William Whyte’s ‘The Organization Man’: A Flawed Central Concept but a Prescient Narrative

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. William H Whyte's concept of organization man is now used in bowdlerised form, shorn of its polemical core. It was an appeal against the situation of people in the big organiations 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 cur-rent 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 sa-me time, the polemic is never more relevant than today because we live in a world in which we are closely surveilled on many levels using ever more sophisticated technol-ogy, and in which many human resource management practices increase the power of organization over individual. William Whyte's time has come.