Management theorists spent much of the 1980s and 1990s analyzing “corporate culture,” the unique culture of a company or, more generally, the culture of white-collar work, with considerable success. Their scholarship on corporate culture, in turn, spilled over into other academic disciplines with historians tracing the paternalism of big business, economists analyzing how shared values foster economic efficiency, and cultural critics attacking the hegemonic influence of American capitalism. But research on corporate cultures was not purely academic, for it was chiefly management consultants from McKinsey & Company, alongside academic theorists sponsored by McKinsey, who first popularized the concept of “corporate cultures.” Although “softer” managerial concerns about the impact of social factors on organizational efficiency predate Elton Mayo's studies at Western Electric in the 1930s, the particular phrase “corporate culture” gained momentum through a trio of influential management books published in the early 1980s that the consultants from McKinsey & Company underwrote. The best-known of these books, Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman's In Search of Excellence, written when both men were partners at McKinsey, eventually sold over five million copies. As a journalist from the New York Times wrote in 1983: