The Organization Man Read online

  While the degree of their optimism is peculiarly American, the spirit of acquiescence, it should be noted, is by no means confined to the youth of this country. In an Oxford magazine, called, aptly enough, Couth, one student writes this of his generation:

  It is true that over the last thirty years it has been elementary good manners to be depressed…. But … we are not, really, in the least worried by our impending, and other people’s present, disasters. This is not the Age of Anxiety. What distinguishes the comfortable young men of today from the uncomfortable young men of the last hundred years … is that for once the younger generation is not in revolt against anything…. We don’t want to rebel against our elders. They are much too nice to be rebellable-against. Old revolutionaries as they are, they get rather cross with us and tell us we are stuffy and prudish, but even this can’t provoke us into hostility…. Our fathers … brought us up to see them not as the representatives of ancient authority and unalterable law but as rebels against our grandfathers. So naturally we have grown up to be on their side, even if we feel on occasion that they were a wee bit hard on their fathers, or even a little naïve.*

  More than before, there is a tremendous interest in techniques. Having no quarrel with society, they prefer to table the subject of ends and concentrate instead on means. Not what or why but how interests them, and any evangelical strain they have they can sublimate; once they have equated the common weal with organization—a task the curriculum makes easy—they will let the organization worry about goals. “These men do not question the system,” an economics professor says of them, approvingly. “They want to get in there and lubricate and make them run better. They will be technicians of the society, not innovators.”

  The attitude of men majoring in social science is particularly revealing on this score. Not so very long ago, the younger social scientist was apt to see his discipline as a vehicle for protest about society as well as the study of it. The seniors that set the fashion for him were frequently angry men, and many of the big studies of the twenties and thirties—Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown, for example—did not conceal strong opinions about the inequities in the social structure. But this is now old hat: it is the “bleeding-heart” school to the younger men (and to some not so young, too), for they do not wish to protest; they wish to collaborate. Reflecting the growing reconciliation with middle-class values that has affected all types of intellectuals, they are turning more and more to an interest in methodology, particularly the techniques of measurement. Older social scientists who have done studies on broad social problems find that the younger men are comparatively uninterested in the problems themselves. When the discussion period comes, the questions the younger men ask are on the technical points; not the what, or why, but the how.

  The urge to be a technician, a collaborator, shows most markedly in the kind of jobs seniors prefer. They want to work for somebody else. Paradoxically, the old dream of independence through a business of one’s own is held almost exclusively by factory workers —the one group, as a number of sociologists have reported, least able to fulfill it. Even at the bull-session level college seniors do not affect it, and when recruiting time comes around they make the preference clear. Consistently, placement officers find that of the men who intend to go into business—roughly one half of the class —less than 5 per cent express any desire to be an entrepreneur. About 15 to 20 per cent plan to go into their fathers’ business. Of the rest, most have one simple goal: the big corporation.

  And not just as a stopgap either. When I was a senior many of us liked to rationalize that we were simply playing it smart; we were going with big companies merely to learn the ropes the better to strike out on our own later. Today, seniors do not bother with this sort of talk; once the tie has been established with the big company, they believe, they will not switch to a small one, or, for that matter, to another big one. The relationship is to be for keeps.*

  It is not simply for security that they take the vows. Far more than their predecessors they understand bigness. My contemporaries, fearful of anonymity, used to talk of “being lost” in a big corporation. This did not prevent us from joining corporations, to be sure, but verbally, at least, it was fashionable to view the organization way with misgivings. Today this would show a want of sophistication. With many of the liberals who fifteen years ago helped stimulate the undergraduate distrust of bigness now busy writing tracts in praise of bigness, the ideological underpinnings for the debate have crumbled.

  The fact that a majority of seniors headed for business shy from the idea of being entrepreneurs is only in part due to fear of economic risk. Seniors can put the choice in moral terms also, and the portrait of the entrepreneur as a young man detailed in postwar fiction preaches a sermon that seniors are predisposed to accept. What price bitch goddess Success? The entrepreneur, as many see him, is a selfish type motivated by greed, and he is, furthermore, unhappy. The big-time operator as sketched in fiction eventually so loses stomach for enterprise that he finds happiness only when he stops being an entrepreneur, forsakes “21,” El Morocco, and the boss’s wife and heads for the country. Citing such fiction, the student can moralize on his aversion to entrepreneurship. His heel quotient, he explains, is simply not big enough.

  Not that he is afraid of risk, the senior can argue. Far from being afraid of taking chances, he is simply looking for the best place to take them in.* Small business is small because of nepotism and the roll-top desk outlook, the argument goes; big business, by contrast, has borrowed the tools of science and made them pay off. It has its great laboratories, its market-research departments, and the time and patience to use them. The odds, then, favor the man who joins big business. “We wouldn’t hesitate to risk adopting new industrial techniques and products,” explains a proponent of this calculated-risk theory, “but we would do it only after we had subjected it to tests of engineers, pre-testing in the market and that kind of thing.” With big business, in short, risk-taking would be a cinch.

