O is for Organisation Man
Nearly sixty five years ago, William H Whyte, a columnist and assistant editor at Fortune, published his second book, The Organisation Man. [i] Four years earlier, he had written a critique of business, describing what he saw as its failure to sell the value of business to people, while it was quite capable of selling business products. Why, Whyte had asked, was this so? The failure was odd, he felt: businessmen could be so effective in the marketplace of things, and so ineffective in the marketplace of ideas. As one European commentator told him, America was ‘all money and no spirit – a country without a soul. [ii] The reviewer was concerned about the challenge business was facing in selling business, and his comments reflected another, long gone era: “Business draws its life ultimately from faith; the faith of the people in its honest, its utility, its sense of responsibility to the community. It may be destroyed because business, trying to sell free enterprise, does so without faith in the people. This, ultimately, is a danger to everyone.” [iii]
Whyte believed it was important to explore the character of the growing business workforce driving the economy of the 1950’s. He was puzzled as what was happening to the educated people who joined business, the burgeoning core of companies, drawn in by the promise of security and a high standard of living. We think we see these men in television shows like Mad Men, the popular series about Madison Avenue, but these colourful characters were the exception: buildings were packed with less vibrant people, many little more than clerical staff, mainly men, almost uniform in appearance and behaviour. Like an anthropologist, Whyte sought to understand how they were educated, trained and selected to work, how they were promoted, and how they lived at work, and out in suburbia. The Organisation Man was the result.
His book is a field study, with the advantage that, as a journalist, he could leaven his observations with personal commentaries and criticisms. Rereading it over the last week, I have been struck by how good a book it is. Packed full of interviews and case studies, it even includes drawings of street layouts in two suburbs showing where the bridge, canasta and book meetings were held, where parties took place together with the potluck dinners, comparing 1953 with 1956. Malinowski would have been proud! Whyte draws on studies in sociology, social psychology, business studies, even self-help books for would be entrepreneurs. In the middle of all this, he throws in a telling critique of Herman Wouk’s novel, The Caine Mutiny! [iv] The New York Times is quoted on the back cover of the Penguin edition with saying “Truly important … Mr Whyte is a brilliantly gifted student of the customs of his country”. He is, and I would think an interesting course of study at a university could use this book together with Christopher Leonard’s Kochland, published last year, as the basis for an examination as to how far business and business employees have, and have not, changed over sixty years.[v]
Whyte begins by explaining how the Social Ethic had replaced the Protestant Ethic in the USA. That immediately showed up a difference between the UK, where I had been brought up, and America. In the UK, the Protestant Ethic advocated working hard and being frugal for the benefit of yourself, your family and the community. In America, the Protestant Ethic was far more individualistic. It did stress hard work and thrift, but the key beneficiary was the individual. The community was incidental, and too much focus on the community smacked of some kind of hidden socialism, an anathema to traditional pioneering Americans. What Whyte saw was that the Protestant Ethic was being replaced by a new set of values. This Social Ethic emphasised three propositions: “a belief in the group as the source of creativity; a belief in ‘belongingness’ as the ultimate need of the individual; and a belief in the application of science to achieve belongingness.” This was a philosophy that saw an individual as a unit of society, and by becoming part of the group with others creating something more than the sum of its parts. Moreover, whatever conflicts and problems arose in working together, they were breakdowns in communication which could be resolved through scientific principles, as these offered the means to ensure equilibrium. As I read this, at one point I thought I was reading about communism!
William Whyte was an intelligent observer. He knew that both the US version of the Protestant Ethic and the Social Ethic were constructs, mythologies was the word he used, but we might call them idealisations. He recognised that at the beginning of the 20th Century, the Protestant Ethic in the USA was not entirely selfish, and in the 1950’s the Social Ethic did have a selfish side. His interest was in the extent to which the Social Ethic was influential in shaping the lives of Americans, and especially those who wished to join the ever-growing ranks of big business. To do this, he explored some intriguing territory: he began with training and selection of staff, went on to examine concerns over the role of science in business; then, after a detour into the organisation man in novels, ended by looking at his subjects living at home in suburbia.
