American Notebook: Ideology and Big Business

...Surely, this suggests some posture of control...

...From the numerous quotations compiled by them two major strands of ideology may be discerned...

...Surprisingly enough, the three economists who helped the lone sociologist did not see through all this...

...As William Whyte, Jr...

...Profits are not merely an income but ultimately a symbol of accountability and rational economic calculation...

...we can always out-produce the Russians...

...It has been only among the Fortune readership, the acknowledged forum of management, that any interest has been shown in working up an ideology for Big Business...

...At this point, however, they seem to have come a cropper, since the experience of totalitarian countries would suggest that criteria imposed by authority can almost always make an ideology appear palatable...

...Hence, the resort to professionalization of the business role as an alternative way of attaining success...

...Relationships inside the enterprise are warm, close, personal and one would no more dare disapprove of than that of motherhood...

...Writers on the problem of ideology frequently describe it as an expression of a group or class view which gives the individual both an awareness and rationalization of his particular social role...

...But, say the authors, he keeps telling himself that he is always subject to market forces beyond his control, that he is a single atomistic unit in a world he never made, and that the question of power in this context is not a relevant one...

...There was an opportunity here for working out a theoretical framework that our authors unfortunately missed...

...economic success is founded in efficiency...

...The supposed beneficiaries of new ideological structures have preferred to drift along comfortably with a quasi-liberal rhetoric while the "new conservatism" of a Russell Kirk has been not so much rejected as ignored...

...For them human relations is the central core of the managerial ideology: managers and workers must learn to get along with people, if not with each other...

...Developing complex ideological systems along these lines was a favorite, often useful pastime in years gone by, but today, as C. Wright Mills tells us in The Power Elite, the recent attempts by dominant groups in American society to create an ideology have not really succeeded...

...the classical and the managerial, which seem to be roughly equivalent to what C. Wright Mills has called "practical" and "sophisticated" conservatives...

...And the wonderful thing about large firms, say the institutional advertisements, is that each is a happy family...

...Consequently the entrepreneur cannot justify his role in terms of power, and is thereby unable really to establish his legitimacy...

...Ideology as an instrument of control or as an expression of interest is rejected as a viable theory by the authors, for, they say, an ideology must be motivated and it is primarily in the stress and strain of role conflicts that motivation can be located...

...The first, though somewhat old-fashioned, exhibits a certain ruggedness in its blunt approach to basic problems...

...The authors went for their basic material to the public statements of business leaders, to institutional advertisements in Fortune, Business Week and similar places, as well as to the many pamphlets flowing out of the NAM, U.S...

...or that some 22 million families have not broken through the lower middle income barrier of $4,000...

...The authors start with what they call the "unreflective character of thinking" which, while deeply rooted in social modes of behavior, has now become sufficiently hardened to be a matter of habit...

...D. Rockefeller image versus the Henry Luce-Paul Hoffman conception...

...business is conducted in a spirit of service...

...The ideal American enterprise is the small entrepreneur who is really nurtured by the few large corporations...

...Teamwork, competition, thrift and research are said to be the keys to our economic well-being...

...Besides, the big fellows, the ads always imply, had humble beginnings...

...It is thus a system of original purity completely devoid of history and origin...

...Bendix recognizes that control is a significant factor, if not the major one, in the development of an ideology, and his careful study of 18th century Britain, present day America, Czarist Russia and the Soviet satellites supplies ample evidence of that...

...6.75...

...The devotees of this view are not averse to repeating their litany in ritualistic fashion: The American Way of Life yields a high standard of living...

...But it is rather odd that the desire to control supply, as the economist would put it, should not be a suitable basis for such motivation...

...Surely, it would have been relevant to relate the whole ideological apparatus of enterprise to the realities of market behavior rather than to the putative psychological motivation of Chamber of Commerce speech writers...

...Madison Ave.'s clever ads are intended to assuage the angst of both the copywriter and his client...

...or that lots of people still haven't gotten that far, for they continue to live in what housing experts call "substandard homes...

...what's good for business is good for all...

...One might almost describe these as the Henry Ford-J...

...This approval converts ideology into a psychological instrument for helping the businessman to sustain his ability to meet the requirements of being a businessman...

...Only "outside" threats tend to upset the even tenor of American economic growth...

...How successful the managers have been in perfecting an ideology is il lustrated by the interesting study* issued not too long ago by four Harvard social scientists...

...As one wanders through this wonderful world put together by copywriters one would hardly know that the high level living the American promise has presumably given us has yet to be paid for...

...Such an explanation offers a simple solution, since it provides an easy way out in distasteful situations...

...In fact, the curious thing about the theory of strain is that it is itself a part of ideology, for what it does is to raise the whole body of advertising gibberish to the level of useful behavior...

