The Organization Man

5 Key excerpts on "The Organization Man"

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  Reading Management and Organization in Film

  • Emma Bell(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  In the opening of the film Organization man The central construct discussed in this chapter is ‘organization man’, the product of a society which specialized not only in the mass production of goods and services but also in manufacturing a standardized managerial persona. The term is also the name of a book, written by Fortune magazine journalist William H. Whyte (1956), describ-ing changes in the American workplace that had resulted from the growth of large organizations – one of his interests being in the way that these changes had been rep-resented in popular culture, including novels, magazines and films. Indeed, when Whyte (1956) wrote about the ‘modern corporate executive’ who not only worked for the organization, but also belonged to it, he could have been describing many of the central characters in the films reviewed in this chapter. The rise of organization man can be located historically in terms of discourses of normality and social uniformity which were popular following World War II, when many large organizations not only drew on military disciplines, such as long-range planning and logistics, as the basis for organization but also looked to men with military experience to provide managerial leadership (Mills, 1951; Sampson, 1995). A crucial signifier of this identity was the gray flannel suit, which ‘could effectively dis-guise the inconsistencies and inequalities of the people beneath it, so that the postwar middle class could be perceived – and could perceive itself – as normal, as unified, as uniform’ (Creadick, 2006, p. 278), this helping to erase prior identities and allow its wearer to become part of a collective, an indistinguishable member of the social group. Organization man argues Creadick (2006) represented the desire for a return to normality, in contrast to the social, economic and emotional upheaval associated with depression and war, themes which are deliberately juxtaposed in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956).

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  "Greed Is Good" and Other Fables

  Office Life in Popular Culture

  • Tony Osborne(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 The Organization Man and His Kin Preachers and Salesmen

  The Organization Man

  In 1956, William H. Whyte, Jr., a writer for Fortune magazine, turned a series of articles featuring interviews with the CEOs of Ford and General Electric into The Organization Man , a lengthy polemic about the loss of individuality.1 The book scrutinizes the mentality of subservience endemic to office life. In the half-century since its debut (equivalent to the interregnum between the Civil War and World War I) the book has been translated into 17 languages and sales have topped two million.

  Today, the casual reader leafing through The Organization Man would think it highbrow, with its copious citations of thinkers such as Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen, and John Dewey. This characterization, however, has more to do with the decline of the reading public and the demise of American education, factors that explain why yesterday’s popular culture is often today (mis)cast as highbrow. Nonetheless, The Organization Man is an exemplar of popular media (the book is still in print). In documenting the mindset of its era, it displayed the critical bite that defines the best reportage. It also enriched our language by popularizing the term organization man , still a put-down today—evidence that our anything-for-money culture is also schizophrenic.

  Whyte wrote from a quasiscientific stance. He used popular culture to corroborate his ideas but looked down upon it as inferior to hefty academic studies. Whyte claimed that the ascent of American business also represented the decline of the Protestant Ethic—i.e., thrift and industry are evidence of (worthiness for) salvation—even though the captains of industry still invoked the old Puritan tenet about the sanctity of “hard work.” In actual practice, however, big business had gutted the moral center from the immortal virtue of “hard work,” which, as all the self-help books and inspirational biographies reveal, is the secret of “making it.”

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  American Social Character

  Modern Interpretations

  • Rupert Wilkinson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  WILLIAM H. WHYTE

  The Organization Man

  By the late 1950s, orthodox liberal opinion had tagged President Eisenhower as a do-nothing, bureaucratic monarch, presiding over a lethargically fat society. Further down the heap, college students and new graduates earned had grades from survey researchers for being politically passive and obsessed with economic security; some blamed this on the intimidating effects of McCarthyism and the Great Depression insecurity of their parents. For commentators and concerned citizens on all sides, ‘conformity’ was the new American middle-class problem, and the writer William Whyte, their prophet.

  Published in 1956, Whyte’s book, The Organization Man, focused largely on male business executives hut was really about a wider shift in middle-class character and society; it had an intricate section on young mothers and fathers in the new suburbia (the subject of a spate of books in that period).