To start a detour of my own, the more I reread his book, the more I began to think about ‘Big Blue’. Big Blue was the nickname for IBM, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. The nickname was partly the result of the company’s blue logo and color scheme, but it was also a commentary on the claim IBM had a dress code of white shirts with blue suits. This wasn’t happenstance. Back in the 1960s, Thomas Watson, the CEO, mandated strict rules for employees, including a dress code of dark suits, white shirts, striped ties, and no alcohol, whether working or not. He went further and led singing sessions at meetings, the songs including such stirring items as “Ever Onward” from the official IBM songbook. [vi] His rules were followed over many years.
I was intrigued to find IBM’s own records did include dress codes, and the website has a section on ‘The Way We Wore’, including the details above. A nice touch of humour, but the website had a somewhat defensive introduction: “It wasn’t too long ago that some observers said that IBMers wore a uniform of pin-striped suits, white button-down shirts, rep ties and wing-tipped shoes. Who us? While it may have been true there was a time such attire was not uncommon in IBM offices, it is also true that pin-striped suits, white button-down shirts, rep ties and wing-tipped shoes were not unique to IBM — then or now. In fact, IBM men and women, like people everywhere, have tended to dress pretty much in the fashions prevailing in their own period and place.” [vii] The more I read The Organisation Man, the more I thought IBM had a good point.
Whyte was focussed on managers and salesmen, recognising that this group offered some odd characteristics. On the one hand, organisation men seemed like clones, rather like those IBM managers, dressing the same and behaving the same. However, the more he studied them, he realised that they were, in many ways, seeking to find themselves within an otherwise very technological world. The key issue was connectedness. Whyte looked at early human relations research, noticing that some studies, famously those examining the impact of environment of behaviour, actually demonstrated that the participants were responding to someone having shown an interest in them. This finding became known as the Hawthorne effect, named after a study in the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric in the 1930s. [viii] Intended to see how illumination affected the productivity of shop-floor assemblers, that research eventually demonstrated that a significant effect on performance came from those factory floor workers knowing the researchers were paying attention to them, trying to make their physical environment better, even when the interventions actually reduced the quality of their workplace conditions!
You might be wondering how a somewhat uniform dress code was relevant. Whyte realised that companies developing performance metrics, quality standards and other scientific systems to manage work were also creating a workforce that sought a sense of belonging. In part, this came from being alongside others like yourself: ‘I am part of this major corporation, like these others around me: we all belong, and we are all together in this endeavour’. It would be easy to slip into the trap of seeing this white collar-dark suit workforce as akin to robots: robots, after all, were a familiar topic in many science fiction books and movies at the time. Interviewing university seniors looking for employment, however, he discovered that the attraction of joining big business was finding comfort, being part of a respected team, fitting in, and enjoying success.
As Whyte studied managerial employees, he saw how metrics had taken over so much of what was being done. His chapters on recruitment are revealing, showing the power of psychological profiling, quantitative questionnaires, and all the other systems that were so popular back then. Inevitably, that scientific approach did exactly what it was intended to do, it helped choose people with the same underlying capabilities and preferences. Young men and women did want to work in a major corporations. They knew they would have to survive the selection process, (and later the training). To be chosen was a reward, and it was no wonder those who were successful embraced the dress code. They were ‘insiders’, and were happy to show it. The use of psychometrics was unrelenting, and Whyte goes on to show how decisions for promotion and transfers drew on a variety of profiling techniques (although I am certain the recommendations of senior managers were also an influential part of the process, at least some of the time!).
As I was reading Whyte’s study, the local library told me a copy of Kochland had arrived. Christopher Leonard’s book is, as he describes it, ‘the secret history of Koch industries and corporate power in America’. [ix] Written 63 years after The Organisation Man, there were many similarities. Charles Koch ran the company using his philosophy of Market Based Management. He was ruthless in selection, abandoning those who didn’t meet his expectations. To work for Koch was to be an organisation man, for sure. However, Leonard also showed how far the Koch brothers were prepared to go in encouraging staff to slip over the edge of the law, use dubious arguments to avoid or minimise fines, and pressure government to leave the company, and industry more broadly, free from regulations and restrictions. I suspect many salesmen in Whyte’s study were just as persuasive and able to finesse the truth as their counterparts do today.
