The Organization Man

CHAPTER 4 Belongingness

82 THE ORGANIZATION MAN they can work, and if we sell our souls we get some satisfying sin in recompense. Scientism asks that we make a compromise, but it can't deliver anything really in return. The scientific formulas for "mass communication," for example: using them we manage to debase our prose, assault our instincts, and insult our listeners-but never do we get that sure-fire communion promised for our surrender . A poor bargain. What I am arguing is that the real impact of scientism is upon our values. The danger, to put it another way, is not man being dominated but man surrendering. At the present writing there is not one section of American life that has not drunk deeply of the promise of scientism. It appears in many forms-pedagogy, aptitude tests, that monstrous nonentity called "mass communication "-and there are few readers who have not had a personal collision with it. cHAPTER 4 Belongingness WHAT KIND OF SOCIETY IS TO BE ENGINEERED? SOME CRITICS OF SOCIAL engineering are sure that what is being cooked up for us is a socialistic paradise, a radically new, if not brave, world, alien to every tradition of man. This is wrong. Lump together the social engineers ' prescriptions for the new society and you find they are anything but radical. Boiled down, what they ask for is an environment in which everyone is tightly knit into a belongingness with one another; one in which there is no restless wandering but rather the deep emotional security that comes from total integration with the group. Radical? It is like nothing so much as the Middle Ages. And what, some have been asking, was so wrong with the Middle Ages anyway? They had excellent human relations. They didn't have the self-consciousness about their society to make them rationalize it or the scientific approach with which to do it. But belongingness they had. They knew where they stood-peasant and noble alike. They saw the fruit of their labor, and the tiny Belongingness 68 world about them protected as well as demanded. Psychologically, they had a home. Not that we should go back to all this, mind you. The job, to paraphrase, is to re-create the belongingness of the Middle Ages. What with the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and other calamities, the job is immensely more difficult that it was in those simpler days. But with new scientific techniques we can solve the problem. What we must do is to learn consciously to achieve what once came naturally. We must form an elite of skilled leaders who will guide men back, benevolently, to group belongingness. An unfair paraphrase? The young men who enthuse so unqualifiedly about human relations as the last best hope would be shocked to be accused of holding so reactionary a view. The people who have been the intellectual founders of the human-relations gospel, however, have not been so muddy-minded. They were not the cheery optimists their latter-day followers seem to be; they were rather pessimistic about the capacities of man, and the society they prescribed was by no means a utopia which would be all things to all men. A man would have to make sacrifices to enjoy it, and the prophets of belongingness stated this with admirable toughness of mind. THE FATIIER OF TilE HUMAN-RELATIONS SCHOOL IS ELTON MAYO. MAYO, professor of industrial research at the Harvard Business School, was concerned with the anomie, or rootlessness, of the industrial worker. Ever since he first started studying industry in Australia in 1903 he had been looking for a way to reconcile the worker's need for belongingness with the conflicting allegiances of the complex world he now finds himself in. For Mayo, and his colleagues, the great turning point came as the result of what started to be a very modest experiment. In 1927 some of Mayo's colleagues began the now celebrated study at the Hawthorne, Illinois, plant of Western Electric.0 The company had a challenging problem for them. For several years it had • For a full account of this experiment, see Management and the Worker, by F. S. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1939). A good summary is to be found in Stuart Chase's The Proper Study of Mankind (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948). 34 THE ORGANIZATION MAN been trying to measure how much more telephone equipment the workers would produce as lighting was...