Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  HOW MANY FRIENDS?

  These matter-of-fact instructions on how to dis-relate send a chill down the spine of those raised on the traditional notion that friendships are for the long haul. But before accusing the business world of undue ruthlessness, it is important to recognize that precisely this pattern is employed, often beneath a veil of hypocritical regrets, in other strata of society as well. The professor who is promoted to dean, the military officer, the engineer who becomes a project leader, frequently play the same social game. Moreover, it is predictable that something like this pattern will soon extend far beyond the world of work and formal organization. For if friendship is based on shared interests or aptitudes, friendship relationships are bound to change when interests change – even when distinctions of social class are not involved. And in a society caught in the throes of the most rapid change in history, it would be astonishing if the interests of individuals did not also change kaleidoscopically.

  Indeed, much of the social activity of individuals today can be described as search behavior – a relentless process of social discovery in which one seeks out new friends to replace those who are either no longer present or who no longer share the same interests. This turnover impels people, and especially educated people, toward cities and into temporary employment patterns. For the identification of people who share the same interests and aptitudes on the basis of which friendship may blossom is no simple procedure in a society in which specialization grows apace. The increase in specialization is present not merely in professional and work spheres, but even in leisure time pursuits. Seldom has any society offered so wide a range of acceptable and readily available leisure time activities. The greater the diversity available in both work and leisure, the greater the specialization, and the more difficult it is to find just the right friends.

  Thus it has been estimated by Professor Sargant Florence in Britain that a minimum population of 1,000,000 is needed to provide a professional worker today with twenty interesting friends. The woman who sought temporary work as a strategy for finding friends was highly intelligent. By increasing the number of different people with whom she was thrown into work contact, she increased the mathematical probability of finding a few who share her interests and aptitudes.

  We select our friends out of a very large pool of acquaintanceships. A study by Michael Gurevitch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked a varied group to keep track of all the different people with whom they came in contact in a one hundred-day period. On average, each one listed some 500 names. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who has conducted a number of fascinating experiments dealing with communication through acquaintanceship networks, speaks of each American having a pool of acquaintanceships ranging from 500 to 2,500.

  Actually, however, most people have far fewer friends than the twenty suggested by Professor Florence, and perhaps his definition was less restrictive than that employed in everyday use. A study of thirty-nine married middle-class couples in Lincoln, Nebraska, asked them to list their friends. The purpose was to determine whether husbands or wives are more influential in selecting friends for the family. The study showed that the average couple listed approximately seven "friendship units" – such a unit being either an individual or a married couple. This suggests that the number of individuals listed as friends by the average couple ranged from seven to fourteen. Of these, a considerable number were non-local, and the fact that wives seemed to list more non-local friends than their husbands suggests that they are less willing than their husbands to slough off a friendship after a move. Men, in short, seem to be more skilled at breaking off relationships than women.

  TRAINING CHILDREN FOR TURNOVER

  Today, however, training for disaffiliation or disrelating begins early. Indeed, this may well represent one of the major differences between the generations. For school children today are exposed to extremely high rates of turnover in their classrooms. According to the Educational Facilities Laboratories, Incorporated, an off-shoot of the Ford Foundation, "It is not unusual for city schools to have a turnover of more than half their student body in one school year." This phenomenal rate cannot but have some effect on the children.

  William Whyte in The Organization Man pointed out that the impact of such mobility "is as severe on the teachers as on the children themselves, for the teachers are thereby robbed of a good bit of the feeling of achievement they get from watching the children develop." Today, however, the problem is compounded by the high rate of turnover among teachers too. This is true not only in the United States but elsewhere as well. Thus a report on England asserts: "Today it is not uncommon, even in grammar schools, for a child to be taught one subject by two or three different teachers in the course of one year. With teacher loyalty to the school so low, the loyalty of children cannot be summoned either. If a high proportion of teachers are preparing to move on to a better job, a better district, there will be less care, concern and commitment on their part." We can only speculate about the overall influence of this on the lives of the children.

  A recent study of high school students by Harry R. Moore of the University of Denver indicated that the test scores of children who had moved across state or county lines from one to ten times were not substantially different from those of children who had not. But there was a definite tendency for the more nomadic children to avoid participation in the voluntary side of school life – clubs, sports, student government and other extra-curricular activities. It is as though they wished, where possible, to avoid new human ties that might only have to be broken again before long – as if they wished, in short, to slow down the flow-through of people in their lives.

  How fast should children – or adults for that matter – be expected to make and break human relationships? Perhaps there is some optimum rate that we exceed at our peril? Nobody knows. However, if to this picture of declining durations we add the factor of diversity – the recognition that each new human relationship requires a different pattern of behavior from us – one thing becomes starkly clear: to be able to make these increasingly numerous and rapid on-off clicks in our interpersonal lives we must be able to operate at a level of adaptability never before asked of human beings.

