Word: move
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...America in 1831. In the U.S., he wrote, a man "settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere." In the intervening years, Americans have lived up to their reputation as the most mobile people in the world, tearing up roots and moving-across the nation or across town-at the slightest prospect of a better life. The average American family changes its residence every five or six years, much more frequently than the average European household. Now, however, there are signs that the great national game of musical houses is slowing down. Since...
...growing reluctance to move has not been lost on the big corporations, which have always felt free to move their people with abandon. A Delta Airlines spokesman reports: "People are absolutely putting their foot down about being hauled out of a city." Polaroid says that applications for transfers abroad, once in the hundreds for every job, are now in the dozens. Like many companies, FMC, an international conglomerate based in Chicago, is responding to employee pressure by eliminating many executive transfers around the country. Says a spokesman: "We are trying to slow down the revolving door...
...change in attitude? Explains Eugene Jennings, a professor of management at Michigan State University: "People are rejecting the values of a mobile lifestyle. It was once considered stupid not to move when a company suggested it. Now the immobiles are coming out of the woodwork and saying no." There are already enough of these naysayers to form what Brandeis Psychologist Grace Baruch characterizes as "a critical mass that makes it O.K. to say, 'Maybe the job doesn't come first...
Some analysts attribute the trend to a housewives' revolt against executive transfer. Michael Russell, a United Van Lines agent in Los Angeles, reports a spreading phenomenon: when the van rolls up to a house to move a family, the wife abruptly announces she has changed her mind and will not go. Says Rosie Montgomery, a counselor at the Women's Center in Dallas: "Women always thought of going along as a wifely duty. Now they are saying, 'Wait a minute; it's my life too, and my children's lives...
...prowl. His point: if mobility is declining at a time when a bumper crop of baby-boom college graduates is appearing on the scene, the trend is probably a powerful one. It is a message that has already got through to many corporations. People who are willing to move wherever the company sends them, says Polaroid Vice President Joseph McLaughlin, "are at this point almost a special breed...