The White-Collar Ape

Man has come a long way since he abandoned the jungle and the loincloth for the office and the necktie. Today modern management science has supplanted instinct as a guide for decision making, and the corporation has replaced the tribe. Or so it seems.

Antony Jay, a British management consultant and former BBC producer, thinks that the distance between the tribal councils of Kalahari bushmen and the inner circles of IBM is not all that great. In a book to be published next month, Corporation Man (Random House; $7.95), Jay argues that modern business firms are organized on the same basis as aboriginal tribes. Furthermore, the behavior of corporate executives springs not so much from reason as from animallike, prehistoric instincts. As in Management and Machiavelli, a 1968 book in which Jay compared the corporation to a nation-state, he has done little scientific research to support his bizarre contentions. But in Corporation Man he supplies some witty recollections from his days at the BBC and in the army, and tosses in a few unorthodox anthropological insights. Among Jay's observations:

THE HUNTING BAND. The keystone of the tribe was the hunting band of ten or so men who went out foraging for food; the heart of the modern corporation is usually a similar group of ten or so employees who form naturally into a ruling circle and are broadly charged with ensuring the firm's long-term survival.

THE CAMP. Employees who are not making or selling the product that brings in the money are nonhunting tribal members who mind the campsite. The camp may embrace departments like finance, planning, personnel, maintenance and public relations. "What the corporation's hunters find absolutely intolerable," Jay says, "is the squaw-men in the camp starting to behave as if they were as important as the men who go out and kill the game."

POPULATION BALANCE. An all-male tribe is more aggressive than a tribe with a large number of female members, and thus more prone to bring about the collapse of a corporation's tribal structure--namely, a strike. The longest and bitterest strikes involve the all-male tribes in mines, docks and factories, whereas strikes of female-dominated white-collar tribes are milder.

TERRITORIALITY. Some species of animals, including tribal man, stake out their own territories and repulse any intruder, whether there is any real threat of danger or not; managers and union officials tend to hit out automatically, and often irrationally, at any infringement, real or imaginary, on their responsibilities or prerogatives.

STATUS. Though many companies officially discourage the pursuit of status, elaborate hierarchies of status symbols tend to spring up automatically. "There is the secretary," Jay notes, "ranging from access to the pool through a secretary in your office, then a secretary in a separate office, to two secretaries and finally an assistant with her own secretary." He ranks the quality and magnitude of rubber plants, carpets, washrooms, stationery and cars as important symbols. According to Jay, status hierarchies are found throughout the animal kingdom and serve as indicators of worth when the real indices--such as in the case of man, salaries or organization charts--are not visible.

FOLKLORE. In the same way tribes build up legends about formidable hunters and battles, corporations develop their own folklore. Stories of idiosyncratic bosses and financial disasters "circulate with rich embroidery," Jay says, and form a cultural bond among employees who otherwise have little in common.

RITUALIZED AGGRESSION. Warring groups of animals and birds often make a great show of bellowing and pulling up clumps of grass in front of each other, rather than actually fighting. Executives of competing corporations engage in the same kind of ritualized aggression when they choose to do battle through advertising, packaging and other frills, rather than through price cutting. "A fight to the death would upset the delicate ecology of the industry," Jay explains. "It never happens."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.