  Combine this with the accelerated through-put of places and things, as well as people, and we begin to glimpse the complexity of the coping behavior that we demand of people today. Certainly, the logical end of the direction in which we are now traveling is a society based on a system of temporary encounters, and a distinctly new morality founded on the belief, so succinctly expressed by the co-ed in Fort Lauderdale, that "frankly, you'll never see these people again." It would be absurd to assume that the future holds nothing more than a straight-line projection of present trends, that we must necessarily reach that ultimate degree of transience in human relations. But it is not absurd to recognize the direction in which we are moving.

  Until now most of us have operated on the assumption that temporary relationships are superficial relationships, that only long-enduring ties can flower into real interpersonal involvement. Perhaps this assumption is false. Perhaps it is possible for holistic, non-modular relationships, to flower rapidly in a high transience society. It may prove possible to accelerate the formation of relationships, and to speed up the process of "involvement" as well. In the meantime, however, a haunting question remains:

  "Is Fort Lauderdale the future?"

  We have so far seen that with respect to all three of the tangible components of situations – people, places and things – the rate of turnover is rising. It is time now to look at those intangibles that are equally important in shaping experience, the information we use and the organizational frameworks within which we live.

  Chapter 7

  ORGANIZATIONS: THE COMING AD-HOCRACY

  One of the most persistent myths about the future envisions man as a helpless cog in some vast organizational machine. In this nightmarish projection, each man is frozen into a narrow, unchanging niche
in a rabbit-warren bureaucracy. The walls of this niche squeeze the individuality out of him, smash his personality, and compel him, in effect, to conform or die. Since organizations appear to be growing larger and more powerful all the time, the future, according to this view, threatens to turn us all into that most contemptible of creatures, spineless and faceless, the organization man.

  It is difficult to overestimate the force with which this pessimistic prophecy grips the popular mind, especially among young people. Hammered into their heads by a stream of movies, plays and books, fed by a prestigious line of authors from Kafka and Orwell to Whyte, Marcuse and Ellul, the fear of bureaucracy permeates their thought. In the United States everyone "knows" that it is just such faceless bureaucrats who invent all-digit telephone numbers, who send out cards marked "do not fold, spindle or mutilate," who ruthlessly dehumanize students, and whom you cannot fight at City Hall. The fear of being swallowed up by this mechanized beast drives executives to orgies of self-examination and students to paroxysms of protest.

  What makes the entire subject so emotional is the fact that organization is an inescapable part of all our lives. Like his links with things, places and people, man's organizational relationships are basic situational components. Just as every act in a man's life occurs in some definite geographical place, so does it also occur in an organizational place, a particular location in the invisible geography of human organization.

  Thus, if the orthodox social critics are correct in predicting a regimented, superbureaucratized future, we should already be mounting the barricades, punching random holes in our IBM cards, taking every opportunity to wreck the machinery of organization. If, however, we set our conceptual cliches aside and turn instead to the facts, we discover that bureaucracy, the very system that is supposed to crush us all under its weight, is itself groaning with change.

  The kinds of organizations these critics project unthinkingly into the future are precisely those least likely to dominate tomorrow. For we are witnessing not the triumph, but the breakdown of bureaucracy. We are, in fact, witnessing the arrival of a new organizational system that will increasingly challenge, and ultimately supplant bureaucracy. This is the organization of the future. I call it "Ad-hocracy."

  Man will encounter plenty of difficulty in adapting to this new style organization. But instead of being trapped in some unchanging, personality-smashing niche, man will find himself liberated, a stranger in a new free-form world of kinetic organizations. In this alien landscape, his position will be constantly changing, fluid, and varied. And his organizational ties, like his ties with things, places and people, will turn over at a frenetic and everaccelerating rate.

  CATHOLICS, CLIQUES AND COFFEE BREAKS

  Before we can grasp the meaning of this odd term, Ad-hocracy, we need to recognize that not all organizations are bureaucracies. There are alternative ways of organizing people. Bureaucracy, as Max Weber pointed out, did not become the dominant mode of human organization in the West until the arrival of industrialism.

  This is not the place for a detailed description of all the characteristics of bureaucracy, but it is important for us to note three basic facts. First, in this particular system of organization, the individual has traditionally occupied a sharply defined slot in a division of labor. Second, he fit into a vertical hierarchy, a chain of command running from the boss down to the lowliest menial. Third, his organizational relationships, as Weber emphasized, tended toward permanence.

