Updated, October 3nd, 2006, 0817.
Jaques, E. (1952:251) defines OC as, "The culture of the factory is its customary and traditional way of thinking and doing of things, which is shared to a greater or lesser degree by all its members, and which new members must learn, and at least partially accept, in order to be accepted into service in the firm."
To the question "What were the reasons for the emergent of literature on 'corporate culture'?", we can simply trace back the writings of many scholars, e.g. Peters & Waterman (1982) and Pascale & Athos (1994) who popularised and coined the terminology. The reasons were:
1. The successes of management in 'strong culture' societies, e.g Japan & Korea;
2. Shift of mindset & managerial aspects, e.g. "soft" over "hard" i.e soft (culture, leadership etc) while hard (systems & technology);
3. Strong 'adaptive culture'; and
4. Culture is superior than bureaucracy.
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I received a question from Dzul (he was asking me about Van Maanen & Barley's (1985) definition of subculture).
They define subculture as "a subset of an organisation's members who interact regularly with one another, identify themselves as a distinct group within the organisation, share a set of problems commonly defined to be the problems of all, and routinely take action on the basis of collective understandings unique to the group."
(Updated: Sept 28th, 2006, 10:04)
Huntington, S.P. talks about clash of civilications in Islamica (latest edition).
