The Organization Man

  But there is considerable mobility. High-school records show that roughly 25 per cent of the graduating class do not return to Newburyport but instead go off to join the organization world, and in many cases this geographic movement represents social movement as well. Meanwhile, the old upper-upper families of the beautiful houses on High Street have been giving way here and there; one by one the old houses are being sold as old ladies with them pass on. (Several have been bought by executives brought into town by local companies.) Newburyporters are sad at some aspects of the slow disintegration of the eighteenth-century idyl, but they are not entirely hostile to the twentieth century. The Newburyport paper is a running stream of items about efforts of citizens to bring in new industry, and after a strenuous local debate they got enough land condemned to make a sort of industrial park. The great suburban trend has not hit them yet, but the new highway up from Boston is broad and flat.

  For many towns the tensions have been strong. The new people may be a symbol of growth and prosperity, but much as resort natives view the “summer people” the old residents see them as something of a threat. These people and the corporation that is bringing them not only upset the historically low wage structure of the town, they have upset the whole local order of things. Whether his blood is blue or not, the general manager of the corporation’s branch plant wields key power, and the townspeople know it. It is little wonder that corporations think long and hard about the tact of the proconsuls—and their wives—that they send to the far reaches of the empire.

  Thus the pleasant young couple driving slowly along in their ranch wagon looking at the old houses can be to a somewhat dispossessed gentry a portent they fear. A member of one of the prominent families in one old town asked me, a comparative stranger, what were the people like that lived in the new houses on the hill across from her farm. “My husband and I are sick about it. We sold the twenty acres over there because we needed the money, but now look what’s happened. Those ugly little boxes they’re putting up! They cost like sin but there’s not one in good taste. These people have no style at all. I wonder where Tom [president of a near-by steel company] finds them all. They are all bright, I suppose. Those wives with their silly babble and their middle-western twangs! They have already just about taken over the golf club, and now Charlie wants me to entertain some of them. I simply won’t. I’ll be pleasant to them, but they have their way and I have mine.”

  The newcomers can often sense the distaste. The transients may tell you about a wonderfully exceptional town they hit, but they are more likely to tell you of towns that proffered a cold shoulder. Sometimes they speak of outright antagonism on the part of the locals. If the community is one that has been expanding rapidly, the apprehensions over the newcomers can get translated very quickly into such matters as zoning and club restrictions, and the little developments that encircle some towns form what is in effect a ring of animosities.*

  The same process of replacement has been going on, somewhat more painlessly, in the great metropolitan centers. Because of the greater number of opportunities it offers, one might assume that the city would much more easily use its home-grown talent to staff its institutions. Even here, however, the natives have been outnumbered by the newcomers. Philadelphia, for example, has long been considered quite inbred, yet a study by sociologist Digby Baltzell reveals that as early as 1940, 64 per cent of the Philadelphia business and professional leaders listed in Who’s Who were born outside the Philadelphia area; in time, he documents, the influx of new blood in the positions of power is reflected in the Social Register.

  The same process is going on everywhere. As the seats of economic power have shifted from the local, home-grown institutions to national organizations, membership in the elite of many a city or town is being determined less by hereditary ties, more by current functional rank. Not only are the national institutions sending in more people, the local institutions themselves are also being opened to outsiders more than before. The urban elite, in short, has become an ex-officio elite.

  To document the facts of current mobility is not to furnish proof that it will continue, and I have met many who believe that in its present order of magnitude it is a temporary phenomenon. I think they underestimate the force of momentum in this respect. It is true enough that the postwar physical expansion of industry has been a great factor, and we cannot count on this as a constant. The more intangible aspects of mobility, however, can be just as important. Turnover has a way of begetting turnover, for as people become acclimated to current necessity there is a natural tendency to make it into a desirability.

  Let me turn for a moment to corporation transfer policy, for it helps illuminate the self-perpetuating nature of the mobility. When the recruit joins up he does not do so because he wants to move a lot, and it is often in spite of it. But moving, he knows, has become part of the bargain, and unsettling as transfer might be, even more unsettling are the implications of not being asked to transfer. “We never plan to transfer,” as one company president explains a bit dryly, “and we never make a man move. Of course, he kills his career if he doesn’t. But we never make him do it.” The fact is well understood; it is with a smile that the recruit moves—and keeps on moving—year after year, until, perhaps, that distant day when he is summoned back to Rome.

  It is not just more moves per man. Even companies reporting no increase in the number of times each individual moves report an increase in the sheer number of men being moved. G.E. has compared a cross section of its forty-five-year-old executives with one of its thirty-five-year-olds. In the ten years after they were twenty-five, 42 percent of the older group had moved at least once; during the same age period, 58 per cent of the younger had moved.

