Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin (review)

Early in Pamela Laird's new book, we learn that Horatio Alger might not recognize the rags-to-riches climb associated with his name. In his nineteenth-century series of uplifting children's novels, Alger's heroes seldom got rich, and they succeeded not only because of honorable personal traits but also because of a good home, friendships, and opportunities from "influential adult patrons" (p. 36). His heroes benefited from inclusion by others into networks of upward mobility; they benefited from "pull." In an engaging and masterful synthesis of scholarship from business history and social history, Laird reinterprets familiar histories to explore the myths and realities of the American road to "success."

Pull draws on contemporary scholarship and concepts about social capital to investigate the personal and institutional networks that help to explain opportunity and accomplishment through the sweep of U.S. history. Social capital comprises the "assets" an individual possesses; it can determine "connections and connectability" through a range of networks. "[G]atekeepers," from mentors to human resources officers, include or exclude people from networks, and "pull" is the "positive discrimination" that permits some people through the gates.

Laird makes a useful distinction between "natural" and "synthetic" social capital. For generations, opportunity appeared through the "natural" networks of family, schools, ethnicity, gender, and many others that depended on "likeness" and exclusivity or privilege of some kind. Laird's central argument is that these connections have been overlooked and underestimated in both our popular and scholarly accounts of the American past. While not discounting the significance of individual ability and determination, Laird retells well-known biographies from Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates by focusing on the help they received from others who "pulled" them up. She notes a study from the 1950s in which 80 percent of CEOs interviewed cited connections through family or friends as the key break in their careers (p. 140). Americans want to believe in individualism, meritocracy, and the American Dream, and consequently fail to recognize a more complicated story that includes networks and dependence.

The ability to create "synthetic" social capital, however, provides an optimistic counterpoint; opportunity can be made more widely available by deliberately constructing alternative networks. To enhance social capital, the privileged and underprivileged alike joined associations: clubs, church groups, reform and philanthropic organizations, professional societies, fraternal organizations, and many others. The founders of the National Urban League (1911), for example, aimed to improve the economic opportunities of African Americans and other disadvantaged groups by advising on etiquette and dress, by hosting social gatherings to facilitate networking, and, most importantly, by cultivating employers to help place their clients in jobs. Similarly, women's groups such as the American Association of University Women and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs sought to create opportunities for their members by mentoring within their groups.

Laird explores how key turning points in American history forced changes in personnel decisions that could undermine older forms of social capital. With the rise of big business, for example, most hiring decisions left the hands of top leadership and became the responsibility of personnel departments. While professionalizing the hiring process might systematize criteria, it could also more rigidly institutionalize prevailing prejudices. The most fundamental change in social capital and networks of opportunity, however, arrived as a consequence of the social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, Laird argues. The broad shift in social values not only accelerated the creation of synthetic networks but increasingly led firms to deliberately construct internal networks of "pull." Despite a note of caution, Laird's account of recent decades is a hopeful one in which the networks of opportunity are harnessed and made available to an increasingly larger array of people.

Many historians of technology regularly operate across field boundaries to integrate issues from business history and social history. While Pull does not directly address classic issues identified solely with the history of technology, historians of technology will recognize in Laird's book important parallels, including...