“This book is not a plea for nonconformity.” William H. Whyte put that explicit disclaimer in his introduction to “The Organization Man,” but in the decades since its publication, scholars and readers have formed a sort of conspiracy to overlook it.
When recalling the golden age of social criticism in the 1950s, so much of which lambasted “conformity,” historians routinely list Whyte and his book with the rest of the hit parade: David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd,” C. Wright Mills’ “White Collar,” Vance Packard’s “The Status Seekers,” Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd,” Sloan Wilson’s “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” With his sturdy Buick, his leather briefcase, and his angst about the mortgage, the “Organization Man” joined the classic gray-flannel demonology.
Whyte’s magnum opus recalls a time, long gone, when men worked for the same firm all their lives and retired with a comfortable pension. (To see how far we’ve come–or fallen–read “Bait and Switch,” Barbara Ehrenreich’s relentlessly downbeat account of today’s middle-class desperation.) But after half a century, when “nonconformity” has become one of the most tiresome and beguiling of cliches, we might now appreciate Whyte’s emphatic disavowal. Far from being a nonconformist, Whyte was a sage in a gray-flannel suit, and “The Organization Man” was too wry and generous to count as a genuine jeremiad.
Whyte’s study of corporate life appeared in the glory days of Fordism, when standardized mass production, together with the expansion of the professional managerial ranks, transformed America into what Harvard historian Lizabeth Cohen has called the “Consumers’ Republic.”
Though demonized in the mythology of American individualism, leviathan corporate bureaucracies had mobilized the resources to end the Great Depression and defeat the Axis powers. Might they also win the Cold War with the artillery of commodities?
Still, some Americans wondered if they were paying an exorbitant existential price for the comforts provided by organization life. Did it impose too high a levy on adventure, idiosyncrasy and personal freedom? Must the price of abundance and security be paid in the currency of alienation? Millions of Americans must have feared it was the case, since so many critiques of “conformity” made it to the best-seller list.
Some of the most articulate voices of unease came from Fortune magazine, where Whyte was a reporter and managing editor. With its irreverence toward traditional business pieties, Fortune was the perfect vehicle for a critique of American corporate life from within the organization. One of Whyte’s colleagues, Eric Hodgins, had already satirized the business class in his Mr. Blandings novels, while another, the soon-to-be management guru Peter Drucker, was a scourge of over-centralization.
Taken aback by the modest ambitions of Princeton’s graduating class of 1949, Whyte (Class of ’39) embarked on a three-year sojourn through office suites and suburban developments, interviewing hundreds of managers, executives, professionals and technicians, especially in the Chicago suburb of Park Forest.
Publishing a few preliminary articles in Fortune, Whyte gathered together his material for Simon and Schuster, which published “The Organization Man” in the fall of 1956.
Readers uneasy about “conformity” were not, and will not be, disappointed. Anyone who has heard, “We’re a family here” will share Whyte’s fear that corporate employees were “imprisoned in brotherhood” by human-relations ideology. Anyone dragooned into “teamwork” by an unctuous “facilitator” might agree that the corporation’s apparent benevolence makes it “increasingly hard for the individual to figure out when he is being pushed around.”
This is the center of the book’s polemical gravity, Whyte’s attack on the tenets of what he called the Social Ethic: the group as the source of creativity; “belongingness” as the highest good; social science, and especially management theory, as the path to productivity and happiness.
Yet Whyte examined the Social Ethic against a larger backdrop of affirmation, telling readers that he offered “no censure of organization society.” He denounced the litany of “strictures against ranch wagons, or television sets, or gray flannel suits.” “There’s no harm in them,” he added tersely.
Aiming squarely at Wilson’s “The Man in The Gray Flannel Suit,” published a year before Whyte’s volume, he excoriated the “sanctimonious materialism” he detected in the novel, and sneered at the lucky convergence of Tom Rath’s sympathetic boss, long-suffering wife and financial solvency–“blessed indeed are the acquiescent.” While Whyte agreed that there was much to be reformed or ridiculed in corporate life, he exhibited no fondness for the bad old days of rugged, toilsome individualism, and he dismissed “misplaced nostalgia” for unfettered markets and small, scrappy proprietors.
Whyte rejected a view of modern American history as a tale that opens with an “idyllic 18th Century” and ends in a “dehumanized 20th.” The Mass Man vilified by critics is “a person the author has never met.” Eschewing the folklore of populism, Whyte found it “difficult to see the three-button suit as more of a strait jacket than overalls” and trusted that the Buick owner could resist the organization as bravely and effectively as any bohemian or radical firebrand. “Organization society,” Whyte asserted, “can be as compatible for the individual as any previous society.”
Not that Whyte was completely enamored of the new order. He rued the suburban penchant for recasting avarice as “the expression of idealism.” He lamented the middlebrow taste of suburbanites and noted starkly that the bonhomie of block parties and barbecues “stops very clearly at the color line.”
Still, Whyte maintained that suburbia represented “a great tribute to the vigor of our democracy.” “No generation has been so well equipped, psychologically as well as technically, to cope with the intricacies of vast organizations,” Whyte asserted; “none has been so well equipped to lead a meaningful community life.”
In the picnics, bake sales and frenetic cocktail parties, Whyte saw pilgrims embarking on “a moral quest.” Remarking on the easy exchange of toys, books, records and lawn mowers, he declared that nowhere except among monastic orders was there “such a communal sharing of property.” He even compared suburban neighborhoods to kibbutzim and transcendentalist communes.
So when Whyte concludes with an injunction to “fight The Organization”–and adds an appendix on how to cheat on personality tests–it’s not at all clear to his readers why anyone would want to, or want to with any ardor. “If we have to have problems,” he reflected, “the adversities of good times are as worthy as any to have to worry about.”
Some of Whyte’s contemporaries detected his essential conformity to the totems of the clan. Harold Rosenberg derided Whyte’s “Orgprose” as a “dreary professional’s ruse for holding on to the best of both worlds.”
Goodman bluntly called Whyte a “cynic,” but went further in probing the nihilism at the core of the “nonconformist” genre. In Goodman’s view, Whyte’s call for “individuality” was an impotent private rebellion that never struck at the root of the system: Whoever merely cheats on the personality test still concedes the organization’s right to administer it in the first place.
The only hope, Goodman implied, lay with individuals who organized against the organization–that is, who conformed to some political vision and agenda. Part of that vision, Goodman argued, should partake of art and craftsmanship, for individuality through truly creative work, a form of resistance hallowed from social critic John Ruskin to Mills.
Bureaucratic savvy would never compensate for the absence of “worth-while objects,” Goodman wrote. Whyte offered only an empty “individuality” because he had no other qualities or ideals to uphold. “The necessary, useful, and pleasant, and the good, true, and beautiful are not much mentioned in his book.”
Highbrow as they sound, Goodman’s couplet of verities may well turn out to be more disruptive of our status quo than “hipness” or “cool”-the evolutionary descendents of Whyte and his generation’s nonconformity.
The imagery of corporate business now exalts brazen rebellion and disturbance to conformity, yet a lot of Americans might want more stability, justice and meaningful labor. “The Organization Man” will only provide them with lessons in the higher conformity.
