Corporate Culture and Globalization: Ideology and Identity in a Global Fashion Retailer

This book offers an ethnographic analysis of how corporate culture has been transformed in the age of globalization and promotes the importance of a national ideology’s role in corporate culture studies.

Based on 15 months of participant observation as a shop-floor salesperson, this book explores the gap between management-created corporate ideology and employees’ interpretations of and responses to this ideology. This book approaches the issue by examining the formation, dissemination, and interpretation of corporate ideology at a global Japanese fashion retailer in Hong Kong. It does so by charting the history of the company’s corporate policy: from centralized attempts at corporate employee management, through the creation of store manager ＂missionaries＂ intended to disseminate their ideology, to the ultimately unexpected outcomes as corporate ideology collided with its interpretations by store employees.

The interdisciplinary nature of this book will appeal to scholars and upper-level students in the fields of management, marketing, anthropology, and cultural studies as well as those interested in globalization, cross-cultural management, and retail management.

Yi Zhu is a cultural anthropologist based at Lancaster University, UK, specializing in the institutionalization and internalization of culture in the organization, particularly in relation to cultural change and identity negotiation. Her current projects focus on the role of politics in culture change, emotion and identity work in organization.