...They see the American system as unique, (in the older classical version, it is the outcome of a special act of creation) based on fundamental laws of nature...

...That these slogans sometimes clash with one another does not perturb the ideologues, Sutton et al rightly suggest...

...Where social roles involve conflict, ideology provides the necessary system of ideas and symbols which mitigates the rivalry, and it is in this way that it becomes both driving force and balance wheel in the American economy...

...Against this theoretical backdrop it isn't hard to explain the content of the dominant economic ideology by the strains generated in the businessman's role...

...Whatever the businessman's reaction might be, he is assured an ample supply of aspirins by this ideology of ideology...

...has said, the eye must be calm, the manner attentive, the character well rounded, the team work efficient, the handshake brisk...

...Charles Wilson's otiose remark about General Motors a few years back varied this theme but slightly...

...Anxieties and emotional conflict find release in justifications of managerial expertise...

...Efficient executive control rather than stockholder risk bearing is the quintessential aspect of the corporation...

...Clearly, the businessman resorts to this mode of jus tification in order to counteract the claims of persons outside his enterprise...

...there are 135 million radios...

...The managers wish to obtain the enthusiastic consent of those whom they would control and manipulate...

...1956...

...The managers concede that the American economy has changed in the last 50 years, but what they see, after the fashion of Adolph Berle and David Lilienthal, is a growing homogeneity in which faceless automatons will be "professionally managed [by] socially oriented corporations...

...We are sometimes so case-hardened to the blandishments of advertising that we tend to forget how dense the underlying ideas are...

...Thus, ideology celebrates the manipulation of behavior and the groundwork is laid for the enthusiasms of a total society...

...And being natural it is stable...

...Stand ardized routines to assure "performance" become substitutes for creative endeavor until conformity is hailed as the paradigm of morality...

...It unambiguously claims lordship over all creation and extols the general beneficence of the profit mo * The American Business Creed, by Francis X. Sutton, Seymour E. Harris, CarlKayser and James Tobin, Harvard...

...Chamber of Commerce and the CED...

...on behalf of corporate enterprise...

...a patterned reaction to the patterned strains of a social role...

...IT Is DIFFICULT to understand the authors' reluctance to employ the idea that the legitimation of power is a major basis for ideology...

...To employ their own analytical concepts, price makers in a market are clearly more significant than price takers...

...The hallmark of excellence among the very rich has been, of course, money, while celebrities of the entertainment world are too unstable as a group to be especially receptive to ideology...

...What is of interest now is the ideology of ideology which forms the theoretical core of the Sutton book...

...BUT ENOUGH has been said to demonstrate the quality of thought implicit in the business ideology...

...Nothing in this recitation is really unexpected...

...This is indeed a neat formula: ideology is nothing more than a symbolic outlet for strain...

...The failure to meet sales expectations, the problems of controlling a production line, or the difficulties of dealing with trade unions are seen as merely imperfections in habitual behavior modes which inevitably give rise to psychological strains...

...It's like a football game: "management is the quarterback, and for the good of the whole team, labor should not try to call the signals...

...It is precisely in these coun tries that ideology as control was developed in more ways than were ever dreamed of in Western sociology...

...There is really no other function for the system of business beliefs, according to our authors...

...and above all, these wonderful attainments come about because of the System...

...tive...

...THE "MANAGERIAL" ideology is a good deal more subtle...

...This, from a Business Week editorial...

...Theirs is the understanding nod rather than the brutal push...

...The authors also speak of the need for plausibility and legitimation in terms of audience standards...

...414 pages...

...Material as well as non-material gains are explained by a relatively simple cause and effect sequence...

...Certainly the historical approach, as employed, for example, by Reinhard Bendix in his Work and Authority in Industry (1956), seems a good deal more fruitful...

...The former are enterprises able to fix their own prices and to administer them in accordance with the needs of sales strategy, a quite important aspect of the economic order...

...The authors then go on to review the ideology's concepts of profit, ownership, authority, competition and other economic and social notions that keep cropping up in the businessman's lexicon...

...The good executive prefers common sense to science, shirtsleeve economics to academic jargon, purchasing agents to statisticians and the status quo above all...

...But until such can be conclusively demonstrated, it will still be more fruitful to see the problems of ideology in terms of power, interest and control...

...In quite sober fashion the authors detail the miasmic output generated by Madison Ave...

...This assumes, of course, that businessmen are really emotionally disturbed by economic rivalry or class tension...

...The discrete approach helps one to "get there," assuming that "there" is on top...

...Ideology, say our auth ors, is basically a reaction to such strain, for it is essentially nothing more than...