Since the time of the book's original publication, the American workplace has undergone massive changes. In the s, the rule of large corporations seemed less relevant as small entrepreneurs made fortunes from new technologies, in the process bucking old corporate trends. In fact this "new economy" appeared to have doomed Whyte's original analysis as an artifact from a bygone day.
But the recent collapse of so many startup businesses, gigantic mergers of international conglomerates, and the reality of economic globalization make The Organization Man all the more essential as background for understanding today's global market.
This edition contains a new foreword by noted journalist and author Joseph Nocera. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. The novel has long been read as a Naturalistic work with primitiveness and virility at … Expand. The Organization Man in the Presidency. The Journal of Politics. But no one reading the news … Expand. Abstract:Paul Lazarsfeld's social research organizations, as centres for cosmopolitan refugees who pioneered communications studies, were instrumental in producing some of the most prominent … Expand.
Purpose — The purpose of this paper is to analyze how popular culture in general and movies in particular both reflected and shaped public attitudes to newly emerging corporate giants in the s; … Expand.
William H. Whyte found this phenomenon alarming. As an editor for Fortune magazine, Whyte was well placed to observe corporate America; it became clear to him that the American belief in the perfectibility of society was shifting from one of individual initiative to one that could be achieved at the expense of the individual.
With its clear analysis of contemporary working and living arrangements, The Organization Man rapidly achieved bestseller status. Now let us ask if these defects are inevitable. Does The Organization have to require acquiescence? Many critics of American civilization, European critics in particular, see our spiritual conformities as an unavoidable consequence of an industrial society, and further growth and prosperity of our kind, they believe, will lead to the ultimate dehumanization of man.
The external similarities of American life, in short, they hold as inextricably related to the inner similarities.
We should never allow ourselves to be complacent about the external similarities of American life, or use prosperity as an apologia for Babbittry [ 1 ].
But it is a retrograde point of view that fails to recognize that these similarities are in great part a consequence of making the benefits of our civilization available to more people. The monotonous regularity of ranch-type houses that can so easily appall us is not the product of an inner desire for uniformity so much as the fact that modular construction is a condition of moderate-cost housing.
This kind of housing is no more or less a pressure for inner conformity than the rows of identical brownstones of the s or, for that matter, the identical brick fronts of the s. Science and technology do not have to be antithetical to individualism.
To hold that they must be antithetical, as many European intellectuals do, is a sort of utopianism in reverse. For a century Europeans projected their dreams into America; now they are projecting their fears, and in so doing they are falling into the very trap they accuse us of. Attributing a power to the machine that we have never felt, they speak of it almost as if it were animistic and had a will of its own over and above the control of man.
Thus they see our failures as inevitable, and those few who are consistent enough to pursue the logic of their charge imply that there is no hope to be found except through a retreat to the past. This is a hopelessly pessimistic view. The fault is not in the pressures of industrial society - an agrarian society has pressures as powerful - but in the stance we assume before these pressures.
If we reverse our current emphases, we will not reverse progress, for individualism is more necessary, not less, than it ever was. This does not mean a "return" to the Protestant Ethic as preached a century ago.
It is futile to speak of individualism as if unrestrained self-interest will somehow produce the greater good. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the right wing has remained a comparatively negative force in American thought. Even more than those who preach the Social Ethic slough over the individual's rights against society, the right sloughs over the individual's obligations to society - and the lack of realism is sensed by the middle as well as the left.
The pendulum analogy that suggests itself would be misleading, for it implies a return to some ideal state of balance. What we need is not to return but to reinterpret, to apply to our problems the basic idea of individualism, not ancient particulars.
The doctrines of the nineteenth-century businessman and our modem society are disparate, but that they are disparate is little cause for us to assume that individualism must be too. The central ideal - that the individual, rather than society, must be the paramount end - animated Western thought long before the Industrial Revolution, or Calvinism, or Puritanism, and it is as vital and as applicable today as ever.
But what is the " solution "? There is no solution. The conflict between individual and society has always involved dilemma; it always will, and it is intellectual arrogance to think a program would solve it. Certainly the current experience does suggest a few steps we can profitably take, and I would like to suggest several. Common to all, however, must be a fundamental shift of emphasis, and if this is evaded, any change will exist largely on the level of language.
The organization man has a tremendous affinity for vogue words by which the status quo can be described as dynamic advance, and "individualism," alas, is such a word. Let us beware, then, the hard-sell, twelve-point program. Many have been touted as in the name of individual expression, but as those suppressed by them will sense, they are usually organization-serving loyalty devices that fool only those who administrate them.
This caveat made, let me suggest several areas where constructive proposals are in order. First, "human relations. We need by all means to continue to experiment and study. Whatever we call human relations, they are central to the problem of The Organization and the individual, and the more we find out about the effect of the one on the other the better we can find more living room for the individual.
But it's not going to be done if many of those who propagate the doctrine cling to self-proving assumptions about the overriding importance of equilibrium, integration, and adjustment. The side of the coin they have been stating at so intently is a perfectly good one, but there is another side and it should not be too heretical at least to have a peek at it. Thousands of studies and case histories have dwelled on fitting the individual to the group, but what about fitting the group to the person?
What about individual dynamics? The tyranny of the happy work team? The adverse effects of high morale? One does not have to be in favor of unhappiness to explore such hypotheses, and now, encouragingly, a few whose good will is unquestionable are showing more disposition to do so. The Harvard Business School, which almost grew old with human relations, has been using the word administrator less, the word leader more, and lately its best research seems directed at the matter of individual initiative more than of group happiness.
Rensis Likert [ 2 ], the leader of the "group dynamics" school, has announced that recent studies of organization are leading him and his colleagues to question their earlier conclusions that good morale necessarily produces high productivity. They still believe that the work group should be supervised as a group rather than on a man-to-man basis, but they do warn that the supervisor who concentrates on making the group happy may produce belongingness but not very much else.
Another fruitful approach would be a drastic re-examination of the now orthodox view that the individual should be given less of the complete task, the team more of it. For a century we have been breaking down tasks into the components and sub-components, each to be performed by a different cell member, and this assembly-line mentality has affected almost everything that men do for a living, including the arts.
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