The Organization Man Read online

  Whyte didn’t just clinch his job; he also found the subject that would engage him for the better part of the next decade. He wrote about many other things, of course—his first book, which also grew out of a Fortune project, tackled the subject of corporate communications—but he kept circling back to the set of ideas he’d stumbled across in that first story. In May 1953, he wrote an article called “The Transients,” which chronicled the way the new cookie-cutter suburbs were becoming, as he put it, “the dormitory of the next managerial class.” Six months later, he wrote “How the New Suburbia Socializes,” which became Chapter 25—retitled “The Web of Friendship”—in The Organization Man. Over the next few years he wrote about the new corporate wife, about his time at Vick, and about the growing corporate reliance on personality tests to weed out independent thinkers. (The magazine was also where he devised his famous appendix to The Organization Man, “How To Cheat on Personality Tests.”) Having spotted the future organization man in 1949, just as he was graduating from college, Whyte, in effect, kept track of him as he began to make his way up the ranks.

  The Organization Man created a small sensation when it was published. Its thesis was debated, denounced, lauded—and talked about all over the country. It also became a best-seller. But having spent some eight years reporting on, and thinking about, organization men, Whyte was ready to move on. He had begun to explore in Fortune a new interest: cities and what makes them work. That interest evolved into a lifelong passion, and every book he wrote after The Organization Man was about city life. He was also ready to move on from Fortune, and the money he made from the book allowed him to do that. He had become increasingly unhappy at Fortune, especially after he was informed that he would not become the magazine’s next managing editor. There was some talk of Luce starting a new publication that Whyte would run; a few memos between Luce and Whyte were exchanged, but nothing ever came of it. When he left in 1958, he never looked back.

  “My strength has been the ability to see things other people have missed,” Whyte used to say, and The Organization Man is nothing if not a brilliant case in point. Whyte was first and foremost a great reporter, endlessly inquisitive, always willing to “observe carefully and listen attentively.” He was forever conducting clever little reportorial experiments to test out this or that hypothesis. (See, for instance, the wonderful questionnaire he sends to 150 heads of personnel and 150 CEOs in Chapter 10.) His deconstruction of suburban life was nothing short of astonishing. If he understood corporate life and how it was going awry—and he did—it was because he watched it up close, asked penetrating question of people up and down the managerial ranks, and then wrote down what he saw. Though The Organization Man is full of sweeping generalities, those generalities have the ring of truth because they are based on good old-fashioned shoe leather. Whatever complaints people had about The Organization Man, almost no one said that his observations were off-base. They couldn’t say that.

  The Organization Man has another quality, though—and this is what made it controversial in its time, and makes it important in our time. It is, at bottom, a jeremiad. To be sure, Whyte does not write the kind of fire-and-brim-stone prose one expects to find in a jeremiad, but neither is The Organization Man filled with the dispassionate prose of the detached observer. On the subject of organization men, Whyte was decidedly not detached. He was passionately opposed to the trends he was chronicling, and his book is propelled by a powerful sense of urgency. Again and again in The Organization Man, you come across sentences, paragraphs, entire chapters in which Whyte seems to be trying to grab his readers by the lapels and say, “Don’t go down this path!”

  Listen to him, for instance, on the subject of “getting along”—the quality that was valued above all others inside the big corporations of the 1950s: “To preach technique before content, the skills of getting along isolated from why and to what end the getting along is for, does not produce maturity. It produces a sort of permanent prematurity, and this is true not only of the child being taught life adjustment but of the organization man being taught well-roundedness” (396).

  Here he is on the triumph of mediocrity: “Anti-authoritarianism is becoming anti-leadership. In group doctrine the strong personality is viewed with overwhelming suspicion. The co-operative are those who take a stance directly over the keel; the man with ideas—in translation, prejudices—leans to one side or, worse, heads for the rudder. Plainly, he is a threat. Skim through current group handbooks, conference leaders’ tool kits and the like, and you find what sounds very much like a call to arms by the mediocre against their enemies” (53-54).

  He bemoans the glorification of groups: “The most misguided attempt at false collectivization is the current attempt to see the group as a creative vehicle. Can it be? People very rarely think in groups; they talk together, they exchange information, they adjudicate, they make compromises. But they do not think; they do not create” (51).

  And on, and on. He laments the growth of bureaucracy, the rise of the “personnel man” (now known, of course, as the HR department), the desire for lifelong security, the foolish belief that raw talent was no longer particularly necessary, and the way the “system” was stamping out independent thought. As he put it, “The hunch that wasn’t followed up. The controversial point that didn’t get debated. The idea that was suppressed. Were these acts of group cooperation or individual surrender? We are taking away from the individual the ability to even ask the question” (59).

  Unlike some of the other social critics of the 1950s, Whyte was not against large corporations per se. He accepted their prominence and their importance in American life. As a business writer, he understood how critical they were to the nation’s prosperity. But he wanted them to function effectively, and he wanted people to be able function effectively within them. And he thought the emphasis on eliminating the messiness of human interaction had it exactly backward: “We are describing [the organization’s] defects as virtues and denying that there is—or should be—a conflict between the individual and the organization. This denial is bad for the organization” (13).