  The basic cause of the change, said Whyte, was the rise of bureaucratic organizations at the turn of the century, coupled with Progressive-reform onslaughts on economic individualism. The collectivism of the early bureaucrats and reformers, necessary at the time, had nonetheless sparked off a shift in values that had become lopsided. America’s “Protestant Ethic” of self-reliance—the ‘“pursuit of individual salvation through hard work, thrift, and competitive struggle”—was giving way to a “Social Ethic [that] endorsed the pressures of society against the individual.” (Whyte did not discuss whether Protestants had followed the “Protestant Ethic” more than Catholics, Jews, and others had—he used the term as a shorthand description.)

  Much of the change, Whyte recognized, was not peculiar to the United States, hut it caused a special tension there due to America’s individualist traditions. According to the Social Ethic, a person’s ultimate need was “belonging,” and creativity came from the group, not the individual. The business corporation, archetype of the new collective, took care of the executive employee’s welfare, encouraging him to consume hard as well as work hard. The result was some ambivalence about the claims of work versus leisure, office versus home. Competitiveness went into climbing the corporate ladder; few people thought big or bucked the collective standards. In the suburban neighborhood, too, people suppressed their own wishes to be private and different.

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  Baby Boom

  People and Perspectives

  • Rusty Monhollon(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  While Organization Men enjoyed the security and material prosperity of corporate life, a number of authors criticized the conformity that their positions produced. William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) is the most famous of these critiques. Corporations promoted what Whyte (1956) called the ‘‘social ethic,’’ a belief in belongingness as the ultimate need of the individual. Whyte argued that Organization Men lacked crea- tivity and individuality. Other authors, such as David Riesman, joined Whyte in his criticisms of corporate culture. Despite the criticisms of Whyte and Riesman, millions of Americans still turned to corporations for employment. The Organization Man’s loy- alty to corporations must be seen in the context of the Depression, postwar abundance, and Cold War anxiety. Either as a child or an adult, Organiza- tion Men experienced the harsh nature of the Depression. During the 1930s, unemployment ranged between 15 and 25 percent of all workers. In 1941, at the end of the Depression, 40 percent of American families lived below the poverty line and almost 8 million workers earned salaries below the legal minimum wage. World War II lifted the American econ- omy out of the Depression and laid the groundwork for postwar affluence. The end of the war unleashed a huge buildup of consumer demand and left the United States as the dominant economic power in the world. For those Organization Men who suffered through the Depression, corporate salaries in the postwar years allowed them to live a different life- style. Americans made up for their frugal lifestyles in the four years follow- ing the end of World War II, purchasing 21.4 million cars, 20 million refrigerators, and 11.6 million televisions each year. One million housing units were sold each year during the same period. The diverse array of new products that flashed across U.S. television screens throughout the 136 B A B Y B O O M P E R SP E C T I V ES I N A M E R I C A N S O C I A L H I S TO RY

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  Managing People and Organizations

  Peter Drucker's Legacy

  • Guido Stein(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Group Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  (Drucker, 1939, p. 45) Economic Man is the symbol that capitalism and Marxism have chosen to express the nature of man and his role and place in society. The economic sphere is presented as the critical area of society, its core. According to this belief, man conducts economic activity as a means to achieve his ends. Man works for a position, some privileges and some (ultimately economic) rights. This is a monologic anthropology, in which the wide variety of facets and dimensions of man focuses on only one fundamental activity, relative to the order of the means. The order of ends is considered unreachable or obvious. In any case, the happiness or well-being that presumably everybody pursues presents a clearly sensitive and material nature. The historical background of Economic Man is found in writings where Adam Smith and his school speak of homo economicus. The birth of economic science is a consequence or result of accepting the concept of Economic Man as a representative of the true nature of man. 2.3. Criticism of Mercantilism In 1942, Peter F. Drucker published The Future of Industrial Man , four years before the Concept of the Corporation ; nevertheless, it advances the theme of what a corporation is and what it is for. While it does reflect on economic considerations, it focuses mainly on social and political ones. In this chapter, I want to explain the theoretical framework in which, from an economic and sociological viewpoint, Drucker moves. Our author boasts a wide reading of the classics of sociology, political philosophy, and philosophy of law, which he used to shape their own theories. The style initiated in this work, a consolidation after extensive previous books, is simple, direct, often repetitive and somewhat disordered; perhaps one could say that it not very academically structured. There are few carefully documented citations, but the general references and vague indications of his sources are very lengthy.

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