The Organization Man

CHAPTER 21 The Transients

CHAPTER 21 The Transients I NOW TURN TO ORGANIZATION MA.J."l AT HOME-AND, I HOPE, SOME clues as to where he is going. In these next chapters I am going to examine him in the communities that have become his dormitoriesthe great package suburbs that have sprung up outside our cities since the war. They are fascinating institutions in their own right, and here and there I will detour into aspects of them that are tangential to my main theme. What I wish to concentrate on, however, is the way in which they reflect the values of the organization man -and of the next generation to come. They are communities made in his image. There are other kinds of people there too, and for many a resident the curving superblocks of suburbia are the end of a long road from the city wards to middleclass respectability. But it is the young organization man who is dominant. More than others, it is he who organizes the committees, runs the schools, selects the ministers, fights the developers, makes the speeches, and sets the styles. Organization people live in many other kinds of places, of course, and some of them are in jobs that don't require them to move away from home at all. But in the new suburbia they are concentrated, and in so pure a state that here they may provide the best indication of the organization life of tomorrow. In suburbia, they can express themselves more clearly than in The Organization itself. They are not subordinates or juniors; they are the elders of the new suburbia, and there they are relatively free of the pressures of older traditions and older people that affect them elsewhere. In such propinquity, they bring out in each other-and at times caricature-tendencies that are latent in organization life, and one sees in bold relief what might be almost invisible in more conventional environments. To an older eye, perhaps, what is to be seen through the picture windows is abnormal, but what may be abnormal today is very likely to be normal tomorrow. What suburbia best illuminates, I believe, is the nature of or267 268 THE ORGANIZATION MAN ganization man's "rootlessness"-and the need to revise our customary assumptions about rootlessness. In speaking of the transients in our society it is interesting how instinctively we describe them by what they don't fit-of the homes they11 never go back to again, of the worlds they never made. Related to the usual niches of society, they are anomalies; moving as they are, they cut across the convenient abstractions that have ordered our thoughts, and thus we find it easy to see them as symptoms of malaise, psychological casualties of that world they never made. Before looking at the transients' suburbia, then, we must first look at the changes in mobility and class structure that brought them there. In ·suburbia, as we will see in the next chapter, organization man is trying, quite consciously, to develop a new kind of roots to replace what he left behind, and to understand the nature of his quest we need to know what it is he did leave behind, why he left it behind, and how he looks back upon it. ON THE MATI"ER OF HOW MUCH UPWARD MOBILITY THERE REALLY IS IN this country, thinking has fluctuated a great deal-more, perhaps, than the mobility itself. Forty years ago the notion that the U.S. had a fairly Huid society would not have been particularly controversial; observers did point out that the Alger story was more an article of faith than a reality, but for the most part they felt our social structure was dynamic-almost frighteningly so. During the thirties and forties, however, a highly influential series of community studies began convincing people that this was no longer true. Quite the contrary, it now appeared that the American system was finally shaking down into a fixed order of things in which achievement was more and more closed to the lower classes. Anthropologist Lloyd Warner and others held that the basic pattern was revealed by the rigidities of the traditional community -the venerable, tree-shaded town in which the Hill, local business ties, and interlocking family relationships firmly fix the individual's position, and from which he can move upward (from the Elks, say, to the Rotary) only by sanction of the next upper group. Short-circuiting of this route, furthermore, was...