Apple World : Core and Periphery in a Trans-national Organizational Culture

Increasingly, large-scale organizations are spreading their activities across great distances and contributing to the web of global interconnectedness. Frequent travelling and use of media technologies enable its dispersed members to develop and maintain social organization and a sense of community. This book endeavors to describe cultural dynamics as they are expressed in center-periphery relationships at Apple Computer in Silicon Valley, Paris, and Stockholm. Who are the people working at these sites? What are the practices and ideas that influence them in their everyday worklife? How do they relate to influences from headquarters or top management? Concomitant with the span of social relations is an increasing consciousness of the world as one single place in which to conduct business and a heightened concern with matters of cultural identity, both translocal and local. Globalization engenders a reflexive stance towards the vulture of the organization and spurs ongoing efforts to produce both cultural similarity and difference within interlinked places If deliberately constructed an communicated values and meanings form the core of Apple culture, there is a lively periphery of reinterpretations, additions and modifications shaped at other levels and locales within the company. Apple stands out as an are in which the meditation and confrontation of cultural influences reveal themselves in both eye-catching and thought-provoking patterns.