Whither Organizational Culture? Privatization of the Oldest State-Owned Enterprise in Turkey

While privatization has been well documented in terms of economic and financial analysis, little has been written about its impact on organizational culture. This paper aims to describe a crisis caused by the privatization of the organizational culture of Sumerbank, the oldest state-owned conglomer ate in Turkey, to examine the possible impact of privatization of the employ ees, and to show the culture clash between the taken-for granted economic and financial assumptions of privatization and the fact of being a "Sumerbankian"—the symbolic label of a withering organizational culture.