The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  He also told the interviewer that his principal worry is that he does not get along too well with another top executive of his company. He was troubled when a suggestion of his that was rejected later turned out to be right—and the other chap knew it was right. In such a situation he felt exposed. He cannot eat before going into a board meeting, and wondered to the interviewer whether he might not be better off running his own small company rather than as an official of a large one. For recreation he plays golf, though he does not seem to care for it and, in good inner-directed style, or perhaps simply good American style, does “a little fooling around with tools in the basement.”

  Material from interviews is, of course, open to a variety of possible interpretations, and I have no great confidence that those here suggested are correct. It would surely be erroneous to conclude that this executive has doubts about himself because he is not fully other-directed or inner-directed (by the very definition of these terms, no one is fully one or the other). The point is rather that the modern executive, regardless of the blend of the two modes of conformity he displays, is put under constant social pressure, in and out of the office. This executive is perhaps better able than most to verbalize the strain this pressure sets up.

  FROM CRAFT SKILL TO MANIPULATIVE SKILL

  The pressure toward social competence, with its concurrent playing down of technical competence, suggests another aspect of this executive’s history which is typical for the emergence of a new pattern in American business and professional life: if one is successful in one’s craft, one is forced to leave it. The machine-tool man began in the shop; as V.P. for sales and advertising he has become an uneasy manipulator of people and of himself. Likewise, the newspaperman who rises becomes a columnist or desk-man, the doctor becomes the head of a clinic or hospital, the professor becomes a dean, president, or foundation official, the factory superintendent becomes a holding company executive. All these men must bury their craft routines and desert their craft companions. They must work less with things and more with people.

  To be sure, business was always work with people. But when the size of enterprises was small, the new head of the enterprise could remain a colleague among other colleagues; he did not cut connections entirely and enter a new milieu. William Allen White’s Autobiography shows that he was able to maintain all his life the amiable fiction that he was only a working newspaperman. Similarly, the older generation of college presidents was composed largely of men who continued to think of themselves as scholars. So, too, the older generation of business executives kept their hats on in the office, chewed tobacco, and otherwise tried to retain their connections with the shop. Today, however, the familiar organizational concepts of “staff and line” symbolize the cutting off of direct contact between the executive and the working staffs of both staff and line. To sit at his new big desk—or to get there—he has to learn a new personality-oriented specialty and unlearn or at least soft-pedal his old skill orientation.

  To the point is a story of an engineer who is offered the far more lucrative job of sales manager.1 He loves engineering, but his wife won’t let him turn down the promotion. His sponsor in the organization tells him it is now or never: does he want to be wearing a green eyeshade all his life? He reluctantly accepts. That night he has a dream. He has a slide rule in his hands, and he suddenly realizes that he does not know how to use it. He wakes in panic. The dream clearly symbolizes his feeling of impotence in a new job where he is alienated from his craft.

  The executive who has moved up from a professional position can hardly help feeling that his work is air conditioned: fine only so long as the machinery below runs smoothly. Those colleagues whom he has left behind will not be slow, in their envy, to remind him that he can no longer consider himself a competent craftsman among his fellow craftsmen, that he does not fool them if, as an editor or by-line columnist, he occasionally attends a presidential press conference; or, as a college administrator, an occasional scholarly convention; or, as a sales manager, occasionally makes a mark on a drawing board.

  Indeed, a society increasingly dependent on manipulation of people is almost as destructive of the craft-oriented professional and businessman as a society in the earlier stages of industrialization is destructive of the handicraft-oriented peasant and artisan. The professional of the more recent period is pushed upstairs into the managerial class while the artisan of the earlier period was pushed into the proletariat; and this testifies to a profound difference in the two historic situations. Yet in both cases the industrial process advances by building into machines and into smooth-flowing organizations the skills that were once built, by a long process of apprenticeship and character-formation, into men.

  Despite this pattern, there are many positions in business, and in particular in the older professions, that offer comfortable places to inner-directed types. In medicine and law the ideology of free enterprise is strong. The attempt to apply objective criteria in selecting personnel persists, and is strengthened by the otherwise odious emphasis on grades in the educational and licensing system. In a hospital, a law firm, a university, there is room not only for those who can bring people together but for those who can bring together chemicals, citations, or ideas. There are many niches for the work-minded craftsman who does not care to learn, or cannot learn, to move with the crowd.

  Even in big industry some such areas can continue to exist because not all technological problems—problems of the hardness of the material—have been solved or put on a routine problem-solving basis. Moreover, there are certain key spots in big business and big government where at times it is precisely an inner-directed rate-buster who is needed—for instance, a man who can say no without going through an elaborate song and dance. At the same time the values characteristic of other-direction may spread at such a rate as to hit certain sectors of the economy before these sectors have solved their technological problems. In the United States the lure of other-directed work and leisure styles cannot be everywhere modulated to the uneven front of economic advance.

