g' cultures sustain commitment to the organization through a belief system. It is in this regard that Harrison and Carroll (1991) examine how organizations seek to maintain the allegiance and loyalty of their members. Culture transmission processes typically assume that culture comprises 'artefacts' and that it is the manager's task to manage them in order to bring about desired changes in employee behaviour (e.g. Trice and Beyer 1985). This encourages the view that man agers are the objective creators and manipulators of a corporate culture that they are themselves immune to, and their task is to inculcate the corporate culture in employees through selection, performance management and socialization. This paper therefore sheds new light on the culture transmission process by examining how and why managers generate a culture for themselves. In their culture transmission model, Harrison and Carroll (1991) consider three factors: (a) recruitment: selecting those who best fit the organization's culture; (b) socialization: intensifying the enculturation of employees, e.g. through orientation and reward systems, and (c) turnover: retaining highly socialized employees and encouraging the departure of the rest. Thus, when the organization is able to control the 'demographic flow' of its members by carefully managing the entry, retention and exit phases, culture transmission is achievable.The use of clearly defined manifestations of culture, e.g. metaphors, logos, stories, rituals, totems, and so forth, has been found to reinforce cultural values, and lead to the acceptance of organizational goals (e.g. Berg 1986; Kamoche 1995; Peters 1987; Pfeffer 1981; Wilson 1992). As for the tools of transmission, we argue that the role of training has been ignored in preference to other HR activities such as selection and rewarding. To the extent that training involves teaching and reinforcing desired forms of behaviour, it is a potentially powerful mechan...
