.
Perhaps more important was the plant’s proximity to River Rouge where Harry Bennett used goons to intimidate Henry Ford’s work force. Before unions, many Detroit area plants were run by brutal superintendents, described as "ass kickers" by several I’ve talked to. Perhaps in the scheme of things, Shatterproof was a better place to work.
Moral ambiguities of industrial life are clearer when they appear in a single person like the old man, than in the Manichaean split between plant owners who found charities and their henchmen. Like most tales in the tradition of Br'er Rabbit, Shatterproof stories champion the use of intellect over force, and suggest ways to survive an irrational society.
Survival is the unifying theme beneath many stories, not just of the old man, but of the company itself. It’s plant building may have had most of its windows broken, but I was told it once housed the assembly line of Eddie Rickenbacker back when he experimented with automobiles. It may have been degraded as a pickle factory, but Shatterproof always bent a good piece of glass. The old man may have moved the plant to North Carolina, may have run it to the ground, but it was his to the end. Who could hope for more?
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