  In turning their back on the protestant ethic they are consistent; if they do not cherish venture, neither do they cherish what in our lore was its historic reward. They are without avarice. Reflecting on the difference between the postwar classes and his own class of 1928, an erstwhile Yale history professor confessed that the former were so unmercenary he was almost a little homesick for his own. “We were a terrible class. It was the days of the roasted lark, Hell’s entries, of the white-shoe boys. Everyone was playing the stock market—they even had a ticker down at the Hotel Taft—and I wound up for a while in a bucket shop down in Wall Street. But today you don’t hear that kind of talk. They don’t want a million. They are much more serious, much more worth while.” He shook his head nostalgically.

  Others have been similarly impressed. One recruiter went through three hundred interviews without one senior’s mentioning salary, and the experience is not unusual. Indeed, sometimes seniors react as if a large income and security were antithetical. As some small companies have found to their amazement, the offer of a sales job netting $15,000 at the end of two years is often turned down in favor of an equivalent one with a large company netting $8,000. Along with the $8,000 job, the senior says in justification, goes a pension plan and other benefits. He could, of course, buy himself some rather handsome annuities with the extra $7,000 the small company offers, but this alternative does not suggest itself readily.

  When seniors are put to speculating how much money they would like to make twenty or thirty years hence, they cite what they feel are modest figures. Back in forty-nine it was $10,000. Since then the rising cost of living has taken it up higher, but the median doesn’t usually surpass $15,000.* For the most part seniors do not like to talk of the future in terms of the dollar—on several occasions I have been politely lectured by someone for so much as bringing the point up.

  In popular fiction, as I will take up later, heroes aren’t any less materialistic than they used to be, but they are decidedly more s
anctimonious about it. So with seniors. While they talk little about money, they talk a great deal about the good life. This life is, first of all, calm and ordered. Many a senior confesses that he’s thought of a career in teaching, but as he talks it appears that it is not so much that he likes teaching itself as the sort of life he associates with it—there is a touch of elms and quiet streets in the picture. For the good life is equable; it is a nice place out in the suburbs, a wife and three children, one, maybe two cars (you know, a little knock-about for the wife to run down to the station in), and a summer place up at the lake or out on the Cape, and, later, a good college education for the children. It is not, seniors explain, the money that counts.

  They have been getting more and more relaxed on the matter each year. In the immediate postwar years they were somewhat nervous about the chances for the good life. They seemed almost psychotic on the subject of a depression, and when they explained a preference for the big corporation, they did so largely on the grounds of security. When I talked to students in 1949, on almost every campus I heard one recurring theme: adventure was all very well, but it was smarter to make a compromise in order to get a depression-proof sanctuary. “I don’t think A T & T is very exciting,” one senior put it, “but that’s the company I’d like to join. If a depression comes there will always be an A T & T.” (Another favorite was the food industry: people always have to eat.) Corporation recruiters were unsettled to find that seniors seemed primarily interested in such things as pension benefits and retirement programs.

  Seven years of continuing prosperity have made a great difference. Students are still interested in security but they no longer see it as a matter of security versus opportunity. Now, when they explain their choice, it is that the corporation is security and opportunity both. If the questionnaires that I have been giving groups of college seniors over the past six years are any indication, students aiming for the big corporation expect to make just as much money as those who say they want to start their own business or join a small one.*

  Who is to blame them for being contented? If you were a senior glancing at these ad headlines in the Journal of College Placement, how much foreboding would you feel?

  A WORLD OF EXPANDING OPPORTUNITY

  OPPORTUNITY UNLIMITED

  CAREERS UNLIMITED

  THE HORIZONS ARE UNLIMITED FOR COLLEGE GRADUATES

  AT UNION CARBIDE

  A GATEWAY TO LIFETIME SECURITY

  A WISE CHOICE TODAY PUTS YOU AHEAD OF YOUR FUTURE

  WHY THEY’RE SURE THEY’RE IN THE RIGHT JOB AT HARNSCHFEGER

  TO THE YOUNG MAN BENT ON CONQUERING THE UNKNOWN

  A SECOND EDUCATION

  GROWTH COMPANY IN A GROWTH INDUSTRY

  “BRAIN BOX” NEEDS BRAINS

  SO YOU WANT TO GO INTO BUSINESS

  WHY COLLEGE GRADUATES SHOULD CONSIDER UNION CARBIDE

  A MAN CAN GROW AND KEEP ON GROWING WITH OWENS-ILLINOIS GLASS CO.

  A BRIGHT FUTURE WITH RCA

  DOW OFFERS THE GRADUATE A BRIGHT FUTURE

  MORE AND BETTER JOBS

  EXCEPTIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR COLLEGE MAN IN TEXTILE SALES

  AN EQUITABLE LIFE INSURANCE MAN IS “A MAN ON HIS WAY UP”

  GROUND-FLOOR OPPORTUNITIES IN TRANSISTORS

  VITRO OFFERS YOUR GRADUATES THE ENGINEERS OF TOMORROW!

  YOUR OPPORTUNITY FOR A LIFETIME CAREER

  OPPORTUNITY FOR YOUR COLLEGE GRADUATES

  OPPORTUNITIES FOR MATH MAJORS

  AN UNUSUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR OUTSTANDING MATH MAJORS

  THE SKY IS OUR WORLD

  THE SKY IS THE LIMIT!

