The Organization Man Read online

  The Organization Man

  THE ORGANIZATION MAN

  WILLIAM H. WHYTE

  Foreword by Joseph Nocera

  Originally published 1956 by Simon and Schuster, Inc.

  Copyright © William H. Whyte, Jr.

  Foreword copyright © 2002 University of Pennsylvania Press

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Published 2002 by

  University of Pennsylvania Press

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Whyte, William Hollingsworth.

  The organization man / William H. Whyte, Jr. ; foreword by Joseph Nocera.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-8122-1819-1 (alk. paper)

  Originally published: New York : Simon & Schuster, 1956.

  Includes index.

  1. Individuality. 2. Loyalty. I. Title. II. Nocera, Joseph

  BF697 .W47 2002

  301’.15—dc21

  2002024390

  Contents

  FOREWORD: JOSEPH NOCERA

  PART I THE IDEOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION MAN

  CHAPTER 1 Introduction

  2 The Decline of the Protestant Ethic

  3 Scientism

  4 Belongingness

  5 Togetherness

  PART II THE TRAINING OF ORGANIZATION MAN

  6 A Generation of Bureaucrats

  7 The Practical Curriculum

  8 Business Influence on Education

  9 The Pipe Line

  10 The “Well-Rounded” Man

  PART III THE NEUROSES OF ORGANIZATION MAN

  11 The Executive: Non-Well-Rounded Man

  12 The Executive Ego

  13 Checkers

  PART IV THE TESTING OF ORGANIZATION MAN

  14 How Good an Organization Man Are You?

  15 The Tests of Conformity

  PART V THE ORGANIZATION SCIENTIST

  16 The Fight against Genius

  17 The Bureaucratization of the Scientist

  18 The Foundations and Projectism

  PART VI THE ORGANIZATION MAN IN FICTION

  19 Love That System

  20 Society As Hero

  PART VII THE NEW SUBURBIA: ORGANIZATION MAN AT HOME

  21 The Transients

  22 The New Roots

  23 Classlessness in Suburbia

  24 Inconspicuous Consumption

  25 The Web of Friendship

  26 The Outgoing Life

  27 The Church of Suburbia

  28 The Organization Children

  29 Conclusion

  APPENDIX: HOW TO CHEAT ON PERSONALITY TESTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  Foreword

  JOSEPH NOCERA

  “The Organization, Man”

  Sometime in the aftermath of the publication of William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, the DuPont Corporation produced a print advertisement with the above headline. In the upper right-hand corner of the ad was a classic 1950s-era sketch of a handful of, well, organization men, dressed in look-alike suits and ties and fedoras, striding purposefully toward some unseen office. In the bottom left-hand corner sat a solitary figure, “Bernie the Beatnik,” in sandals and jeans, holding a guitar. In between the two images were about 200 words of copy, in fairly small print.

  Given that The Organization Man came out in the fall of 1956 and stayed on the best-seller list through the following autumn, the ad was probably produced sometime in 1957. Eisenhower was in his second term, the cold war was ablaze, and what we now think of as 1950s values—in many ways, the real subject of The Organization Man—dominated the nations psyche. Yet when the ad first came to my attention not long ago, I blithely assumed that its purpose was to repudiate Whyte’s central thesis, which is that the American organization—and especially the large corporation—was systematically stamping out individuality, that people were foolishly allowing this to happen, and that this loss of individuality would eventually be ruinous to both the individual and the corporation. From my vantage point at the dawn of the twenty-first century, I assumed that DuPont would be using the ad to say that corporations were not as hellbent on conformity as Whyte had described them—that at DuPont, at least, a free-thinker like Bernie the Beatnik could blossom and thrive. After all, DuPont is a company that depends on science to create new products, and one of Whyte’s strongest beliefs was that scientific innovation would be greatly diminished if companies stopped hiring scientists who were free-spirits and even renegades. As he put it in a brilliant chapter, “The Bureaucratization of the Scientist,”

  Management has tried to adjust the scientist to The Organization rather than The Organization to the scientist. It can do this with the mediocre and still have a harmonious group. It cannot do it with the brilliant; only freedom will make them harmonious. (213)

  You read a paragraph like that some forty-five years after it was written, and you think, Of course. Who doesn’t know that conformity stifles scientific endeavor? Surely DuPont understood that, even back in the 1950s.

  But then I took a closer look at the ad and realized that my initial assumption about it had been completely wrong. As it happens, DuPont did indeed want to repudiate Whyte—but not by saying that corporations were less conformist than he described. On the contrary, it wanted to defend that quality—to elevate it, to ennoble it, to make a virtue of it. In the ad, Bernie the Beatnik claims that he’d never take a job with a big company: “Go to work every day, do what you’re told, lose your freedom,” he grumbles. To which DuPont triumphantly replies: “It’s true that the organization men we know go to work every day. They don’t think of this as losing their freedom but as pursuing a freedom that can be enjoyed only so long as have a strong, creative and productive nation.” In other words, in sublimating your individuality, you weren’t just helping your company. You were helping your country. The Organization Ad, I guess you could call it.

