Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin (review)

Success is as much about whom you know as it is about what you know and how you perform. Networks, mentors, and role models play pivotal roles in corporate climbing and entrepreneurship. Although the business lexicon only recently incorporated these terms into its vocabulary, Pamela Laird convincingly argues that these forms of social capital, which she calls pull, have always helped determine success. Moreover, because they exist primarily among individuals who see each other as belonging to the same cohort, success in the corporate realm largely excluded minorities and women until the 1960s and 1970s.

Laird's examination of the relationship between pull and business success begins with a figure often linked with the notion of the self-made man, Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, despite claims to the contrary, made ample use of familial, peer, and authority networks to parlay his success. While his autobiography served as a role model to nineteenth-century artisans, middling shopkeepers, and even such scions of industry as J. P. Morgan, ability and performance alone did not assure these men's fortunes. Familial, social, and business connections also propelled their careers, and they formed many of their connections through membership in such formal organizations as social clubs, business and fraternal associations, and unions. Yet, because these entities restricted their memberships to white males, women and African Americans had to use their own social networks and organizations to achieve success.

Even as the bureaucratic structures of the modern corporation developed and companies insisted that they based their personnel practices on individual ability and merit, access to social capital remained essential for upward mobility. Pull mattered so much that business publications and companies began emphasizing formal training and mentoring programs by the 1950s. Yet, belonging to the same cohort as those higher up remained critical even for personnel departments, which acted as initial company screens. Many accepted women and minorities only for positions offering little or no advancement potential. Colleges and universities, professional and technical organizations, and social clubs further limited access to corporate career ladders to white-middle and -upper class males through such mechanisms as their admission/membership requirements, reliance on references, and licensure requirements. Even their cooperative learning/apprentice programs and formal meetings facilitated white males' access to pull while limiting women's and minorities' opportunities.

All this changed after 1960. Although federal initiatives such as the G. I. Bill expanded access to corporate ladders for working and lower-middle class white males after World War II and organizations such as the National Urban League began creating synthetic networking and mentoring opportunities for African Americans in the 1930s, it took the civil and women's rights movements, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and subsequent Equal Employment Opportunity rulings to push open access to corporate ladders. However, because cohort membership determined advancement, white males in authority still saw women and African Americans as strangers within their organizations and thus limited their access to higher corporate positions. As Laird's examples of AT&T, Avon, Sun Oil, and Xerox reveal, it was only through affirmative action endeavors on the part of company executives impelled by discrimination suits, and women and African American employees who formed their own networking and mentoring organizations, that women and minorities began to rise through the hierarchy. Yet attitudes long embedded in American culture remained difficult to break. The "glass ceiling," sexual harassment, and access to the social venues in which business is conducted still exist and thereby limit opportunity.

While these barriers are breaking down slowly, acknowledgment of the role social capital plays in entry and mobility within the business realm has grown exponentially as the governmental agencies, academics, and the business press critically examined women's and minorities' business careers. Such diverse sources as the Harvard Business Review and Ann Morrison...