The Power of the Corporation

...I do not mean to suggest that mammoth national corporations are powerless, but merely that their personnel policies, including transfers, are poor indicators of their power...

...Having observed them busily creating civic and other associations in the new town of Park Forest, Illinois, Whyte admired them more than other organization men...

...The first move," she writes, "teaches the young couple that they can live successfully without the people and community that nurtured them.'" In subsequent moves, they transfer "their needs for security, nurture and community from family and friends to the corporation...

...And not surprisingly, they were all long-term residents, self-employed or working for corporations that did not move their employees around...

...for them, transience may be liberating...

...After interviewing "middle managers" employed by "GPI"—a giant national producer and merchandiser of consumer goods —and their wives, the author finds that the women suffer most...

...The villain for Margolis, then, is the large national corporation itself, for besides making its employees and their families emotionally dependent, it robs them of the active interest in the community that is needed to sustain local democracy...

...The critique reached a crescendo with Vance Packard's 1974 best-seller, A Nation of Strangers, which warned that constant moving could lead to individual and familial pathology, as well as community—and national—disintegration...

...The "TC members" carried on innumerable friendships, even with political opponents...

...some suffered from constant moving, others flourished...

...In fact, fragmentary data in the book indicates that they are organization men and women precisely so that their children will not have to be...

...Of course, those transients did not have to deal with a group of old residents like Fairtown's TC members, who, if I read correctly between the author's lines, were reluctant to share power with the corporate newcomers...

...Indeed, responsible scholar that she is, Margolis weakens her own case by observing toward the end of the book that excessive corporate loyalty and the willingness to suffer annual or biannual moves were most typical of managers from blue-collar backgrounds or of men who were the first members of their families to have gone to college...

...They should also stop trying to impose an ideal of residential stability on a society that has been unusually mobile since its beginnings, and shows no sign of settling down...

...A closing note: Diane Margolis is one of a small albeit growing number of sociologists who write an English comprehensible to the general reader...

...Nevertheless, the author's data suggest once more that many Americans will sacrifice stability for occupational and other goals they value more highly...

...Transients can bring new ideas into a community, and have frequently overthrown old and autocratic political machines in the suburbs...

...Ironically, therefore, Margolis' findings hint at definite limits to corporate power...

...Nor does the author make a persuasive case for her argument that the corporation emasculates its employees, forcing them to sacrifice their own and their families' autonomy to the company...

...transience remains to be done, yet my impression is that the effects vary with the people involved, that stability is not always good and transience not always bad...

...They are the real corporate managers, and it is largely through them that the corporation obtains "near-totalitarian" power...

...Corporate power, she contends at the close of her book, "seems to reach into the noncorporate community, threatening all lives with its near-totalitarian control...

...The same costs, though, are paid by ambitious self-employed people, government bureaucrats and young academics who must now, more than ever, publish to avoid perishing...

...Such individuals, embarked on a difficult and risky ascent, may give up other values and passions to pay allegiance to the company that is sponsoring their journey into the upper-middle class...

...At the same time, they will be reluctant to take sides, or express themselves on issues in which the corporation may have a stake...

...Although I share the author's concern about corporate power and its misuse, I am not convinced by all her findings...

...I met some corporate transients when I studied Levittown, New Jersey, in the late 1950s, and I was always impressed by the diversity of their reactions—to their companies, to the transfer policy and to the communities which they moved to...

...Reviewed by Herbert J. Gans Professor of Sociology, Columbia University...

...For this reason alone, I hope she will continue to study and publish about the large national corporation...

...Now Diane Margolis, a sociologist, has followed in Packard's footsteps...

...Some did become psychological serfs of the corporation, yet many more developed cynicism toward it...

...they argued passionately about values they held about the local community and a variety of issues...

...The ideal itself has many virtues and constant moving has its faults...

...The "characteristic mode" of the managers, she observes, "was trivialization...

...Although it is one of the country's 100 largest companies, GPI cannot find really loyal managers, except among people from humble origins?and these people meanwhile treat GPI as a stepping stone in much the same way that earlier generations treated the urban slum, the ethnic group and organized crime...

...Moreover, she appears to place such a high value on stability and the local community that she waxes too romantic about the TCers, blessing their political and social life with the dated sociological concept of Gemein-schafl...

...The effects of transience on community life and local democracy—the author's particular worries—vary as well...

...Margolis also reports that corporate transients lack interest in close friendships, eschew participation in the local community, and ignore political and moral issues generally, becoming "passionless" in the process...

...To be sure, Professor Margolis is justified in being critical both of the corporation and of the overly-conforming managers, but it should be said that these managers live in a less secure world than their already-middle-class colleagues...

...It is true that GPIers who wanted promotions had to be willing to work evenings and weekends at the expense of family life...

...I hope, too, that next time she will interview its executives and examine their economic and political activities...

...Their response to virtually every social issue was 'Ridiculous!'" The GPI families Margolis studied had been reassigned to corporate headquarters, and were now living in "Fairtown," a Connecticut town 30 miles away...

...These middle-class rebels against the corporation are treated approvingly, and I suspect Margolis liked them better than the ambitious noveau bourgeois from blue-collar backgrounds...

...Managers with middle-class backgrounds could, by contrast, call a halt to transfers, either by forcing GPI to promote them in place or by leaving the company for a stable job, perhaps precluding further upward mobility...

...Furthermore, as the corporation uses them, they are using the corporation—as a social ladder...

...argued that a new breed of executives had arrived: men who turned their backs on American individualism, adopting instead a "social ethic" to make careers within large national corporations, foundations, and religious and scientific institutions...

...The book's 29 chapters included one devoted to "The Transients," junior executives and their families who were regularly transferred between branches of their organizations, moving from suburb to suburb without ever settling down...

...Unfortunately, Margolis seems so intent on exposing the evils of the corporation that she does not report as fully about GPIers who enjoyed their nomadism as she does on the ones who disliked it...

...For while she devotes some attention to how corporate managers live, her favorite theme is the mainly harmful effects of corporate transfers and residential transience...

...Accordingly, this study has persuaded me that sociologists (and journalists) should now stop worrying about corporate transfers...

...And as a group they were more active in Levittown affairs than the permanents...

...Although the comparison would seem to imply that the villain is the corporate transfer policy per se, Margolis maintains that the real problem is more fundamental: A corporation like GPI circulates its young managers to acquaint them with the company's far-flung regional branches and markets, but in the process it encourages them to cut their ties to everything except the corporation...

...Unlike the managers, they obviously cared about Fairtown...

...they can also be quite undemocratic, excluding newcomers and even old residents who fail to accept their rule...

...The definitive study on residential stability vs...

...Later writers, however, were far less complimentary about the nomads...

...author, "Deciding What's News" Nearly 25 years ago in The Organization Man, William H. Whyte Jr...

...The political and social cliques she found among Fairtown's TC mem-ers may enhance community cohesion and vitality...

...Certainly, they will be more interested in corporate politics than in local community politics...

...In addition, she interviewed a sample of Fairtown residents active in the community's Township Committee—and they displayed all the social and individual virtues mis-ing in the managerial families...

...Not only must they repeatedly transform a new house into a home, but they never have time to pursue their own interests or prepare themselves for the day when the children have flown the coop...

...For example, those who have grown up in a tightly-knit family circle often seek nothing more than to escape its intense demands for conformity and its constant invasions of privacy...