The last third of Whyte’s book takes us outside the corporation and into suburbia. As companies grew and established their headquarters in cities across the country, so the workforce had to follow the opportunities. This led many to find themselves in new, emerging residential areas, with better quality housing, good amenities, more luxury goods in nearby malls and department stores. Without realising it, the organisation man was putting down new roots, often well away from where he had grown up, and surrounded now by people just like him. These changes did apply to women too, of course, but for much of the period Whyte’s book covers, men were in an overwhelming majority: some women worked on the shop floor, some in support functions, but most outside in the stores, dry cleaners, restaurants and other service and support businesses. This anthropological component of Whyte’s study, examining leisure, relationships and values (which I briefly described earlier) is well worth reading today. In some respects, it did remind me of Japanese ‘salarymen’, but Whyte’s workforce didn’t stay at work for quite such crazy hours, although at one point, like salarymen Koch’s staff did have to sing company songs!
If Whyte’s book had been of interest to me as a university teacher when I was teaching social anthropology, it hit home more directly when I started work at Shell. Until then, as an academic, I could wear an open-necked shirt with a sweater or a tweed jacket to work. Now a rising mid-level executive, I saw everyone wore a suit, and so did I. I couldn’t quite swallow all the conformity, and so began wearing socks with characters on them, Donald Duck socks, socks with birds, socks with frogs, and so it continued for the next twenty years. I would wear slightly less formal ties, too, of which my favorite was in a dark paisley design, quite acceptable at a quick glance, though a little risky; close observation would reveal that hidden in the design was Mickey Mouse, peering out through the twists and turns of the teardrop motif. I think I liked to consider myself a secret non-conformist! Dream on!
Is the world that Whyte observed now lost to history? There’s evidence that the Japanese salarymen today represent a declining part of their workforce. [x] In America, companies tout diversity, work life balance, and informal dress codes. The company man Whyte described has largely disappeared, but mainly because businesses no longer accept much responsibility for their staff: people are expected to look after their own careers and savings, to find their next position themselves, and to accept their current positions can disappear overnight. As a result, of course, the company man or woman today is just as assiduous in conforming to the rituals and behaviours of the business that takes them on: it might not be a dark blue suit, it could be jeans and a casual shirt are the expected work wear. Performance metrics are still being used, and staff are anxious to show their value. The people working in a company know the alternative: they see what could happen every day, as they observe gig workers bringing in meals, cutting the lawns, painting the building, delivering parcels. Security and connectedness still matter.
When I was rereading The Organisation Man, I saw my copy was printed in 1963. I wondered when I had acquired it, but there was no evidence of the date. However, I did see the bookplate, Ex Libris Peter Sheldrake. The drawing was of Pan, I think, playing his pipes for a woman, who stood watching him, seductively bare breasted, playing with a necklace. Like the socks I wore to work, my bookplate was another small sign of a rebellious nature. Closer to Whyte’s workplace culture than I’d care to admit, I still liked to believe I was not an ideal organisation man!
[i] First published by Simon and Schuster, 1956. I am using the Penguin Special edition of 1960
[ii] From David Cohn’s review of Ballyhoo and Faith by William F Whyte, in The New York Times, 6 April 1952.
[iii] Ibid, page 8
[iv] More than telling, he explains why the ‘surprise ending’ was to be expected, confirming the morals of the time
[v] Kochland was published by Simon and Schuster, 2019. See more on this book later.
[vi] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/waywewore/waywewore_19.html
[vii] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/waywewore/waywewore_1.html
[viii] Stuart Chase wrote The Proper Study of Mankind, New York, Harper, 1948, which gives an excellent overview.
[ix] Simon and Schuster, New York, 2019. They were the publishers of The Organisation Man 63 years earlier.
[x] See: Japanese Salarymen: On the Way to Extinction? Kristin Wingate, Fairfield University, 2016
