Images of Employees in Company Reports — Do Company Chairmen View their Most Valuable Asset as Valuable?

The last five years have seen an enormous resurgence of academic and managerial interest in the concept of organisational culture — the taken‐for‐granted assumptions, beliefs, meanings and values enacted and shared by organisational members. While for some academics, interest has centred on the epistemological questions raised in the very conceptualisation of organisational culture, for many managers the interest has been more down to earth. A group or organisation's culture is interesting because it is felt to “make a difference” — in other words, that culture can influence behaviour and, consequently, a company's performance, that a “strong” culture is both symptomatic and generative of “excellence”. Hence several practical questions have been posed. Can the organisational cultures generated in the large companies of economically successful nation states (e.g. Japan and West Germany) be transferred to companies in less economically successful countries? Can organisational culture be managed “in search of excellence”? If it can be managed — and there is much academic controversy on this point — how is this to be done?