Word: whyte
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ORGANIZATION MAN, by William H. Whyte Jr. A thoughtful and critical study of the growing numbers of Americans who tend to live, work, think and play within the framework of the large corporations that employ them. No off-the-cuff call for nonconformity for its own sake, the book (a surprise bestseller) spells out the need for genius and just plain individuality to speak in their own voices...
...moral of the work is classically American--self-help and hard work--and the attraction in the reading is proclaimed by the publisher: "a book that can change your life. Who knows? maybe you can do it too!" Since the original compilation of these parables, one Fortune editor, William Whyte, has turned heretic with The Organization Man; but this collection shows that individualism is still buttressed by "the frank desire to get rich as fast as possible...
...famed laws of lifemanship. Now, from an unlikely enclave of Empire known as the Raffles Chair of History at the University of Malaya in Singapore, Professor C. (for Cyril) Northcote Parkinson has produced a combination of Potter and the U.S.'s own William H. (The Organization Man) Whyte. Professor Parkinson's book is a delightfully unprofessorial diagnosis of that widespread 20th century malady−galloping orgmanship...
...Whyte sees it, the U.S. is a nation which likes to think of itself as 160 million individualists, but is filling up with a new generation that is more than half in love with easeful life. This generation, thinks Whyte, has deliberately lowered its sights to a safe, sound, specialized job within some "company family" and membership in a suburban group where nothing is split but the split-level home...
...Conflict v. Adjustment. Until a generation or two ago the U.S. lived by what Whyte calls the "Protestant Ethic" of thrift, hard work and competition, but this is gradually being replaced by the "Social Ethic" of security, collective spirit and "scientism." The ideal of healthy conflict is being replaced by the ideal of adjustment. Big organizations in the U.S. have become self-contained welfare states, "citadels of belongingness," to which the new generation pays almost monastic allegiance. "They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization...