The Organization Man Page 29
The foundations’ own practices are creating the very lack they decry. Almost as important as the actual pattern of foundation giving is the academic’s idea of how the foundations want to give. Quite plainly, the majority of social scientists believe that the best way for them to get foundation money is: (1) through a large project, and (2) one tailored to foundation interests. Foundations can complain that this is an unjustified stereotype. Stereotype or not, however, it has a way of conjuring up its own reality.
The immediate point at issue is not that the lone genius is being starved. This is by no means an unimportant consideration, but the question of whether or not there are mute, inglorious Miltons is a matter too complex to be explored here. I am talking of the overall climate, which is to say, the impact of foundation giving on the man in the middle—the nine out of ten who are neither lone genius nor confirmed team “operator.” Which side of his work is a man to emphasize? Which of the many problems that can interest him will he choose? What he thinks the foundation wants will have more influence than he cares to think.
Through the grapevine the social scientist hears how so-and-so landed a big grant with one approach and how someone else didn’t with a contrary approach. He also hears that the way he writes up his prospectus is all-important. “I’m gun shy,” says one social scientist. “I’ve seen some of my colleagues sweat long hours writing and rewriting prospectuses. One man I know has been working away at a prospectus for a year now. Every time he rewrites it, he gets further away from his original idea. I don’t think he himself realizes how much he has gotten into plain merchandising.”
You can get money for any kind of project, goes a standard refrain, except the small one close to your heart. For this reason some don’t try at all. “Right now I have an idea that’s worth a middling-sized project,” says one sociologist. “But I am not going to apply. I want to spend my time on the broad exploratory part, but if I got into it, I would get involved in administration. I would have to spend a year organizing a design that would please the foundation people—people who don’t know anywhere near as much about the subject as I do. Then, when we got into the fact-finding part, I wouldn’t have time to think.” Not entirely facetiously, another sociologist argues that there should be special grant expediters. “We need academic five percenters,” he suggests. “Men who would do the organizing work on projects for five per cent of the gross if they landed the grant.”
The more usual inclination is not to put off an idea but to bloat it into a big project, and if it is to an image that the academic bends himself, he is nonetheless suborned. He may start out with an idea that requires little more than some time off from the university, travel money, and the help of a few graduate students. But he hesitates to ask for a modest grant; repeatedly, he has heard at the faculty club that foundations don’t like that kind of grant. He begins, instead, to think of ways to clothe his basic idea as part of a larger group effort. He will suggest advisory committees, corps of people to collect data, corps to correlate data. Step by step the project grows in grandiosity, and step by step he will get further away from the original idea that impelled him—indeed, in such cases it is a puzzle why he continues to go after the money at all. No imperative of personal gain, or logic, remains. He goes after the foundation’s money, as Mallory said of Mt. Everest, because it is there.
But if he gets the money he will be worse off than if he didn’t. He has saddled himself with an administrative job—and it will be an administrative job far tougher than that faced by the businessman. For the scientist is particularly vulnerable to the conflicts of group work. The businessman is a professional at this sort of thing; the scientist is not. He too has problems of rank and status: who is going to publish first on the project and where, who is going to be the next chairman of the department, what will this do to his professional reputation? In grappling with these, however, the scientist is not armed with the detachment of the executive; more than the latter, he judges a man for his beliefs and he cannot keep policy differences long separate from personal feelings.
The scientist turned administrator will also find that the project has an insidious way of becoming an end in itself. One social scientist I know helped set up a large area study several years ago in the optimistic belief that this was the best way he could pursue his own inquiry. He is now a much wiser man. “We started by gathering statistics,” he says. “Now that I look back on it I am not quite sure why, except that it seemed the best way to get started. But the more statistics we gathered the more statistics we thought of gathering. Pretty soon we had every graduate student in the area out here. Next we had to have more office space, and more clerical help. By the time we’d spent our initial grant, I’d done practically nothing I’d planned to do. But the thing was rolling and there was no stopping it.” The experience is not too atypical. Many a project gets to a point where its main reason for being is to produce more research to justify a grant for more research, and if the researcher confesses failure it is apt to be as a disingenuous preface to asking for help to reach the summit now in sight.
If people knew how badly the overblown project frequently turns out, there wouldn’t be so many of them. No matter how bad the project, however, there are all sorts of secondary justifications to be made; understandably, researchers don’t want to tell the foundations they have been wasting their money, and if nothing comes out of the project there is always the excuse the younger people got some good training. Foundation officials are by no means naïve, but while they may be aware that nothing very important came of an overblown project, they are not so likely to be aware of the far more negative effect of the project. What else could the people have been doing? The wastage of some of the most productive years of many first-rate people is the true blight and it affects the big names in the field quite as well as the newcomer.