  FROM FREE TRADE TO FAIR TRADE

  Very soon after the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 outlawed unfair competition it became clear that what was unfair was to lower the price of goods, though this view was concealed under attacks against cheating or mislabeling of goods. But in the NRA period this covert attitude received government and public sanction, and it became libelous to call someone a price cutter. With the passage of the Robinson-Patman Act and state fair-trade laws, free trade and fair trade became antithetical terms. Prices come to be set by administration and negotiation or, where this is too likely to bring in the Antitrust Division, by “price leadership.” Relations that were once handled by the price mechanism or fiat are now handled by negotiation.

  Price leadership often looks to the economist simply as the manipulation of devices to avoid price wars and divide the field. But price leadership has other aspects as well. It is a means by which the burden of decision is put onto the “others.” The so-called price leaders themselves look to the government for clues, since cost—that mythical will-of-the-wisp—is no longer, if it ever really was, an unequivocal guide. Follow-the-leader is also played in arriving at the price and working conditions of labor; and unions have profited from their ability to play on the wishes of top management to be in stride with the industry leaders, and to be good fellows to boot. As we shall see later, the other-directed pattern of politics tends to resemble the other-directed pattern of business: leadership is in the same amorphous state. Moreover, both in business and in politics, the other-directed executive prefers to stabilize his situation at a level that does not make too heavy demands on him for performance. Hence, at various points in the decision-making process he will vote for an easier life as against the risks of expansion and free-for-all competition.

  Such a business life does not turn out to be the “easy” one. For one thing, the other-directed people do not have things all their own way in business any more th
an they do in politics. Free trade is still a powerful force, despite the incursions of the fair traders. Many observers, judging the degree of monopoly by looking at the percentage of assets controlled by the large, administered-price corporations, overlook the fact that even a small percentage of companies outside the range of the glad hand can have a leverage quite disproportionate to their assets. Rubber may be a monopoly, but will we always need rubber? Movies may be monopolisric, but what about television? In the small and marginal industries, the monopolies not of today but of tomorrow, there is often no need to be a good fellow. What is more, the dynamics of technological change remain challenging; whole departments within industries, as well as whole industries themselves, can become obsolete, despite their ability to negotiate repeated stays of the death sentence imposed by technological change. Even within the great monopolistic industries there are still many technologically oriented folk as well as many technologically oriented departments; no management planning in any one company can completely smooth out and routinize the pressure resulting from their innovations.

  To the extent that the businessman is freed by his character and situation from considerations of cost, he must face the problem of finding new motives for his entrepreneurship. He must tune in to the others to see what they are saying about what a proper business ought to be. Thus, a psychological sensitivity that begins with fear of being called a price cutter spreads to fear of being unfashionable in other ways. The businessman is as afraid of pursuing goals that may be obsolete as of living a style of life that may not be stylish. Oriented as he is to others, and to the consumption sphere, he views his own business as a consumer.

  By and large, business firms until World War I needed only three kinds of professional advice: legal, auditing, and engineering. These were relatively impersonal services, even when, in the case of the lawyers, the services included buying—for cash on the barrelhead—a few legislators or judges. Since the number of available specialists was fairly small in comparison with demand, they could be absorbed into either or both of the two types of prevailing nexus: one, the family-status-connection nexus which persisted from earlier times in the smaller communities and does so even today in these communities and in the South; the other, the cash nexus based on performance, or on “character” in the older sense. Today the buyer is, first of all, not sure which of many services to buy: shall he get a lawyer or a public relations man or a market research agency or call in a management consulting firm to decide; second, he is not sure of his choice among the many potential suppliers of each of these services—none of whom must he accept either for family-status-connection reasons or for obviously superior character and performance. Thus choice will turn on a complex of more or less accidental, whimsical factors: a chance contact or conversation, a story in Business Week or a “confidential” newsletter, the luck of a salesman.

  We can see the shift in many corporate histories. A business that begins as a small family enterprise, whose founders have their eye on the main chance—with a focus on costs and a “show me” attitude about good will and public relations—often alters its aims in the second generation. Fortune is put on the table, a trade association is joined, and the aim becomes not so much dollars as the possession of those appurtenances which an up-to-date company is supposed to have. We see a succession of demi-intellectuals added to the staff: industrial relations directors, training directors, safety directors. A house organ is published; consultants are called in on market research, standard operating procedures, and so on; shop and store front have their faces lifted; and in general status is sought, with profits becoming useful as one among many symbols of status and as the reserve for further moves toward a status-dictated expansion.

  In many cases this shift is accompanied by a conflict of the older, more inner-directed with the younger, more other-directed generation. The older men have come up through the shop or through a technical school with no pretensions in the field of human relations. The younger ones are imbued with the new ethic. They seem still to be concerned about making money, and to some extent they are, but they are also concerned with turning their company into the model which they learned at business school. Businessmen recognize this new orientation when they speak of themselves, as they frequently do, as trustees for a variety of publics. And while they try to manipulate these publics and to balance among them, they, like the political leaders, are manipulated by the expectations the public has, or is thought to have, of them.

