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27 One for All: Teamwork and the Ideal Boyhood 2 T he growth of corporate culture in postwar Ontario compelled corporations to draw attention to the problems of administration and management that arose when men worked in groups rather than individually. What corporations required during the postwar period was the right kind of man, one who would slip neatly into the new corporate economy. Some adults remained committed to the notion of rugged individualism as a boyhood value; others more aggressively promoted a version of boyhood based on a deeper, collective male identity. In the age of anonymous bureaucracies, concerned as they were more with fitting in than with standing out, proponents of this version of boyhood played down rugged individualism and played up teamwork, togetherness , cooperation, group fidelity, collective identity, and company loyalty. In this model of boyhood, important distinctions based on class or race between and among boys were erased as a greater sense of “togetherness” between and among males was sought. This version of boyhood was classless— or at least, organizations such as the Boy Scouts wanted it to be.1 It was no less competitive than in the past, but in the past, strife between and among boys had been more openly promoted than in the postwar era. In the past, the once autonomous male self who engaged in individual combat had been the ideal. However, running alongside the growth of corporate culture, a new version of boyhood was emerging, one that was influenced by the experiences of the Second World War and shaped by the threat of communism. A boy’s character was now to be a mix of modern military and postwar corporate virtues—teamwork , togetherness, selflessness, loyalty, hard work, duty, and discipline. The group, not the individual, was to be emphasized and valued. And among other things, the boy who would become the organization man had develop an aversion to independent entrepreneurship.2 Such boys would grow up to become assets for any far-sighted corporation. ONTARIO BOYS 28 This chapter begins by examining the postwar value of teamwork and its relation to the ideal boyhood. Teamwork as a core boyhood value ran alongside other postwar values such as conformity, togetherness, self-sacrifice, the disciplining of desire, and recognition of the group. All of these were in turn harnessed to productivity, work efficiency, and the accumulation of profit, which happened to be the postwar goals advanced by industry and corporations alike. Responding to postwar anxieties and insecurities, adult discourses about boyhood focused on building boys who would adopt the value of teamwork as a way to ensure social order and the state’s stability. This chapter also explores how some adults promoted sport as having moral worth because it taught boys the value of teamwork, along with other corporate virtues such as team loyalty, civic responsibility, self-sacrifice, and subordination to leadership. It moves on to examine social and cultural commentators’ efforts to place within public discourse the centrality of male bonds. Their goal in this was to re-establish a greater sense of male intimacy through public narratives that situated boys as natural playmates of other boys. Finally, by exploring discourses that centred on boyhood and the gang, this chapter examines how the boy gang functioned as a model for corporate or factory life. Teamwork and the Boyhood Ideal The ideal model of boyhood embraced a reworked understanding of teamwork. This new understanding served the interests of major institutions of power such as government, bureaucracies, and industry, and no longer only God and country. In Toronto in October 1942, during an address to a convention of the American Federation of Labor, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King called for the establishment of labour–management committees “in every industry in our country.”3 His remarks signalled the start of one the “most successful and long lived cooperative experiments in Canadian industrial relations ,theLabour-ManagementProductionCommittees.”4 Acentralaimofthese committees was to promote “teamwork” between labour and management. The Labour-Management Cooperation Service published a bulletin titled Teamwork in Industry; it also developed films and radio projects intended to expand the appeal of teamwork as a concept. According to McInnis, at times these “tactics degenerated to the level where a mawkish cartoon character, known as Tommy Teamwork, was enlisted to remind production workers of the importance of cooperation.”5 The emphasis on “teamwork” is not surprising, given that the immediate postwar years had seen a surge in labour strikes, where “communities across Canada took to picket...

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