  What is it we believe today about the relationship between corporations and individuals? We believe, first of all, that large corporations such as General Motors and, yes, DuPont, remain hugely important institutions—that much hasn’t changed since Whyte wrote The Organization Man. They employ tens of millions of people, serve as critical engines of economic growth and prosperity, and influence the culture in incalculable ways. Although there was a fleeting moment in the late 1990s when corporations were being described as dinosaurs, no one really thinks that any more. Big corporations are as embedded into the fabric of the country today as they were in the 1950s.

  What has changed, of course, is the way we deal with the corporations that employ us—and the way corporations deal with us. Very few people join a company assuming they’ll spend the rest of their career in that one place. They’re no longer willing to move from city to city at the behest of the company, as they did when The Organization Man was published. (Nor, I might add, are the ranks of middle managers largely the preserve of men any more.) People don’t assume that being loyal to one company will be rewarded in the end. They look for their own opportunities instead of waiting for the company to hand opportunities to them. Many people have fine and productive careers without ever spending a day in the employ of a large corporation. For its part, the company accepts these realities and sometimes even embraces them. Loyalty, after all, is hardly a corporate virtue any more.

  But, as profound as these changes are, there is another that is every bit as important. Within companies, individuality is now a virtue instead of a vice. It has become conventional wisdom that corporate bureaucracies are deadly, that too many meetings are a waste of time, that contrar
y opinions have enormous value, that conflict can be healthy, and that most great ideas—not just in the research lab, but in the marketing department, among the sales force, and in the executive suite—are more likely to come from a single person with an original thought than from any number of well-meaning task forces. For employees, meanwhile, a chance to retain their individuality makes it far more likely that they’ll actually like their jobs. A few years ago, a magazine called Fast Company was founded with the explicit mission of trumpeting the importance of individuality in corporate life—for both the individual and the company. In a March 2001 cover story, the magazine claimed that all true, radical innovation begins as the work of a deviant.* That pretty much sums it up. An ad like the one DuPont ran in reaction to The Organization Man—it’s not even conceivable today. No corporation would argue that conformity is better than individuality. No corporation believes it anymore.

  Of the handful of famous books published in the 1950s decrying the values of the era—The Lonely Crowd, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and The Power Elite among them—none have stayed with us the way The Organization Man has. Even though the book has been out of print for years—an oversight that is being happily corrected with this new edition—its title has long since entered the language. It instantly conjures someone we recognize: our former selves. It’s who we used to be—or, for baby boomers, who our parents used to be—but (we like to think) it’s not who we are any more.

  For that same reason, though, there is a tendency to view Whyte as one of those 1950s futurists who made predictions that turned out to be laughably wrong-headed, a little like the people who used to claim that one day we’d all be driving nuclear-powered cars or taking quick trips to the moon. “Whyte’s portrait was damning, or at least depressing,” wrote Reason editor Virginia Postrel in January 1999, shortly after Whyte died. “Of course,” she promptly added, “it all sounds like nonsense today.”† But Postrel was wrong in her assessment. What struck me in rereading The Organization Man—indeed, what gives the book its power today—is not that Whyte turned out to be wrong. Rather, it is that he turned out to be right about so very, very much.

  Years later it would be claimed that the author of The Organization Man had been an organization man himself; after all, hadn’t Whyte been employed by Time, Inc. during the years he was working on the book? But while he may have worked for an organization, Whyte was never an organization man, and he never saw himself in those terms. On the contrary, it was precisely because he wasn’t one of them that he could see them with such impressive clarity. Organization men blended in; Whyte, by contrast, was blessed with an independence of mind that he never shed and never tried to. Organization men put the needs of the company ahead of their own desires. But at Fortune—the Time, Inc. magazine where he held the title of assistant managing editor—Whyte was always one of those “difficult” writers, the kind who was forever angling for a little more time, a little more space, a little more everything. In effect, he put his need to ensure that his work was great ahead of the magazine’s need to publish it on time. (He once wrote that “messiness, inadvertence, paranoia, time and benign neglect” were the five qualities necessary to produce a good Fortune article.* Organization men spent their lives at one company; Whyte’s longest stint at any one place was thirteen years—the time he spent working for Fortune. When he left Time, Inc. in 1958, he was just forty years old. Though he continued to write a steady stream of important books and studies practically until his death forty-one years later—becoming in that time one of the country’s most respected urbanologists—he never worked for an organization again. As his reputation as an urban thinker grew, developers sometimes approached him, offering handsome stipends if he would lend his imprimatur to this or that project. Though there were times when he could certainly have used the money, he never took it. He didn’t want to be compromised. That’s hardly the mind set of the organization man.