  As I’ve said earlier, this view is now so widespread in the culture that it can scarcely even be described as conventional wisdom any more. It’s practically second nature to view things the way Whyte did in 1956. But what is second nature to us now was profound insight in the mid-1950s, when nobody thought in those terms—or at least nobody within the organizations Whyte was writing about. Simply for being so far ahead of the curve, Whyte deserves enormous credit.

  But he deserves credit for something else as well. Let’s think for just a minute about how it was that corporations—and the people working within them—came around to Whyte’s view of things. You can argue—and I won’t disagree—that a lot of it had to do with the cultural changes that took place in America in 1960s and 1970s. The Vietnam War protests. The need for baby boomers to rebel against their parents. Watergate, and the country’s loss of trust in large institutions, from government to corporations to churches. And so on. Baby boomers entered the workplace with a built-in skepticism toward large corporations and a powerful need to “do their own thing.” Ultimately, individualism simply overwhelmed any large-scale effort to suppress it.

  But I would make a second argument—namely, that the modern history of corporations was every bit as important as these large cultural forces in imposing change on the way big companies went about their business. Here was giant General Motors, its supremacy unchallenged in the 1950s and 1960s, suddenly finding itself losing market share to Japanese auto makers in the 1970s—and completely at a loss as to how to change course. Here was IBM, the dominant technology company for much of its history—and a company so enamored of corporate conformity that it mandated that its entire male staff wear white shirts. Suddenly under assault from smaller, nimbler, less bureaucratic companies, IBM’s leadership—all organization men, who had come up through the ranks—were paralyzed. Again and again you saw it: these big, bureaucra
tic, inward-looking companies—the very companies that had long valued consensus over conflict and had frowned on individualism and entrepreneurship—coming under attack in the 1980s, as world competition heated up. Their inability to innovate was costing them dearly. Their unwillingness to make tough, often unpopular decisions was driving down their stock price, and making them takeover candidates. Their bland leaders lacked the necessary decisiveness. Their refusal to deal with new competition amounted to a form of corporate denial.

  In other words, every fear Whyte had expressed in The Organization Man twenty-five years before had, in fact, come true. And how did corporate America right itself? Under enormous pressure from outside forces (I’m thinking especially of the corporate raiders of the 1980s), they belatedly took Whyte’s advice to heart. They jettisoned the bureaucracy. They began to listen to the dissenting voices in their ranks. They championed renegade “skunkworks” projects and created corporate “cultures” that would spark innovation. They began firing bland, indecisive leaders, and replacing them with non-organization men. The message of The Organization Man, for so long ignored, had finally gotten through.

  There are, to be sure, parts of The Organization Man that seem as dated as a hula hoop. But so much of what Whyte tried to warn against has relevance today. And almost all of it still makes tremendous sense. In his time, William H. Whyte was a prophet without honor. But now we know how right he was. This new edition of The Organization Man reminds us anew of lessons we can never afford to forget.

  *Ryan Matthews and Watts Wacker, “Deviants, Inc.,” Fast Company, March 2002, p. 70.

  †Virginia Postrel, “Has The Organization Man Aged: Nostalgia’s Illusions,” New York Times op-ed, January 17, 1999.

  *Whyte, “How to Back into a Fortune Story,” in Daniel Bell et al., Writing for Fortune: Nineteen Authors Remember Life on the Staff of a Remarkable Magazine (New York: Time, Inc., 1980), 189.

  *James C. Bradford, Introduction to Whyte, A Time of War: Remembering Guadalcanal, a Battle (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), xv.

  *Writing for Fortune, 189.

  †Dwight McDonald, “Against the Grain,” Writing for Fortune, 149.

  *Whyte, A Time of War, 106.

  PART ONE

  The Ideology of Organization Man

  CHAPTER 1 Introduction

  This book is about the organization man. If the term is vague, it is because I can think of no other way to describe the people I am talking about. They are not the workers, nor are they the white-collar people in the usual, clerk sense of the word. These people only work for The Organization. The ones I am talking about belong to it as well. They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions. Only a few are top managers or ever will be. In a system that makes such hazy terminology as “junior executive” psychologically necessary, they are of the staff as much as the line, and most are destined to live poised in a middle area that still awaits a satisfactory euphemism. But they are the dominant members of our society nonetheless. They have not joined together into a recognizable elite—our country does not stand still long enough for that—but it is from their ranks that are coming most of the first and second echelons of our leadership, and it is their values which will set the American temper.

  The corporation man is the most conspicuous example, but he is only one, for the collectivization so visible in the corporation has affected almost every field of work. Blood brother to the business trainee off to join Du Pont is the seminary student who will end up in the church hierarchy, the doctor headed for the corporate clinic, the physics Ph.D. in a government laboratory, the intellectual on the foundation-sponsored team project, the engineering graduate in the huge drafting room at Lockheed, the young apprentice in a Wall Street law factory.

