Corporate Culture

Michelle Santiago Cortés on the fracturing of the white collar monoculture.

Corporate culture once cultivated specific images of worker and workplace design. These images trickled into pop culture, where even American Psycho levels of satire could be metabolized into earnest aspiration and Wolf of Wall Street into faux nostalgia for a type of workplace and its accompanying technologies.

The mid-century ad men represented post-war America’s charismatic executives and typewriting secretaries. Through the eighties and nineties, the mid-century excesses accelerated into more obnoxious displays of wealth and power. In the 80s, having a brick cell phone meant you had $4,000 to spare on 30 minutes of talk time per charge. The suits of the 90s wore beepers to tell the world they were important enough to be on-call 24/7. In 1992, Robert Downey Jr. visited Wall St. for a documentary and had nothing but choice words to describe the men of the trading floor: “If money is evil,” he tells the camera in a recently viral clip, “this place is hell.” Corporate culture was already losing its luster.

Similar to the entertainment monoculture, which is “a subjective, shifting frame of reference,” the corporate monoculture’s ability to foster a feeling of singularity and coherence has faded over time. For the tech startups of the 2010s, the long hours were justified by a world-changing mission. Corporate culture is modeled by managers through their professed principles and values–the tech companies of the 2010s were non-hierarchical in theory, but cults of personality in practice. Employees exported those values through their salary-subsided lifestyles—the Soylent and rock climbing gym membership.

Now, corporate culture is at an impasse. Gone are the days of mentioning a company and invoking a glossy image of all the awesome things people are doing at the office in exchange for a check and some benefits. Just last month, Reuters published an in-depth report on Axon, the company that makes Tasers, and its fraternity-style hazings involving, you guessed it, tasing their own employees. If you look around the room you’re in right now, you’ll probably find an object conceived in a workplace that was subject to an explosive news article about its toxic, messy, or downright terrible culture. If not, go to a bookstore, where not one but two books detailing our time’s greatest authors of corporate culture—Glossier’s Emily Weiss and Tesla/Twitter’s Elon Musk—are primed to be best-sellers.

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Amusingly, the attempts to rehabilitate corporate culture’s reputation and reconnect with employees and recruits is coming across as straight up propaganda, especially when it comes to the return-to-office push. In Reddit’s r/WFH, members are frustrated with their employers’ sudden push to work out of the office. The thread keeps track of an alarming number of LinkedIn posts where corporate leadership waxes poetic about in-office life. In June, an office furniture company made headlines for its absurd depiction of the future of remote workers, their speculative rendering of said worker is doomed to have “swollen eyes, a hunchback and claw-like hands.” A similar depiction was used in 2019 to warn against the ills of in-office work.

The move to re-establish the primacy of corporate culture is also showing up in weird “trend” writing. This year, yes that’s 2023, Ad Age published a column about the “no cubicle movement.” It talks about open-plan offices being better suited to accommodate the Gen Z “preference for autonomy, mental health awareness, and collaboration.” It says Gen Z needs “a more collaborative, lively environment” that “not only fosters creativity, but [also] celebrates it.”

Never mind the overwhelm of data that shows young workers today care mostly about pay, health insurance, and independence. Tellingly, this Ad Age column also mentioned how TikTok queries under “financial recruiting” are flooded with “Gen Z creators complaining about their mental health or even on the verge of tears over their 15-hour workday trapped at a desk.” It’s hard to come across something as innocuous as an Accenture consultant’s day-in-the-life TikTok and not think: “PsyOp!” Talk of glamorous corporate culture can only do so much when the lived version is so unfulfilling.

Corporate culture is fragmented. Or to put it bluntly: corporate culture is in pieces. There is no fantasy corporate culture (singular) projected onto the sky that can represent all the hopes and dreams we plan on pursuing through our corporate jobs. Instead, we have our lived corporate cultures (plural) that are reflective of all the weird, frustrating, and of course, exploitative tasks that fill our days. Much like television at the moment, there is no monoculture but, rather, mass niche experiences broken out by industry.

I struggle to find any evidence that people are holding tight to the mind-body-soul connection to their workplace that once made employees corporate culture evangelists. Shards of corporate culture’s remains are now floating around social media as memes or congealing into dystopian novels like Severance or The Other Black Girl. “Finance bros” and “tech bros” are still easy shorthand, but nobody quite knows where they work anymore. There is now a meme page for every culture industry, from publishing to art and even architecture, taking on the dual tasks of making fun of their corporate cultures and working to build alternatives—from Girl Boss to Girl Moss.

Nevertheless, corporate wants their lick back: Property developer and CEO Tim Gurner made waves on Twitter saying, “We need to see unemployment rise” and “We need to see pain in the economy.” Showing up to work and doing the work doesn’t seem to be enough for some bosses, they want more dependence and devotion. Gurner complains about an alleged shift in the power dynamic between employers and employees. If culture doesn’t need corporate, then what’s left?

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