It is often assumed in the academic world that the best-known people can write their own ticket if and when they want to. This is not true. For one thing, such men are constantly being approached to head up big projects or become part of one, and it is understandable they cannot resist forever. One well-known sociologist recalls how he got entrapped. “One day a bunch of us were talking to a visiting foundation official about our work. We mentioned one side project we had thought of from time to time. The official was enthusiastic. ‘How much would it cost?’ he asked. We said, offhand, $150,000. What do you know but two weeks later he sent us a telegram wanting to know if we would go ahead with it. We accepted, dammit, and we have been cursing ourselves ever since. I am not saying that the work wasn’t of benefit; we did a fine job. But most of us felt we were marking time for several years.”
Even when they want to do some small, independent research of their own, top men often have more trouble getting money for it than colleagues would suspect. Several men who are regarded as great “operators”—men who can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for surveys on any conceivable subject—privately aver that the one thing they have never been able to do is get money for what they personally would like to do most of all.
Money, money everywhere, they complain, but not a cent to think.
They are apt to be the ones most influential with foundations, but this can be a mixed blessing for them. They, too, are entrapped. “There is a strange clique of advisers which invariably develops around the foundations,” says one of the most influential men in U.S. social-science research today. “For instance, take the head of one foundation. I have his ear. If some people convince me their project is good, I can get it through for them much better than they could themselves. But with another foundation I don’t even know who to phone. So this is how it is: to one clique you belong, to another you have no access at all, and to a third you have secondary access because you have a friend. I suppose it can’t be avoided; they have to have advisers. But, if you had a chance to see how we operate without even talking about it! Belonging to one of these cliques is time consuming and nonremunerative. You
have to go to the dumbest meetings; it’s like the medieval bishopric…. It’s important to what clique you belong for its own sake. But it doesn’t mean you get to do your own personal project. It would be terribly bad taste to ask for special consideration for your own work.”
If the men in the mainstream have trouble getting support for individual work, what of the maverick who doesn’t fit in? Occasionally, foundation people do wonder about him—when he was head of Carnegie, Frederick Keppel suggested that some kindly benefactor might set up a foundation to look into the matter. Nobody has yet, and foundations don’t appear to believe that the problem even needs looking into any more. Where, they ask, is the unsupported “lone wolf,” or, as some put it, the “so-called lone wolf”? They don’t know of any.
We cannot find what we do not seek. To see how justified was the complacency of the foundations I got a list of nominations from several top sociologists of men not working on currently fashionable problems but who were thought first-rate. I wrote the thirteen and asked them their experience with the foundations. Of the thirteen, I found, seven had applied to one of the big three for a grant. All but one had been turned down. The other six had not applied at all. With one exception, they felt they would not get sympathetic consideration.
Again, expectations are critical. On any one case there can be honest differences as to whether a grant would be in order, but surely it is significant that some people’s image of the foundations is so adverse they won’t even apply. It will not do for the foundations to dismiss them as malcontents and their charges as stereotypes. The image is self-confirming, and at the very least the foundations have a serious communication problem on their hands. Their primary public is academia, and if its members are constrained because they believe foundations are hostile to anything that doesn’t fit in with currently fashionable trends, the foundations should do something about it. Giving more to individuals, and publicizing the fact, would help. But first must come an awareness that the image does exist and does mold.
That in part it is unjustified is beside the point. It is true, as I have indicated elsewhere, that the frequent charge of an “interlocking directorate” misses the mark. It is obvious that there must be circles of influential advisers and that most of these men should be already great in influence and power in the academic world. What seems at fault is not this fact but the foundations’ disinclination to keep reminding themselves of this fact. They must have a main line of direction, yes, but they must for the same reason prod themselves constantly that they will not be inhospitable to people who wish to follow more lonely trails.
The foundations say that individual grants can only be part of their work. They are right. They say that individual grants are not the work that requires great boldness. Again, they are right. But this only compounds their default. If they cannot counter prevailing orthodoxy in an area that requires little audacity or money, where can they? The most serious charge is not that they are failing to give enough to stimulate individual work. It is that they do not concede that such a problem really exists at all.
In these three chapters I have slighted the role of the administrator, the necessity for scientists working together, and the value of applied research. I have done so because these have already been so well praised that further emphasis would be supererogatory. And this is my central point. The foundations, the universities, and the government have not actively conspired to change the climate, but merely by riding with the trends, they have created a growth that can stifle the very progress they seek.
And it is going to keep on feeding on itself. J. A. Gengerelli, head of the Psychology Department at U.C.L.A., has put it well: “We have a social force,” he says, “that selectively encourages and rewards the scientific hack. There is a great hustle and bustle, a rushing back and forth to scientific conferences, a great plethora of $50,000 grants for $100 ideas. I am suggesting that scientific, technical, and financial facilities are such in this country as to encourage a great number of mediocrities to go into science, and to seduce even those with creative talent and imagination to a mistaken view of the nature of the scientific enterprise.”
