Organizational Man

Conceptual Overview

In charting what he saw as the dominant traits of postwar organizational culture, Whyte's book depicted an era when historical change had weakened the dominance of Weber's Protestant ethic, with its virtues of hard work, prudence, and competition. For Whyte, the advent of large organizations as dominant social institutions marked a bureaucratization of society that rendered a new ethic dominant—one that, in contrast to Weber, Whyte called the social ethic. This new social ethic, Whyte argued, provided a rationalization of large organizations' demands for fidelity and dedication. Furthermore, it provided a moral justification for the legitimacy of social pressures that privileged the group over the individual. Whyte's contention was that the organization man—the middle-class, middlemanagement suburbanite—was beholden to a social ethic characterized by a belief in belongingness to groups and institutions as both a basic human need and the source of individual creativity.

What Whyte called the ideology of the organization man promised that a harmonious relationship between the individual and society could be achieved [Page 1138]through scientific progress mediated through large bureaucracies. Within them, the organization man was a technician pursuing a collective good; he was thought to believe in the moral justification of organization and hence the social responsibility to conform to its norms and expectations. Whyte's depiction of the organization man is inherently critical. He suggests that the social ethic he describes is something that should be resisted. Whyte argued against the age of organization, when the pressures for cooperativism and conformity had become out of balance with those of individualism, and he asserted that this balance needed to be redressed. Indeed, Whyte wrote that the “worship” of organizations as harbringers of utopian social harmony was deeply problematic in that it failed to recognize the actual and potential conflicts between the individual and society. Moreover, the social ethic of the organization man was one that prized mediocrity over excellence, conformity over individuality, and moral comfort over courage.

Despite the book's age, Whyte's central concerns still have some purchase in contemporary times. As Donna Randall has commented, management theory has been based for a long time on the assumption that high levels of employee commitment are beneficial for organizations—the very assumption that Whyte viewed as problematic. Indeed, the dominance of the managerial belief in the virtue of “strong” cultures of commitment and loyalty to organizational values has remained firm. As Randall pointed out, however, there can be negative consequences of overcommitment for both individuals and organizations. Overcommitment can lead to a resistance to change, hinder creativity, limit prospects for personal development and career mobility, as well as cause stress in nonwork relationships.

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