  Corporations never planned it quite that way. Decentralization and expansion, rather than deliberate personnel policy, have determined the pattern. Companies have systematized it, to be sure. Moves are settling into more of a rhythm, and almost invariably they are sweetened by special departments that handle all the housekeeping fuss of the trip. By and large, however, the question of the man’s personal development—however emphasized when the boss breaks the news to him—has been secondary to the day-to-day necessity of filling vacancies out in the empire.*

  That is, up until now. Periodic transfer, some companies are coming to believe, is a positive good in itself; and even where no immediate functional reason exists, it might often be important to move the man anyway. What better way, they ask, to produce the well-rounded executive? Instead of leaving transfer to be determined haphazardly by different departments, some companies, like G.E., have made such decisions part of a systematic managerial program. By thus making a man’s “permanent” assignment (i.e., one lasting at least three years) part of a deliberate rotation policy, the man is given “more choices in life to make,” and the company, as a result, is given a pool of seasoned talent. Other companies agree. By deliberately exposing a man to a succession of environments, they best obtain that necessity of the large organization—the man who can fit in anywhere. “The training,” as an I.B.M. executive succinctly puts it, “makes our men interchangeable.”

  And is not this the whole drift of our society? We are not interchangeable in the sense of being people without differences, but in the externals of existence we are united by a culture increasingly national. And this is part of the momentum of mobility. The more people move about, the more similar the American environments become, and the more similar they become, the easier it is to move about.

  More and more, the young couples who move do so only physically. With each transfer the décor, the architecture, the faces, and the names may change; the people, the conversation, and the values do not—and sometimes the décor and the architecture don’t either. If there are no company people to help the newcomers break the ice, there are almost bound to be some fellow transients near by, and the chances are good that some of them will be couples that the most recent arrivals have run into somewhere else in this gre
at new freemasonry of transients. It is, they like to observe, a small world. “I just jump to read the new-arrivals list in the local paper,” says a typical transient. “We’ve already run up against a couple from our Cambridge days at the Business School, and we’re sure that some from Park Fairfax or Fresh Meadows will be along soon too.” But even if they know no one it will not make too much difference. Whatever their respective organizations, they will share the same problems, the same kind of memories and aspirations. To use a favorite phrase, they talk the same language.

  This communality among organization people would seem to support one of the more unpleasant prophecies that have been advanced in the U.S. Will not this freemasonry of talent freeze into an elite more and more closed to outsiders? From Veblen’s “soviet of engineers” to Burnham’s “managerial revolution,” the idea that a professional ruling class was jelling—or should jell—has been a strong undercurrent in American thought. Today, on the face of it there would seem more reason than ever for such an elite to coalesce.

  I do not think this is the direction of our main problem. As the new generation of management has been maturing, whole groups, not merely individuals, have moved into the middle class. The fact, for example, that a declining number of businessmen comes from farm homes is not due to oligarchy so much as to the decrease in the proportion of farmers to the rest of the U.S. population. So with laborers. It is true that few top executives come up from a working-class background, but we tend to exaggerate the number who ever did. If we go back to 1870, we find that very few of the business leaders of that time had been laborers or even laborers’ sons. As a study by Gregory and Neu* demonstrated, the business leaders of that day were overwhelmingly of middle- or upper-class background, and more, not fewer, of them were sons of heads of companies than today.

  As the middle class has expanded, the hereditary advantages of the upper strata have declined drastically. The spread of American education, the growing accessibility to culture, have so ironed out regional and social differences that a vastly greater number of Americans can now compete on even terms in what might be called a national society. The rate of expansion within high-prestige occupations tells part of the story. As Nelson Foote has pointed out, the occupations which have shown the greatest relative gain compared to 1910 are those, like teaching and engineering, in which education is far more important than family and community ties. Similarly, within business, those more dependent on family connections —the proprietors, for example—have decreased while the white-collar people have increased.*

  For further evidence of this upward movement we are indebted to none other than Lloyd Warner. He has collaborated in a study of big-business leaders, and with a willingness to revise former conclusions that compels awe as well as respect, he concludes that it is people who move who are the key. Hereditary advantages can be important, he and co-author James C. Abegglen note, but what seems to be the more essential denominator of top executives is a recurrent cycle of “arrival and departure”—an ability to leave one set of friends and circumstances and affiliate with another, and to repeat this whenever necessary, and repeat it again. “All evidence,” Warner and Abegglen say, “indicates that in American society opportunity continues to be realized, and increasingly so. Rather than closing in on men of low birth, holding them to the positions into which they were born, our social system continues to make it possible for men from all levels to move into elite positions in commerce and industry.”†

  Aside from the fact that the managerial group is open to all comers, there is another fact which disqualifies its members as a ruling class. They have no collective sense of direction. They have none because their organizations have none. Owing to essential differences in functions and goals, and not unimportantly, the American inability to put things together into a doctrine until after it’s all over, our many different hierarchies are not so comparable as might appear. Like the union man who becomes an industrial-relations executive, the ex-government lawyer turned a corporation counsel, the erstwhile blue blood who becomes a sales trainee, many organization men have a conflict in loyalties they must resolve. The men who move are not vouchsafed a common, all-purpose religion.