Of the two dangers, it is the molding effect that is paramount. When a large group of scientists met several years ago to discuss future basic science, on one point there was unanimous agreement: the contemporary social organization of science has been producing highly competent scientists, but scientists who are trained to work efficiently only in groups and who are not acclimated to individual inquiry. And none have been wholly immune to this force. To talk of the problem in terms of the lone genius or the screwball is to confuse the issue. We cannot have two sets of standards, one for a gregarious majority, another for an introverted minority. What we must concern ourselves with are the conditions that are common to all scientists, for the kind of environment which stimulates the creative side of the average scientist is the same environment in which genius flourishes.
Once we could afford to postpone the creation of such an environment, but we can no longer. In becoming too much the technicians, too little the innovators, we have banked complacently on European thought complementing our application. But we now have little grounds for smugness. European scientists still do more armchair work than American scientists, but this, as the patriot can point out, is partly because the European hasn’t the money or facilities to do much else, and as American leadership and money become more influential he may be quite eager to leave the armchair. But this would be cold comfort. The European tradition of fundamental work has not been broken, but it is being severely strained. Why, The Economist asked recently, should its country’s scientists concentrate on producing ideas that America will exploit? It did not counsel a cut in fundamental science, but it did argue that for Europe’s own self-interest, it should put proportionately more effort into technology and application. Let Americans think up their own ideas.
America, as Eric Hodgins has put it, is being offered intellectual leadership in the most compelling way. It is the kind of challenge, candor should force us to admit, that goes against the grain of the American temperament. We are by nature too impatient, too pragmatic, too co-operative for the cause of aimless discovery ever to be a popular one. And that is precisely why leadership is so imperative.
* In addition to the Big Three there are seventy foundations which state themselves interested in support of social science. In a questionnaire they were asked (1) how much they gave and (2) how much of this went to individual research. Of the forty-seven who replied, twenty-one actually did give to social-science research (total in 1954: $2,500,000). Only eleven, however, gave any money at all to individuals. Total given in 1954: $480,000.
PART VI
The Organization Man in Fiction
CHAPTER 19 Love That System
If you wanted to put in fiction form the split between the Protestant Ethic and the Social Ethic of organization life, you might, if you wanted to be extreme about it, come up with a plot situation something like this.
A middle-management executive is in a spot of trouble. He finds that the small branch plant he’s helping to run is very likely to blow up. There is a way to save it: if he presses a certain button the explosion will be averted. Unfortunately, however, just as he’s about to press a button his boss heaves into view. The boss is a scoundrel and a fool, and at this moment he’s so scared he is almost incoherent. Don’t press the button, he says.
The middle-management man is no rebel and he knows that the boss, stupid as he is, represents The Organization. Still, he would like to save everyone’s life. Thus his dilemma: if he presses the button he will not be acting like a good organization man and the plant will be saved. If he doesn’t press it he will be a good organization man and they will all be blown to smithereens.
A damn silly dilemma, you might say. Almost exactly this basic problem, however, is the core of the biggest-selling novel of the postwar period, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, and rarely has a novel so
touched a contemporary nerve. Much of its success, of course, was due to the fact it is a rattling good tale, and even if the author had ended it differently it would still probably have been a success. But it is the moral overtones that have made it compelling. Here, raised to the nth degree, is the problem of the individual versus authority, and the problem is put so that no reader can duck it. There is no “Lady or the Tiger” ending. We must, with the author, make a choice, and a choice that is presented as an ultimately moral one.
The boldness of it makes The Caine Mutiny something of a landmark in the shift of American values. Popular fiction in general, as I will take up in the next chapter, has been going in the same direction for a long time, and The Caine Mutiny is merely evolutionary in this respect. But it is franker; unlike most popular fare, it does not sugar-coat the precept to adjustment by trapping it up with the words of individualism. It is explicit. Author Wouk puts his protagonist in a dilemma and, through rigorous plotting, eliminates any easy middle course. The protagonist must do what he thinks is right or do what the system thinks is right.
The man caught in the dilemma is one the reader can identify himself with. He is Lieutenant Maryk, the executive officer of the mine sweeper Caine. Maryk is no scoffer, but a stolid, hard-working man who just wants to do his job well. He likes the system and all his inclinations lead him to seek a career in the Regular navy.
Ordinarily he would lead an uneventful, productive life. The ship of which he is executive officer, however, is commanded by a psychopath named Queeg. At first Maryk stubbornly resists the warnings about Queeg voiced by Lieutenant Keefer, an ex-writer. But slowly the truth dawns on him, and in a series of preliminary incidents the author leaves no doubt in Maryk’s—or the reader’s—mind that Queeg is in fact a bully, a neurotic, a coward, and what is to be most important of all, an incompetent.