  They are all, as they so often put it, in the same boat. Listen to them talk to each other over the front lawns of their suburbia and you cannot help but be struck by how well they grasp the common denominators which bind them. Whatever the differences in their organization ties, it is the common problems of collective work that dominate their attentions, and when the Du Pont man talks to the research chemist or the chemist to the army man, it is these problems that are uppermost. The word collective most of them can’t bring themselves to use—except to describe foreign countries or organizations they don’t work for—but they are keenly aware of how much more deeply beholden they are to organization than were their elders. They are wry about it, to be sure; they talk of the “treadmill,” the “rat race,” of the inability to control one’s direction. But they have no great sense of plight; between themselves and organization they believe they see an ultimate harmony and, more than most elders recognize, they are building an ideology that will vouchsafe this trust.

  It is the growth of this ideology, and its practical effects, that is the thread I wish to follow in this book. America has paid much attention to the economic and political consequences of big organization—the concentration of power in large corporations, for example, the political power of the civil-service bureaucracies, the possible emergence of a managerial hierarchy that might dominate the rest of us. These are proper concerns, but no less important is the principal impact that organization life has had on the individuals within it. A collision has been taking place—indeed, hundreds of thousands of them, and in the aggregate they have been producing what I believe is a major shift in American ideology.

  Officially, we are a people who hold to the Protestant Ethic. Because of the denominational implications of the term many would deny its relevance to them, but let them eulogize the American Dream, however, and they virtually define the Protestant Ethic. Whatever the embroidery, there is almost always the thought that pursuit of individual salvation through hard work, thrift, and competitive struggle is the heart of the American achievement.

  But the harsh facts of organization life simply do not jibe with these precepts. This conflict is certainly not a peculiarly American development. In their own countries such Europeans as Max Weber and Durkheim many years ago foretold the change, and though Europeans now like to see their troubles as an American export, the problems they speak of stem from a bureaucratization of society that has affected every Western country.

  It is in America, however, that the contrast between the old ethic and current reality has been most apparent—and most poignant. Of all peoples it is we who have led in the public worship of individualism. One hundred years ago De Tocqueville was noting that though our special genius—and failing—lay in co-operative action, we talked more than others of personal independence and freedom. We kept on, and as late as the twenties, when big organization was long since a fact, affirmed the old faith as if nothing had really changed at all.

  Today many still try, and it is the members of the kind of organization most responsible for the change, the corporation, who try the hardest. It is the corporation man whose institutional ads protest so much that Americans speak up in town meeting, that Americans are the best inventors because Americans don’t care that other people scoff, that Americans are the best soldiers because they have so much initiative and native ingenuity, that the boy selling papers on the street corner is the prototype of our business society. Collectivism? He abhors it, and when he makes his ritualistic attack on Welfare Statism, it is in terms of a Protestant Ethic undefiled by change—the sacredness of property, the enervating effect of security, the virtues of thrift, of hard work and independence. Thanks be, he says, that there are some people left—e.g., businessmen—to defend the American Dream.

  He is not being hypocritical, only compulsive. He honestly wants to believe he follows the tenets he extols, and if he extols them so frequently it is, perhaps, to shut out a nagging suspicion that he, too, the last defender of the faith, is no longer pure. Only by using the language of individualism to describe the collective can
he stave off the thought that he himself is in a collective as pervading as any ever dreamed of by the reformers, the intellectuals, and the Utopian visionaries he so regularly warns against.

  The older generation may still convince themselves; the younger generation does not. When a young man says that to make a living these days you must do what somebody else wants you to do, he states it not only as a fact of life that must be accepted but as an inherently good proposition. If the American Dream deprecates this for him, it is the American Dream that is going to have to give, whatever its more elderly guardians may think. People grow restive with a mythology that is too distant from the way things actually are, and as more and more lives have been encompassed by the organization way of life, the pressures for an accompanying ideological shift have been mounting. The pressures of the group, the frustrations of individual creativity, the anonymity of achievement: are these defects to struggle against—or are they virtues in disguise? The organization man seeks a redefinition of his place on earth—a faith that will satisfy him that what he must endure has a deeper meaning than appears on the surface. He needs, in short, something that will do for him what the Protestant Ethic did once. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, a body of thought has been coalescing that does that.

  I am going to call it a Social Ethic. With reason it could be called an organization ethic, or a bureaucratic ethic; more than anything else it rationalizes the organization’s demands for fealty and gives those who offer it wholeheartedly a sense of dedication in doing so—in extremis, you might say, it converts what would seem in other times a bill of no rights into a restatement of individualism.

  But there is a real moral imperative behind it, and whether one inclines to its beliefs or not he must acknowledge that this moral basis, not mere expediency, is the source of its power. Nor is it simply an opiate for those who must work in big organizations. The search for a secular faith that it represents can be found throughout our society—and among those who swear they would never set foot in a corporation or a government bureau. Though it has its greatest applicability to the organization man, its ideological underpinnings have been provided not by the organization man but by intellectuals he knows little of and toward whom, indeed, he tends to be rather suspicious.