  It would be enough to make a man cynical. But the students are not a cynical lot. When they talk about security they like to make the point that it is the psychic kind of security that interests them most. They want to be of service. Occasionally, their description of service borders on the mawkish, as though the goal was simply to defend the little people, but underneath there is real concern. Seniors want to do something worth while.

  This worth-whileness needs some qualification. To listen to seniors talk, one would assume that there has been an upsurge of seniors heading toward such service careers as the ministry. There is no evidence of such a rush. The public variety of service doesn’t attract either. Seniors scarcely mention politics as a career and even for the more aseptic forms of public service they show little enthusiasm; the number aiming for the foreign services or the civil services has been declining, and this decline was well under way before the Washington investigations.

  If they are going to be worth while, seniors want to be worth while with other people. Their ideal of service is a gregarious one—the kind of service you do others right in the midst of them and not once removed. A student at a round-table discussion on the pursuit of happiness put it this way: “People who are just selfish and wrapped up in themselves have the most trouble. And people who are interested in other people … are the type of person that is not too much concerned with security. Somehow the security is provided in the things they do, and they are able to reach out beyond themselves.”

  The kind of work that students want to do within the corporation illumines the character of this concept of worth-whileness. What the preferences show is a strong inclination toward the staff rather than the line. In a check I made of two hundred corporation-bound students of the classes of ’55 and ’56, only 12 per cent said they were aiming for production work, while roughly a third indicated a staff job.

  Of these, the personnel slot is the glamour one. When seniors first expressed this yen for personnel work right after the war, many people thought it was simply a temporary phenomenon. The veterans of the postwar classes labored under the idea that because they had “handled people” in the services they were ideally suited for personnel work, and the advice given them by Veterans Administration counselors further confirmed them in the belief. But the years have gone by, and the quest has persisted. Wearily, placement directors explain that the work is semiprofessional, that there are few openings in it, and that in any event they are rarely open to recruits. It still doesn’t seem to make much difference. With a phrase that has become a standing joke in placement circles, the senior explains that it is the job for him just the same—he likes people.

  His vision of the job is a mirage. The actual work is connected more with time study, aptitude testing, and stop watches than adjusting people, but to the senior it seems to promise the agreeable role of a combination YMCA worker, office Solomon, and father confessor to the men at the lathes. It promises also to be somewhat out of the main stream. Much like life in the services, it seems to offer a certain freedom from competition; it is a technician’s job, the job of one who services others. For a class intent on the happy mean, it is the all-round package: not only does it promise economic security, it promises spiritual security as well.

  Because the quest has been so long unrequited, seniors have been turning to public relations. In some colleges it has already outdistanced personnel work as a choice. But it is really the same job they are thinking about. The senior does not see himself worrying about seating lists for banquets, ghostwriting speeches, or the like; in his vision he sees the universal man of the future, testing the pulse of the workers to see that they are happy, counseling with educators and clergymen for better inter-group communication, spellbinding the mossbacks with advocacy of the common man. As in personnel work, he will be nice to everybody on company time.

  When seniors check such ostensibly line occupations as sales, they still exhibit the staff bias. For they don’t actually want to sell. What they mean by sales is the kind of work in which they will be technical specialists helping the customer, or, better yet, masterminding the work of those who do the helping. They want to be sales engineers, distribution specialists, merchandising experts—the men who back up the men in the field.

  If they must sell in the old, vulgar sense of the word, they want to do it as a member of a group and not as a lone indi
vidual. And most definitely, they do not want to sell on commission. This has been made quite clear in the reception given life insurance recruiters. Except when they have home office jobs to offer, insurance recruiters have always had fairly rough going in the colleges, but it’s now so difficult that sometimes they sit in the interview room a whole day without a senior once coming near them. Mainly out of commiseration for the recruiters, one placement director uses a stratagem to force students into signing up for insurance interviews. “I tell them it’s good for the practice,” he explains. “I also tell them that if they don’t turn up for these interviews I won’t let them have a crack later at those nice big corporations.”

  Those who mark down finance as a choice are also staff-minded. Few ever mention speculating or investing in stocks and bonds. Their interest in finance is administrative rather than accumulative; they are primarily interested in credit, mortgage loan work, trust and estate work, and financial analysis.

  A distinction is in order. While the fundamental bias is for staff work, it is not necessarily for a staff job. If the choice is offered them, a considerable number of students will vote for “general managerial” work, and many who choose personnel or public relations do so with the idea that it is the best pathway to the top line jobs. Seniors see no antithesis; in their view the line and staff have become so synonymous that the comfortable pigeonhole and the ladder, to mix some favorite metaphors, are one and the same. Their concept of the manager subsumes the two. As older executives are so fond of telling them, the “professionalization” of the executive is making a new kind of man, and more literally than the older men know, the younger ones believe every word of it. In fact, of course, as well as in the senior’s fancy, the manager’s work has been shifted more to the administrative. But not half so much as seniors would like to see it. In this respect, as so many business-school people hopefully say, seniors are way ahead of everybody else.