  Born in 1917, in the then graceful town of West Chester, Pennsylvania, William Hollingsworth Whyte—known all his life as “Holly”—grew up in circumstances quite different from the vast bulk of postwar strivers who would comprise the class he chronicled in his book. To put it bluntly, he came from a family of some means. His great-grandfather had been a wealthy Baltimore merchant, his grandfather a surgeon, his father a railroad executive. As a boy, Whyte summered in Cape Cod, where his grandmother owned a cottage, he would later recall, “with silver doorknobs.” During much of the Depression—an event that powerfully affected his generation but gets surprisingly short shrift in The Organization Man—Whyte was happily ensconced in boarding school. After that came Princeton, from which he graduated in 1939, and then out into the world of work, which in his case meant taking a sales job at the Vick Chemical Company.

  It’s almost comical to think of Holly Whyte, fresh out of Princeton, tramping through the dirt roads of Kentucky trying to persuade small town merchants to stock up on such products as Vick’s VapoRub. And, indeed, it did have its comic elements, as you’ll see in Chapter 9, where Whyte describes the Vick training program and his subsequent two years as a not-very-good salesman. But he also came away from the experience with a grudging admiration for the Vick “survival of the fittest” ethos—a sharp contrast to the less rigorous training programs that grew up around the organization men after the war.

  By the time of Pearl Harbor, Whyte was a lieutenant in the Marines. An intelligence officer, he fought in Guadalcanal, but came down with case of malaria that he couldn’t shake. Sent back to the United States in the summer of 1943, he spent the rest of war teaching at the Marine Corps schools in Quantico, Virginia. Many years later, one writer would wonder aloud about what blind spot caused Whyte to miss the fact that it was organization men who had won the war. “Nowhere does he indicate that the leaders of the institutions he criticizes had learned the value of organization and teamwork during World War II, often as members of the armed forces, and that organization and teamwork made a vital contribution to Allied victory.”* But to read A Time of War, the memoir Whyte wrote about Guadalcanal, is to realize that Whyte viewed the Marines as precisely the kind of dynamic organization that stood in contrast to the corporations and other institutions he studied in the 1950s. What had made the difference on Guadalcanal, Whyte believed, was strong leadership, courage, and a willingness to take intelligent risks. Real leadership, in particular, was a quality Whyte believed was being drained out of organizations, and, as you’ll see in the pages that follow, he worried a great deal about whether the organization men would even evolve into true, decisive leaders. He had his doubts.

  During his time at Quantico, Whyte wrote a series of lengthy, closely-observed articles for the Marine Gazette about the campaign in Guadalcanal. Those clips, along with his pedigree—in the 1950s, WASP Ivy League graduates never had much of a problem landing positions at Time, Inc.—got him a job as a staff writer at Fortune. He got off to a rocky start—”I was so bad,” he later wrote, “that I was not fired, but kept on as an exhibit.”* But in time it became clear that Fortune was the perfect hothouse for his particular talents to bloom.

  When people think of the glory days of Fortune, they tend to dwell on the magazine’s first decade, the 1930s. It commissioned works of art for its covers. Its photographs were of museum quality. Its staff included such legendary writers as Dwight McDonald, Archibald McLeish, and James Agee, whose classic work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was conceived (though never published) as a Fortune article. But those writers—and many others on the early staff—did not take any special pride in creating the magazine. Many of them were committed leftists, who took Time, Inc. founder Henry Luce’s money while disdaining his brand of pragmatic conservatism. “This monstrosity,” Dwight McDonald would later call Fortune in an essay about his seven years at the magazine—an essay largely spent deriding the stories he wrote and the people he worked with (“I got Agee a job on Fortune in 1932; he was grateful, but shouldn’t have been”).† Indeed, for much o
f the 1930s, the mood of the staff was one of alienated labor.

  The Fortune of the 1950s was another matter entirely. The writers and editors were genuinely interested in the subject of big corporations and business in general, and most of them loved writing about it. But more than that, there was a feeling of enormous intellectual ferment at the magazine, a sense that they were creating a new kind of business journalism. They began viewing business the way a sociologist might, reporting not just on which company was doing what, but on what companies had in common, on how corporate strategy was devised, and on what life was like inside a big company. Eventually Fortune took as its mission the goal of exploring not just corporate life but American life and the way the two intertwined. And the person most responsible for turning Fortune in this new and exciting direction was William H. Whyte.

  His first major article for the magazine set the tone for what was to come. Whyte was assigned to write about Yale’s Class of ’49 by Fortunes managing editor, who had been told—by Yale president Whitney Griswold, no less—that it was “one of the finest college classes to come out of Yale University ever.” But Whyte came away from his interviews at Yale distinctly unimpressed. “So I continued to talk to people,” he later wrote,

  listening, without prejudice, to what these members of the Class of ’49 were saying, and I confirmed my original impression. This class, at Yale and everywhere else, weren’t so hot…. These young people weren’t seeking excitement, or challenge. They wanted a safe haven. They wanted to work for AT&T and General Electric, for heaven’s sake!

  The story was just the opposite of what we had expected. It made for a shocking piece—shocking, that is, to that generation who still believed in rugged individualism. This was man-bites-dog, and it clinched my job at Fortune. … I had observed carefully, and listened attentively, and all the while I had kept my mind open to the possibility that the famous president of Yale University might be wrong.*