企业文化外文翻译.doc

外 文 翻 译 原文： Corporate culture When studying corporate culture in the sense of shared beliefs and values, it is important to distinguish two dimensions. The first dimension is the strength of the culture, that is, the degree to which these beliefs and values are shared. It is this cultural strength that has been the focus of this article and that has also received the most attention in the literature on corporate culture.But—whereas cultural strength has an impact on firm performance— it is the second dimension which often seems to have the larger impact on firm performance: the content of the culture, that is, what these people believe and value. In what follows, I now consider this article’s implications for the content of corporate culture. I show, in particular, that the manager has an important influence on the content of her firm’s culture and that a firm’s culture tends to persist over time, even when all original members of the firm have left. The working paper Van den Steen (2004) also shows why different firms may develop different cultures and why cultures may be suboptimal even when firms have unlimited opportunity to learn from experience. The manager’s influence on culture. To capture the content dimension of “corporate culture as shared beliefs,” I would like to define a firm’s culture to be that course of action on which most employees agree as the best course of action (at the point in time when they have to choose an action). With a finite number of employees, however, such action may not exist. I will therefore formally define a course of action ac to be the firm’s culture if the probability—over the distribution of employee beliefs—that two employees agree on ac as the best course of action is higher than the probability that they agree on any other particular action. As the number of employees goes to infinity, this definition almost surely coincides with the action on which most employees agree as the best course of action. My first result i