-Caveat Lector-
>From NYTimes Op-Ed
January 17, 1999
A Need To Belong
By ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD
B ERKELEY, Calif. -- When it first appeared in 1956, William H.
Whyte's "The Organization Man" hit a raw nerve. Four decades later,
it is strange to note what slogans we remember from this classic
and what wisdom we forget.
The book was an in-depth study of middle-class men who lived in
suburban Park Forest, Ill., and worked for large companies. Whyte
followed their lives from college to the jobs they then
"transferred" into. He also wrote about homes in their suburbs
("packaged villages") and their trim wives. Everything seemed to
correlate. Thus, the higher the real-estate value of the suburb,
the smaller the best-selling dress sizes in nearby department
stores. Whyte even studied the speeches chief executives gave and
the personality tests they took.
Today, many think of Whyte's book as a simplistic critique of the
conformist corporate man. But this is unfair. Whyte provided a
subtle and thoughtful exploration of the moral perimeters of modern
life. He charted the decline of the Protestant ethic -- the pursuit
of salvation through hard work, thrift and competitive struggle, an
ethic that prized the individual, not the group.
Whyte himself had no love for that ethic, since it seemed to
promise the entrepreneur that God had elevated what for centuries
had been looked on "as the meanest greed" into something "a rising
middle class would interpret as the earthly manifestation of God's
will."
But Whyte also saw that this point of view continued to exert rare
power. He pointed out that the best-paid consultants were those who
could make whatever was happening in the culture -- even rampant
consumerism -- seem an expression of the Protestant ethic.
Among the corporate employees of Forest Park, however, Whyte
discovered a very different social ethic that put the group ahead
of the individual. The organization man's ultimate need, he
suggested, was not to succeed, save and compete, but to belong.
The dark side of the new ethic was that it could hamper individual
creativity. Thus, Whyte advocated less time spent in committee
meetings and more time spent alone thinking up ideas.
He also thought that the social ethic could squash individual
conscience. An employee who was uncritically loyal to the company
might not be a good citizen. Better for people to be socially
responsible as well as creative.
Is "The Organization Man" relevant today? Certainly the corporate
landscape has changed. For one thing, today many middle managers
are women.
Gone is the domestic back-up for the workaholic man. But Whyte's
larger point, about the invasiveness of the corporate mentality,
still holds. Whether the ethic is Protestant or social, there is
even more concern today about work-family balance.
On the global chessboard, companies are gobbling one another up,
finding precarious niches, starting up or going under. In "The New
Individualists," published in 1991, a pair of writers, Paul
Leinberger and Bruce Tucker, interviewed the sons of Whyte's
suburban subjects and found that these men didn't desire to belong.
They were fine without belonging. We don't have loyalty-inducing
organizations, the authors wrote, and we don't even have
organization men without organizations.
But Whyte wondered, and we should too, whether the matter really
ends there. Maybe the Organization Man is dead, but the social
ethic, and its passive abdication to a corporate way of life, is
not dead. Maybe our rootlessness helps make us big adapters. In a
brilliant chapter, "The Transients," Whyte describes the many
people -- their numbers increase in the higher education and income
levels -- who leave home and never return. They do so partly
because it would be an admission of defeat to go home, and partly
because, as Whyte puts it, "transients can't go home because they
won't find it there if they do."
Today transience occurs on a global scale. We move not only from
one job to another, but from one spouse -- and sometimes one set of
children -- to the next. In "The New Insecurity," the philosopher
Jerald Wallulis argues that we are changing from a society that
values employment and marriage to one that values employability and
marriageability.
In the face of this, it seems that all we can think to do is don
the armor of the old Protestant ethic, brave the cold winds of
global capitalism and try our luck. Whyte's wisdom -- his grasp of
the larger and deeper reality -- led him to see that it might hurt
inside to live like this, and that we don't have to adjust -- as
the Organization Man did -- to the circumstances capitalism gives
us. We can use our creativity to change them.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociology professor at the University
of California at Berkeley, is the author, most recently, of ``The
Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work.''
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