William Whyte's 'the Organization Man': A Flawed Central Concept but a Prescient Narrative**
Zusammenfassung
IWilliam H Whyte's concept of organization man is now used in bowdlerized form, shorn of its polemical core. It was an appeal against the situation of people in the big organizations taking shape after World War Two, belonging to the organization rather than simply working for it, earning rewards that are also, in the end, traps. In the current worlds of agile organizations with serially loyal staff these people no longer exist, and in fact the only group that fits the Whyte pattern are dedicated priests. At the same time, the polemic is never more relevant than today because people live in a world in which they are closely surveilled on many levels using ever more sophisticated technology, and in which many human resource management practices increase the power of organization over individual. William Whyte's time has come.
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William Whyte's 'the Organization Man': A Flawed Central Concept but a Prescient Narrative**
Introduction
William H. Whyte's concept of "The Organization Man' (1956, 1960) has played a central role in structuring the way people think about working for large organizations for the last 50 years. As with all much used concepts, it has also with the passage of time lost its complexity, specificity and nuance with repeated use. Now, the concept of The Organization Man is often used in a bowdlerised form simply to describe a committed worker in an organization, and this is certainly not what Whyte meant. Our aim in this paper is to return to and describe the essentials of Whyte's concept, drawing attention to its core, which is a polemic against the direction of change in American business and society in the mid 1950s. Then we focus on the loose way he links the concept to ideal attributes that he argues are common to management types in business, medicine, law, stockbroking and even the priesthood. We argue here that in fact the only individuals that come close to fitting Whyte's archetype for The Organization Man are dedicated priests. Despite this, he has never been more useful than now, when the power of the collective that he rails against has been reborn in the surveillance and soft-power laden world of current organizations. Finally, we suggest that there is a new form of Organization M...Siehe den Gesamtinhalt dieses Dokumentes