  Each individual, therefore, filled a precisely positioned slot, a fixed position in a more or less fixed environment. He knew exactly where his department ended and the next began; the lines between organizations and their sub-structures were anchored firmly in place. In joining an organization, the individual accepted a set of fixed obligations in return for a specified set of rewards. These obligations and rewards remained the same over relatively long spans of time. The individual thus stepped into a comparatively permanent web of relationships – not merely with other people (who also tended to remain in their slots for a long time) – but with the organizational framework, the structure, itself.

  Some of these structures are more durable than others. The Catholic Church is a steel frame that has lasted for 2000 years, with some of its internal sub-structures virtually unchanged for centuries at a time. In contrast, the Nazi Party of Germany managed to bathe Europe in blood, yet it existed as a formal organization for less than a quarter of a century.

  In turn, just as organizations endure for longer or shorter periods, so, too, does an individual's relationship with any specific organizational structure. Thus man's tie to a particular department, division, political party, regiment, club, or other such unit has a beginning and an end in time. The same is true of his membership in informal organizations – cliques, factions, coffee-break groups and the like. His tie begins when he assumes the obligations of membership by joining or being conscripted into an organization. His tie ends when he quits or is discharged from it – or when the organization, itself, ceases to be.

  This is what happens, of course, when an organization disbands formally. It happens when the members simply lose interest and stop coming around. But the organization can "cease to be" in another sense, too. An organization, after all, is nothing more than a collection of human objectives, expectations, and obligations. It is, in other words, a structure of roles filled by humans. And when a reorganization sharply alters this structure by redefining or redistributing these roles, we can say that the old organization has died and a new one has sprung up to take its place. This is true even if it retains the old name and has the same members as before. The rearrangement of roles creates a new structure exactly as the rearrangement of mobile walls in a building converts it into a new structure.

  A relationship between a person and an organization, therefore, is broken either by his departure from it, or by its dissolution, or by its transformation through reorganization. When the latter – reorganization – happens, the individual, in effect, severs his links with the old, familiar, but now no longer extant structure, and assumes a relationship to the new one that supersedes it.

  Today there is mounting evidence that the duration of man's organizational relationships is shrinking, that these relationships are turning over at a faster and faster rate. And we shall see that several powerful forces, including this seemingly simple fact, doom bureaucracy to destruction.

  THE ORGANIZATIONAL UPHEAVAL

  There was a time when a table of organization – sometimes familiarly known as a "T/O" – showed a neatly arrayed series of boxes, each indicating an officer and the organizational sub-units for which he was responsible. Every bureaucracy of any size, whether a corporation, a university or a government agency, had its own T/O, providing its managers with a detailed map of the organizational geography. Once drawn, such a map became a fixed part of the organization's rule book, remaining in use for years at a time. Today, organizational lines are changing so frequently that a three-month-old table is often regarded as an historic artifact, something like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  Organizations now change their internal shape with a frequency – and sometime a rashness – that makes the head swim. Titles change from week to week. Jobs are transformed. Responsibilities shift. Vast organizational structures are taken apart, bolted together again in new forms, then rearranged again. Departments and divisions spring up overnight only to vanish in another, and yet another, reorganization.

  In part, this frenzied reshuffling arises from the tide of mergers and "de-mergers" now sweeping through industry in the United States and Western Europe. The late sixties saw a tremendous rolling wave of acquisitions, the growth of giant conglomerates and diversified corporate monsters. The seventies may witness an equally powerful wave of divestitures and, later, reacquisitions, as companies attempt to consolidate and digest their new subsidiaries, then trade off troublesome components. Between 1967 and 1969 the Questor Corporation (formerly Dunhill International, Incorporated)
bought eight companies and sold off five. Scores of other corporations have similar stories to tell. According to management consultant Alan J. Zakon, "there will be a great deal more spinning off of pieces." As the consumer marketplace churns and changes, companies will be forced constantly to reposition themselves in it.

  Internal reorganizations almost inevitably follow such corporate swaps, but they may arise for a variety of other reasons as well. Within a recent three-year period fully sixty-six of the 100 largest industrial companies in the United States publicly reported major organizational shake-ups. Actually, this was only the visible tip of the proverbial iceberg. Many more reorganizations occur than are ever reported. Most companies try to avoid publicity when overhauling their organization. Moreover, constant small and partial reorganizations occur at the departmental or divisional level or below, and are regarded as too small or unimportant to report.

  "My own observation as a consultant," says D. R. Daniel, an official of McKinsey & Company, a large management consulting firm, "is that one major restructuring every two years is probably a conservative estimate of the current rate of organizational change among the largest industrial corporations. Our firm has conducted over 200 organization studies for domestic corporate clients in the past year, and organization problems are an even larger part of our practice outside the United States." What's more, he adds, there are no signs of a leveling off. If anything, the frequency of organizational upheavals is increasing.