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The Organisation Strikes Back: Rhetorical Empowerment Strategies in 1950s Business Representations of White-Collar Manhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2004

ERICA ARTHUR
ERICA ARTHUR
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The critical appraisal of the 1950s organised society is well established in such now-classic texts such as David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), C. Wright Mills's White Collar (1951) and William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956). These works exposed the group-orientated, “other-directed” corporate personality, motivated by an extreme desire to belong, as a precarious foundation for individual security. If not considered from an explicitly masculine perspective, the emasculating connotations of this model of occupational identity were nevertheless evident in Mills's conception of the white-collar “little man,” Riesman's definition of the “limp” and “exceptionally sensitive” other-directed personality and Whyte's characterisation of the organisation man as the unobtrusive “man in the middle.” Collectively, the depiction of white-collar masculinity in these texts helped create the context for the stereotypical perception of 1950s business enterprise as a breeding ground for conformity and troubled male identity. Less appreciated, however, is the business community's response to this critical appraisal.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , April 2004 , pp. 23 - 40
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The primary materials under consideration here are held at Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Durham, North Carolina and the Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware. My thanks to the Hagley Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society, the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham for providing the funding that made this research possible. I gratefully acknowledge the comments and criticisms of John Fagg, Sharon Monteith, Douglas Tallack, Margaret Walsh, Roger Horowitz, Ellen Gartrell, Jay Kleinberg, and the anonymous reader for the Journal of American Studies on earlier drafts of this article.