William H. Whyte: The Organization Man (1956)
William Hollingsworth Whyte (1917–1999) was a student of urban society, an interest he cultivated while working with such organizations as the New York City Planning Commission. In 1956 he published his most famous work, The Organization Man, a best-selling critique of a social ethic that, in his view, emerged in post–World War II America. He refers, for example, to the “bureaucratization of society” and explores the “personal impact that organization life has had on the individuals within it,” particularly the “organization’s demand for fealty.” The book is not a call for nonconformity per se, but rather for a middle road between the individualism presumably characteristic of the nation’s earlier history and the collectivism of modern social, governmental, and business organizations. The book followed on the heels of Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, which depicts the efforts of its characters to find meaning in a world dominated by...
