Does academia have a lazy work culture? I'm a rising sophomore at a top US university, and I've become really fascinated with the world of academia over the past year -- so much so that I'm considering doing a PhD after I graduate and entering it myself. But there's something about academia that bothers me. 

I'm doing a summer internship at a research center at a university where I'm in the company of several PhD students and post docs as well. I've noticed that the work culture here is a bit lazy. I understand that academia isn't the most "organized" area (unlike the corporate world), and that one great thing about academia is the flexibility you get to do your work however you want. For instance, I've spoken to professors who say they do most of their work at night -- which, obviously, is impossible in a regular job. But I've observed this getting translated into laziness. People will only come in to the center for 3-4 hours a day, and sometimes not even every day in the week. I also see people often passively sitting on their computers and not really actively doing their work.

I completely understand that academics are less "robotic" than people working corporate jobs in that they don't follow the same routine every single day, but it just seems to me that a lot of people lack the drive, intensity, and seriousness that I see in my romanticized version of the world of academia. Thoughts?
Different areas of work look differently. A mechanic, a tailor or a miner perform visible physical operations and deliver an objective and measurable result by hour. Compared with them, office work may seem lazy: people sit at their desks, they are not sweating, can have toilet and drink breaks whenever they want, etc. Also, the result of their work seems less tangible: we do not see goods or materials produced, only papers, and looking from outside, we often can not understand how good the  result is without taking their manager's word for it.

Academic teaching and administration work is very much like office work in a company. Teaching-focused colleges and universities often seem very similar to corporate organisations (with one important difference that they have  less support  structures and security for academics).  

Academic research work seem even less organised and the results seem even less tangible. People either appear sitting at their computers idly (while they are in fact thinking on the problem), or stay at the whiteboard scribbling unreadable equations (still thinking on their problems), or stay at home (thinking about their problems). If you look around, you will see the result of their thinking process (e.g. a computer or smartphone in front of you, as well as many many others). But the results do not jump out of their heads in the same visible way how an ore appears from the mine.

Corporate culture portraits an idealised worker as an energetic, serious man in suit. There are many, many problems with this idealised picture, for example, the fact that it is relatively easy to make such an appearance without any real skill, knowledge and desire to produce a meaningful result. Academia, partly, shares this problem: there is an idealised image of academic (a person excellent in everything, highly introvertial but excellent in communicating complex ideas to different audiences, etc etc), which has little to do with the real academic culture. Many academics visibly change their behaviour when they have to present their results for promotion or appraisal. However, in their natural habitat, they still focus on solving their problems in the way which is most effective for them, do not act to impress you or match your expectations about how this process has to look.