The Beechmont Crest Online Guide to Management Science
THE ORGANIZATION MAN
By the end of the Second World War, the influence of Taylor and the scientific school of management had been softened considerably by other schools of thought, and by various social and political changes. (Labor unions were at the height of their power; and many of the original practices of Taylorism were curtailed by labor legislation.) Nevertheless, the identification of employees as “a part of” the company would continue well into recent decades.
In the postwar era, however, more attention was given to the depersonalization of white collar workers in organizational environments. In his 1956 book, The Organization Man, William Whyte chronicled the surrender of individual identity to corporate identity. A journalist for Fortune Magazine, Whyte was a quasi-insider within the world of the big corporations that became the workplace of choice in the decades following World War II.
Whyte asserted that corporations rewarded conformist behavior—and that the conformity continued beyond the hours that the organization men spent on the job. The employees portrayed in Whyte’s book tended to live in nearly identical neighborhoods, hold the same sets of beliefs, and imitate each other in nearly all aspects of dress and demeanor. The organization man’s personal sense of identity was completely tied to the corporation, such that he had virtually no other sense of self. Whyte was disappointed to see the self-reliant, “frontier spirit” of generations past give way to an obsession with petty corporate politics and organizational identity.
But it would be a mistake to interpret the existence of Whyte’s organization men in starkly Orwellian terms. During The Organization Man era, Adam Smith’s harsh analogy of the worker as a machinelike “asset” of the company evolved. While white collar workers were arguably cogs in wheel, the new relationship between the company and the employee was symbiotic and paternalistic. It was a “social contract,” with obligations and benefits for both sides. The employee had an obligation to provide the company with hard work and dedication. And the company, in return, would provide secure, steady employment throughout the employee’s working life.
During these years, it became common for employees of large corporations to use explicitly paternal language to refer to their employers. (Examples include “Father Ford,” “Procter & God,” etc.) Sometimes these monikers were used with affection—and at other times, with sarcasm.