  Their allegiance is more to The Organization itself than to any particular one, for it is in the development of their professional techniques, not in ideology, that they find continuity—and this, perhaps, is one more reason why managerial people have not coalesced into a ruling class. “They have not taken over the governing functions,” Max Lerner has pointed out, “nor is there any sign that they want to or can. They have concentrated on the fact of their skills rather than on the uses to which their skills are put. The question of the cui bono the technician regards as beyond his technical competence.”

  The evidence, in short, is that whatever the faults of american society at this time, lack of dynamism is not one of them. The routes to advancement are not closing down, our classes are not freezing; quite the opposite, there have never been so many people moving in so many different ways. How much to the good, or bad, this change will be is a question we must defer. There is no virtue in change per se; whether or not it is to be for the good depends on what the change is to, and that, as the young suburbanites’ way of life would indicate, is at once unsettling and encouraging.

  A focus on the dynamic can breed a shallow optimism, and one can revel so much in the variety in American life as to believe that no matter how bad a particular trend may be there is always a counter-trend around to offset it, and so why worry? (Or why generalize, some might add.) Yet I do believe the emphasis on change to be the most valid point of view and one, furthermore, that bespeaks a considerable faith in the capacities of the individual. Observers who would like to see less change argue that change breeds anxieties, tensions, and frustrations. This is true, and certainly the suburban transients pay a great price for the uprooting that has put them there. But how ideal for them would be the alternative? Before we explore their troubles let us remember that only a fixed order of things, or total allegiance to one encompass-ingly benevolent organization, would give them freedom from this kind of worries.

  * Recently, Point of No Return, by J. P. Marquand; A Pride of Lions, by John Brooks; The View from Pompey’s Head, Hamilton Basso. Forerunners would include Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady.

  * A study by New York University’s Dr. Marie Jahoda indicates that in its initial stages of development, the people in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, believed that most of the other people in lower Bucks County disliked them. They were quite right.

  * There are still a number of environments, it should be noted, in which executives don’t fit in—and some in which they fit in all too well. A good many companies have belatedly realized they have lost some of their best men by carelessly assigning them to San Francisco or Los Angeles for a spell. Even salary boosts often fail to achieve repatriation; once tasted, the California way of life dulls such appetites—a fact that has sometimes been reflected in a salary differential between the West Coast and the East. When Shell Chemical moved its head office to New York from San Francisco some of its management group resigned rather than go along, and several who did go along eventually decided to go back. Another company recently located a lab on the Coast, it admits, mainly to hang onto talent it might otherwise lose.

  On the other hand, there are some kinds of environments many people can’t be tempted into trying at all. This has been particularly evident in the postwar moves of entire headquarters to the hinterlands. Making a small town a way station on the executive route is one thing; making it Mecca, another. An organization’s creative and professional people usually will move permanently to a small town only if it is in striking distance of a large city and the professional contacts it affords. Similarly, almost any executive is likely to balk—for a while at least—if the town is so small that the influx of the company threatens a resurgence of the paternalistic company town.

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p; * In Men in Business, edited by William Miller; a publication of the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History, Harvard University, 1952.

  * Nelson N. Foote and Paul K. Hatt, “Social Mobility and Economic Advancement,” The American Economic Review, May 1953.

  † W. Lloyd Warner and James C. Abegglen, Big Business Leaders in America (New York: Harper and Bros., 1955). This study, based on 8,562 businessmen, gives an even stronger picture of mobility than did Herrymon Maurer’s provocative study, which concentrated on the 900 top executives (Fortune, Nov. 1952). Using categories comparable to those used in earlier studies, Warner and Abegglen found that since 1900 there had been an increase of 8 per cent in the proportion of executives whose fathers were laborers, a decrease of 10 per cent in those whose fathers were owners of businesses. A study by Mabel Newcomer, The Big Business Executive (New York, 1955) documents the same trend; in her sample, 7.5 per cent of the executives of 1950 were sons of workers—versus 4.2. per cent for the executives of 1900.

  CHAPTER 22 The New Roots

  To find where the mobility of organization life is leading, the new package suburbs may be the best place of all to look. For they are not merely great conglomerations of mass housing. They are a new social institution, and while the variations in them are many, wherever one goes—the courts of Park Forest, the patios of Park Merced in San Francisco, Philadelphia’s Drexelbrook, the new Levittown, Pennsylvania—there is an unmistakable similarity in the way of life.