Reinventing Organisation Man

In 1956, William H. Whyte wrote the influential The Organisation Man, a vituperative attack on the ‘social ethic’ shaping the values of those in the middle ranks of private and public corporations. This oddly named ethic was a collectivist nightmare which morally legitimated the powers of society against the individual. Amongst those blamed was Mayo and his obsessive concern for belongingness and group adjustment. Whyte’s solution was for the individual to fight a rearguard battle against the organisation, with the aid of some useful advice such as ‘how to cheat at personality tests’. As Peters and Waterman note (1982: 105), the association with grey conformity made corporate culture a taboo topic. Though some continue to doubt the idea of people ‘belonging’ to the company (Lessem, 1985), by the end of the 1980s organisation man was back in fashion. IBM’s ‘corporate fascists’ with their historic emphasis on conformity and commitment could get their overdue kudos as well as smile politely on the way to the bank (Pascale and Athos, 1982: 186). Despite all the hymns of praise to corporations, the credit for reviving the issue largely goes to American academics and management consultants, notably the two mentioned above, plus Ouchi (1981) and Deal and Kennedy (1988) (all except Ouchi connected to the McKinsey consultancy company), though it was filtered, as we began to discuss in Chapter 5, through a reading of the Japanese experience that located their success in the existence of strong cultures and ‘turned-on workforces’.