2019 Volume 20 Issue 2 Pages 27-62
This paper describes the materialization and reinterpretation of organizational culture in the Japanese company, Ichi, and examines the transformation of corporate value into a tangible corporate system via an evaluation system to monitor and motivate employees. This paper presents perspectives on culture's materialization in the business context and reveals the underlying corporate ideology's impact, with store managers as facilitators. Furthermore, the paper also shows that employees' customer service performance was uneven because the concept of customer service was not fully understood, and the pragmatic nature of the local employees caused a diverse reinterpretation of organizational culture. Examining Ichi contributes to research on the reinterpretation of culture because corporate systems and structures influence local employees' understanding of the company's culture. Finally, this paper argues that ethnographic research on business organizations reveals the cultural logic of the management and local employees, which can ensure mutually beneficial agreements and ease cultural conflicts.
