Unpopular Culture: The Ritual of Complaint in a British Bank

This book is an ethnography of an unnamed British bank's organizational culture. John Weeks, assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, renames the disguised bank "British Armstrong Bank" (BritArm). Weeks spent eight months of full-time fieldwork at BritArm in 1994 and 1995 and performed several follow-up interviews with managers and employees over the next six years. While the concept of organizational culture has seeped into the modern lexicon, Weeks concludes that the popular business press has taken hold of it—using it and misusing it to the extent that it has become nebulous and has lost concrete meaning. Weeks found that few employees at any level at BritArm had anything positive to say about its culture. Ironically, the culture of complaint at BritArm created an atmosphere of dislike for the firm among its employees that fostered loyalty to it at the same time.