Man with the Rotary Hoe

Man with the Rotary Hoe THE ORGANIZATION MAN (429 pp.) --William H. Whyfe Jr.--Simon & Schusfer ($5).

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground . . . Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

--Edwin Markham The Man With the Hoe'

The Industrial Revolution turned the peasantry into the proletariat, working the "dark Satanic mills," and Karl Marx predicted that eventually the middle class would be forced into the faceless proletariat, too. During the '305 it seemed to some that Marx had been right, and the myth of robber barons engaged in snatching bread from the mouths of the poor was in the back of many a muddled head. Now, it seems, there is a new and very different thing to worry about. The capitalist robber baron has turned out to be a love-starved aunt cramming cake into eager little mouths. The middle class, instead of disappearing, has waxed fat and happy.

A lot of people are pleased by this unmarxist revolution--especially the revolutionaries triumphant in their suburbs--but since World War II, a whole school of literature has sprung up worrying about the situation. The "whitecollar mob" and the "lonely crowd" have become the objects of much nervous concern. William H. (for Hollingsworth) Whyte Jr., an assistant managing editor of FORTUNE, is the latest and perhaps the most thoughtful writer to be thus concerned. His "Organization Man" is the man with the rotary hoe--the suburbanite who is doing well in technological America. Whyte wonders who slanted his skull into a middlebrow conformation and worries that the light may be blown out within his brain.

As Whyte sees it, the U.S. is a nation which likes to think of itself as 160 million individualists, but is filling up with a new generation that is more than half in love with easeful life. This generation, thinks Whyte, has deliberately lowered its sights to a safe, sound, specialized job within some "company family" and membership in a suburban group where nothing is split but the split-level home.

Conflict v. Adjustment. Until a generation or two ago the U.S. lived by what Whyte calls the "Protestant Ethic" of thrift, hard work and competition, but this is gradually being replaced by the "Social Ethic" of security, collective spirit and "scientism." The ideal of healthy conflict is being replaced by the ideal of adjustment. Big organizations in the U.S. have become self-contained welfare states, "citadels of belongingness," to which the new generation pays almost monastic allegiance. "They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life."

Some critics have already gleefully pounced on Whyte's book, trying to make his thesis conform with the current cult of nonconformity. This is not Whyte's intention. Says he: "This book is not a plea for nonconformity. Such pleas have an occasional therapeutic value, but as an abstraction, nonconformity is an empty goal . . . Indeed it is often a mask for cowardice ..." The main problem, in Whyte's view, is more specific: it is that, with the most enlightened intentions, big organizations are often stifling individual initiative. This is a result not of the evils of organization life, but of its very beneficence: Organization Man is "imprisoned in brotherhood." Partly because of their enormous size, partly because of the myth that strong leadership is somehow undemocratic, U.S. organizations are increasingly run by "multiple management," i.e., committees, boards, etc. There is a growing reliance, thinks Whyte, on the creativity of the group as against the creativity of the lone individual. As the epitome of this spirit, Whyte cites a device known as the Group-Thinkometer, which allows a committee to register decisions by pressing invisible buttons under the table, so that dissent will remain anonymous.

Human Engineering. Whyte concedes that the Group-Thinkometer is an extreme example, but he believes that it is symptomatic, not only in business but in scientific team research, which often stifles the brilliantly casual and encourages the orderly mediocre, as well as in the big foundations, which prefer to give money to groups rather than to individuals. (Many group research men, says Whyte, go after foundation money not because they are really interested in the projects the money can finance, but "as Mallory said of Mount Everest, because it is there.") The group spirit, thinks Whyte, can breed the kind of deadening atmosphere that was expressed in a training film for a major U.S. chemical corporation, which proclaimed happily as it surveyed the huge laboratories: "No geniuses here; just a bunch of average Americans working together."

Top executives in the U.S.. says White, are anything but just a bunch of average Americans. They still must run the show, and they know it; but increasingly, they also must waste energy in paying obeisance to group mythology and in playing a role to fit the new notion of the ideal executive. To a large extent, this ideal is no longer the hard-driving genius; it is the well-rounded man who does his job with ease (so much so that many executives now feel guilty when they work too hard) and who is smooth rather than brilliant.

The closest thing to a villain that Whyte produces is not business, nor materialism, nor conformity, but a prize possession of liberals and reformers--pragmatic sociology. More specifically, it is the notion (stemming from, among others, William James and John Dewey) that science can be used to understand and regulate all human activity. The 19th century's optimistic belief in the perfectibility of the individual has been replaced by the belief in the perfectibility of society --if necessary at the expense of the individual. Whyte launches a ferocious attack on personality tests which size up employees through supposedly scientific questionnaires (even how they fill out the questionnaires may count against them, e.g., spelling out one's middle name in full shows narcissism). Whyte sees the preposterous pseudo-psychology of these tests as a symbol of what he regards as almost a secular religion, the dangerously Utopian belief in "human engineering."

To Stand His Ground. What to do? In a lot of popular fiction about Organization Man. Whyte notes caustically, the hero simply speaks his hatred of Big Organization and retires to the good life in the country. That is not Whyte's solution: "[His escape] will enable him to live a lot more comfortably than the ulcerated colleagues left behind, and in more than one sense it's the latter who are the less materialistic. Our hero has left the battlefield where his real fight must be fought." Whyte simply wants Organization Man to stand his ground, speak his mind and constructively fight the organization, when necessary. He recalls, with De Tocqueville, that even when the Protestant Ethic of individualism was in full flower, frontier-born America understood and practiced cooperation. But Whyte makes an eloquent plea for a re-emphasis of the individual: "Organization has been made by man; it can be changed by man . . . The fault is not in organization; it is in our worship of it." There are, continues Whyte, a few times in organization life when the individual "can wrench his destiny into his own hands" and he should not miss these moments, for his own sake and for that of his organization.

In short, what Whyte is saying is that the U.S. has nothing much to worry about as long as the man of the future does not turn out to be the man with the grey flannel mouth.

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