The Organization Man

Published in 1956 by William H. Whyte, editor of the up-market business magazine Fortune, The Organization Man offered a portrait of American manhood suffocating under a blanket of dull conformity fostered by American corporate culture. After World War II an economic boom had brought prosperity, but for many commentators of the time the ensuing rise of faceless business corporations and the inexorable expansion of suburbia had pushed American masculinity into the paralyzing doldrums of uniformity. The Organization Man exemplified these perceptions through its portrayal of a white-collar bureaucracy that rewarded conformity rather than initiative, crushing individual identity and autonomy beneath the collective will of the organization.

Drawing on evidence from a study of a new middle-class housing development in Illinois called Park Forest, The Organization Man depicted a rising generation of junior executives whose embrace of a new social ethic threatened to undermine national vigor. Whyte argued that, in place of the traditional masculine ideals of hard work, thrift, selfreliance, and competitive struggle, the middle-class male was heavily pressured by economic prosperity to meet his breadwinning obligations, and therefore he adopted a value system that privileged group interests over those of the individual. The developing business culture of conformity, conventionality, and consensus, he feared, threatened to overwhelm the traditional manly virtues of individuality, autonomy, and entrepreneurship by demanding personality traits in which ambition, imagination, and creativity were suppressed in favor of genial group-mindedness, consistency, and affable compliance. Similarly, Whyte believed that suburbia fostered the “organization” mentality of docile orthodoxy and conformism through voluntary associations and informal neighborhood groups that provided for community cohesion and mutual support, but at the price of an oppressive social homogeneity.

The Organization Man was part of a body of literature that, during the 1950s, portrayed middle-class American manhood as being in a state of decline. David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950) lamented the rise of the “other-directed man” who, instead of being self-reliant and “inner-directed,” blindly followed the lead of those around him in a desperate search to “belong.” C. Wright Mills, in White Collar (1951), presented American business corporations as monolithic bureaucracies in which employees were dehumanized by monotonous work routines. The very title of Sloan Wilson's novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), provided an enduring emblem for the debilitating malaise and loss of selfhood that plagued American middle-class men. Within such studies, the erosion of individuality was invariably configured in gendered terms: “Masculine” dynamism, autonomy, and self-control were presented as drowning in a sea of feminine passivity, and American manhood was seen as being emasculated by enervating white-collar jobs and soft suburban living.

[Page 351]One of the most widely read and influential social critiques of the 1950s, The Organization Man is noteworthy not simply for its damning appraisal of American business practices. Whyte's book also gave currency to contemporary perceptions of a crisis in masculine identity—a premise that became a recurring theme in American cultural debate throughout the late twentieth century.