  If one had to set a date for the change, one might say that the old epoch ended with the death of Henry Ford. After his death his firm, a last stronghold of older ways, completed the installation of new labor, accounting, and other managerial techniques and orientations.

  The word fair in part reflects a carry-over of peer-group values into business life. The peer-grouper is imbued with the idea of fair play; the businessman, of fair trade. Often this means that he must be willing to negotiate matters on which he might stand on his rights. The negotiator, moreover, is expected to bring home not only a specific victory but also friendly feelings toward him and toward his company. Hence, to a degree, the less he knows about the underlying facts, the easier it will be to trade concessions. He is like the street-corner salesman who, reproached for selling for four cents apples that cost him five, said “But think of the turnover!” Here again craft skill, if not an actual drawback, becomes less important than manipulative skill.

  Obviously, much of what has been said applies to the trade unions, the professions, and to academic life as well as to the business world. The lawyer, for instance, who moves into top positions inside and outside his profession is no longer necessarily a craftsman who has mastered the intricacies of, let us say, corporate finance, but may be one who has shown himself to be a good contact man. Since contacts need to be made and remade in every generation and cannot be inherited, this creates lucrative opportunities for the mobile other-directed types whose chief ability is smooth negotiation.

  FROM THE BANK ACCOUNT TO THE EXPENSE ACCOUNT

  In this phrase Professor Paul Lazarsfeld once summed up some recent changes in economic attitudes. The expense account is tied in with today’s emphasis on consumption practices as firmly as the bank account in the old days was tied in with production ideals. The expense account gives the glad hand its grip. In doing so it still further breaks down the wall that in the era depending on inner-direction separated the paths of pleasure and of work. The successful other-directed man brings to business the set of attitudes learned in the sphere of consumption not only when he appraises his own firm with a customer’s eye but also when he is “in conference.”

  Business is supposed to be fun. As World War II inflation cooled off, the business pages repeatedly carried speeches at conventions on the theme: “Now selling will be fun again!” The inner-directed businessman was not expected to have fun; indeed, it was proper for him to be gloomy and even grim. But the other-directed businessman seems increasingly exposed to the mandate that he enjoy the sociabilities that accompany management. The shortening of hours has had much greater effect on the life of the working class than on that of the middle class: the executive and professional continues to put in long hours, employing America’s giant productivity less to leave for home early than to extend his lunch hours, coffee breaks, conventions, and other forms of combining business with pleasure. Likewise, much time in the office itself is also spent in sociability: exchanging office gossip (“conferences”), making good-will tours (“inspection”), talking to salesmen and joshing secretaries (“morale”). In fact, depleting the expense account can serve as an almost limitless occupational therapy for men who, out of a tradition of hard work, a dislike of their wives, a lingering asceticism, and an anxiety about their antagonistic cooperators, still feel that they must put in a good day’s work at the office. But, of course, Simmel would not admit, in his brilliant essay from which I quoted at the head of this chapter, that this kind of sociability, carrying so muc
h workaday freight, was either free or sociable.

  For the new type of career there must be a new type of education. This is one factor, of course not the only one, behind the increasing vogue of general education and the introduction of the humanities and social studies into technical high school and university programs. The educators who sponsor these programs urge cultivating the “whole man,” speak of training citizens for democracy, and denounce narrow specialisms—all valuable themes. Indeed this book grows in part out of the stimulation of teaching in a general social science program. But while it may be doubtful that engineers and businessmen will become either better citizens or better people for having been exposed to these programs, there is little question that they will be more suave. They may be able to demonstrate their edge on the roughnecks from the “tech” schools by trotting out discourse on human relations. Such eloquence may be as necessary for professional and business success today as a knowledge of the classics was to the English politician and high civil servant of the last century.

  Meanwhile, I do not wish to exaggerate the emphasis on human relations even in the bureaucratized sectors of the economy. There is much variety still: some companies, such as Sears Roebuck, seem to be run by glad handers, while others like, let us say, Montgomery Ward, are not; some, like Anaconda, are public relations conscious; others, like Kennecott, are less so. Much current progress in distribution, even in selling, tends to reduce the importance of the salesman. This is clear enough in the Automat. Moreover, the personality aspects of selling can be minimized wherever a technician is needed: for instance, salesmen of specialized equipment which requires a reorientation of the customer’s work force. Though IBM salesmen have to be go-getters, they also have to know how to wire a tabulating machine and, still more important, how to rationalize the information flow within a company. Hence, although they are facilitators of the communications revolution, they must be no less craft oriented than the salesmen of the less complex equipment of an earlier era. Within most such industries there is a great need for technically minded people who are, to a considerable degree, protected by their indispensable skills from having to be nice to everybody, with or without an expense account.