The Organization Man
The Organization Man is a bestselling book by William H. Whyte, originally published by Simon & Schuster in 1956. Whyte's approach While employed by Fortune Magazine, Whyte did extensive interviews with the CEOs of major American corporations such as General Electric and Ford. A central tenet of the book is that average Americans subscribed to a collectivist ethic rather than to the prevailing notion of rugged individualism. A key point made was that people became convinced that organizations and groups could make better decisions than individuals, and thus serving an organization became logically preferable to advancing one's individual creativity. Whyte felt this was counterfactual and listed a number of examples of how individual work and creativity can produce better outcomes than collectivist processes. He observed that this system led to risk-averse executives who faced no consequences and could expect jobs for life as long as they made no egregious missteps. He also thought that everyone should have more freedom. Influence According to Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker, the book is, "the most compelling portrait of middle-class Americans at midcentury and the starting point for all subsequent investigations of their legacy." Deborah Popper and Frank Popper contend the book energized dissidents: