Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Toward a Safe and Sane Halloween and Other Tales of Suburbia. William Geist. Times Books, $16.95. The rise of suburbia since the end of World War I1 has contributed to...
...The Saudis, says Safran, have been forced to choose between closer relations with the United States and alignment with Syria and Iraq...
...Deborah Baldwin *Respectively: male, male, female, female Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security...
...Lexington, $19.95...
...Safran argues that the disintegration of the moderate Arab consensus in the wake of the Iranian revolution and Egypt’s expulsion from the Arab League threatened the Saudi’s strategic position in the Gulf and further contributed to their unpredictable behavior...
...Hadn’t novelists like John Updike, John Cheever, and Philip Roth successfully mined them...
...Wandering through this mysterious world of shopping malls, Tbpperware parties, plastic flamingos, and Weber grills, Geist finds the suburbs to be something more than an advertising base...
...Charles Kupchan...
...Meanwhile, even the best of big-city newspapers that manage to survive find themselves pandering to upscale, largely suburban advertisers...
...A story about architecture thus becomes a story about the decline of community values...
...The authors err by not balancing their enthusiasm for employee ownership with more than whispers about its problems...
...They have overregulated interstate banking and squelched healthy competition among different kinds of financial institutions, says King, while letting slide the risky investments that underlie the recent rash of bank failures...
...Sales per employee are two to three times those of its competitors...
...This, along with continued layoffs and plant closings, has made workers bitter...
...Geist is full of wonderful facts...
...He now writes the “About New York” column for the Times...
...Like Tom Wolfe, Geist has a gift for zeroing in on the familiar but unexamined aspects of everyday life and showing why they’re important...
...Safran attributes the recent unpredictability of Saudi foreign policy in part to the decentralization of authority within the country, especially that which occurred during the reign of King Khaled following Faisal’s death in 1975...
...New York’s gain is suburbia’s loss...
...Under Khaled, the kingdom moved toward a more collective style of leadership, one that produced divisions within the ruling family and hence an indecisive and ambiguous foreign policy...
...Those of us who grew up in the suburbs have long suspected that they weren’t quite as barren as the press made them out to be...
...When Loden isn’t lumping all women together as kind and caring (and all men as remote and impersonal), she is dancing around the topic of sex discrimination...
...He counsels, “America’s long-term aim should be to disengage its vital interests from the policy and fate of the Kingdom .” 0 Shortly after the release of this book, it was revealed that Safran had accepted two grants from the CIA-$107,430 for his book and $45,700 for a conference on Islamic fundamentalism...
...Leading the pack in shamelessness is The New York Times, which has in recent years boosted its flagging revenues with such embarrassments as the “Home” section, the “Living” section, and tony supplements like “The Sophisticated Traveller...
...Loden says she has identified a “groundswell of interest in the feminine leadership style developing among men and women in business who recognize the important role it can play in improving productivity, encouraging innovation and raising employee morale...
...Although he listed other funding sources in his acknowledgements, Safran honored an agreement with the CIA to forgo mention of its grant and to clear the contents of the book with Agency officials...
...After interviewing what one must assume was an extremely limited number of women in business, Marilyn Loden concludes, “Women are more likely to stress cooperation over competition, teamwork over hierarchical structures, intuitive rather than exclusively rational reasoning, and an emphasis on long-term quality gains over short-term successes .” Next she blames all of the ills of American industry-including productivity losses and massive trade deficits-on men, whose singleminded emphasis on giving orders and acting tough apparently is at the root of worker alienation and the overly strong US...
...In 1981, perhaps in penance for its sins, the Times hired Geist away from the Chicago Mbune, where he’d been writing about the suburbs, yes-but in a lively, humorous, and often illumina t ing way...
...dollar...
...and an intuitive yet easily distracted bank president who once invested five hours of the top brass’s time in a discussion of the company Christmas card...
...Newspapers are easy to distribute inside a city, but difficult to get to far-flung suburban subscribers...
...Kitry Krause Feminine Leadership, or How to Succeed in Business Without Being One of the Boys...
...More than 2,635,000,000 copies of National Geographic have been published (“and casual empiricism suggests that none have been thrown away...
...If he feared that a public link to the CIA would have jeopardized his contacts in the Middle East or discouraged potential conference participants, he should have gone elsewhere for support...
...William Geist is one of the few good things to come out of journalism’s new orientation toward the suburbs...
...The authors only hint at the effect such abuses may have on public and congressional support and therefore on the continued growth of employee ownership...
...A resident said Belgian chocolates would be all right but no vegetables...
...This is an important point because the Reagan administration’s original tax reform plan would have done away with a number of the ESOP tax benefits...
...W. L. Gore and Associates, maker of the fabric “Gore-Tex,” has no management hierarchy but is growing at 25 percent per year...
...As a result of the reports about CIA funding, approximately half of the expected participants failed to attend the conference...
...Geist found little consolation in the knowledge that Bob Woodward, who’d grown up in the Chicago suburbs, had been turned down by the Suburban nib before going on to glory at The Washington Post: “If they had hired him, perhaps his slot at The Washington Post would not have been filled when I applied there...
...For example, in a column about the decline of the front porch, which stopped being standard in American architecture about 50 years ago, Geist observes that instead of spending their leisure time chatting with neighbors and taking in the action on the street, today’s suburbanites are more apt to invite people with similar demographic profiles a week ahead of time to sit in a fenced-in backyard...
...Both the Korean grocer and the “Potemkin village” story were drawn from Geist’s new beat, which is New York City...
...This in itself does not warrant criticism...
...George Stephen, an employee in the Weber Brothers Metal Works in suburban Chicago, invented the first Weber grill in 1951...
...The other exposed a New York City effort to put decals on the windows of abandoned buildings in the Bronx in order to create the illusion that families lived there...
...Given the chance to own at least part of the company for which they work, most employees say the best part of helping to run the show is the chance to make more money...
...she concedes that much of their success is due to “unintended consequences prevail[ing] over planning,” as well as a political system lacking our fractious tradition of federalism...
...But let’s face it, a boring job, no matter how decorated with “input,” is still a boring job, and workers understandably want a little more tangible compensation for the tedium...
...Dependence on American security guarantees was incompatible with pan-Arab sentiment, while attempts to juggle relationships with Syria and Iraq were complicated by clashes between Damascus and Baghdad over the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...Only when Congress (and some states) made employee-ownership plans more attractive by offering tax advantages in exchange did the idea make boardroom agendas across the country...
...While bankers themselves have contributed to the confusion, King accuses politicians of making the worst blunders...
...But in 1972, when Geist graduated from journalism school, who wanted to be stuck out in the suburbs...
...Nadav Safran has amassed a wealth of information on Saudi foreign policy from 1964 to 1982, an impressive accomplishment given the closed nature of Saudi society and the paucity of good source material on the topic...
...Nonetheless, the authors are quick to add that without worker participation in management, businesses will not achieve the gains in productivity, growth, and profitability that distinguish the most successful employee-owned companies...
...Corporations struggling to remain competitive should recognize the value of spreading that risk among their workers, whose own best interest, unlike that of absentee shareholders, lies in the business’s longterm efficiency and productivity...
...Still, it’s startling to hear a woman talk about women in sweepingly sexist terms...
...went private, ending its employees’ pension plan and setting up an ESOP that gave workers 70 percent of the company...
...A Cornel1 University study estimated that $200 million is annually spent on Long Island lawns...
...One was about a Korean grocer who created a furor by proposing to sell vegetables in a store on fashionable Park Avenue...
...A number of workers have retired with stock valued in six figures...
...As a stark contrast to our own sorry mess is the inspiring example of Sweden’s banking system, says King...
...David K Stowe Employee Ownership in America: The Equity Solution...
...But those workers got few of the voting rights that usually go with ownership and received little decision-making authority...
...Gypsy moths were brought to New York by a French naturalist in 1869, escaped from his lab, and bred out of control because none of their natural predators lived there...
...As Geist relates in his introduction, he was “eager to put public officials-each and every one-behind bars .” Instead, he found himself working at the Suburban Mb, a tabloid insert of the Chicago Tribune...
...Lexington, $16.95...
...Most people I know simply would like to work for a boss with charisma who knows how to tap people’s skills and give them a personal stake in the future of the enterprise...
...Marilyn Loden...
...much information on Middle East security simply is not available on the public record...
...It isn’t clear, however, why she chose the Swedes as models...
...Timothy Noah The Great American Banking Snafu...
...Well known for their political timidity, the wealthy Saudis generally have followed the consensus in the Arab world...
...It’s hard to say what’s sadderthat the masculine leadership style can so often be obtuse and insensitive or that this longtime management expert is asking women to help improve the workplace not by being more competent but by being more womanly...
...Imagine a football team with five head coaches and 50 assistants, “all with different game plans and different regulations, which confused the field officials who often were overruled by officials sitting on the bench...
...The lure of that kind of success has not, however, been enough to overcome the reluctance of many companies to share power with their workers...
...Endorsed by “everyone from Paul Volcker to Tom Hayden, from the New York Stock Exchange to the Teamsters, from Ted Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, and from the Pope to the Chamber of Commerce,” employee-ownership plans, which included mly 500,000 workers a decade ago, now cover more than ten million...
...Mary L. King...
...So, now guess: which of them was male and which female?* And so what...
...To reach the swelling ranks of suburban subscribers, newspapers have had to build satellite printing plants and hire more trucks, driving up costs...
...This is Mary King’s harrowing vision of the American banking system...
...As usual, the Saudis have avoided making clear decisions...
...Nor is there much discussion of whether companies can sustain their great leaps in productivity and growth...
...They’re a story...
...But reaping the reward for everyone depends on workers having not only a real investment in the product of their labor but also a real opportunity to affect that product’s success or failure...
...Safran’s mistake was agreeing not to reveal one of his key sources of financial support...
...how about a book for both sexes on how to be a better boss...
...If things go poorly, they can lose everything...
...As he and Carl were becoming the most rich and famous journalists in the world, I was attending suburban board meetings .” In time, Geist came to see the anthropological possibilities in his suburban beat and persuaded the Dibune to give him a column...
...This finding contradicts the prevailing theory that participation in decision-making and improving the quality of work life are the keys to employee satisfaction and commitment...
...Instead of being angry at men for discriminating against women, she rebukes women for attempting to compete in the male power structure on male terms...
...The authors also fail to examine the risks employees take by depending on one company’s continued success for their retirement benefits...
...Those companies’ stories are often remarkable...
...This collection, drawn from both the 7Tibune and the Times, is the fruit of Geist’s years observing the habits of suburbanites-who, Geist reminds us, make up more than one-third of the population...
...The size of the share of the company that workers own, for example, and the reason a company sets up an ESOP don’t seem to affect worker satisfaction or commitment...
...And, indeed, only 7 percent of the companies surveyed for Employee Ownership said they would have set up their employee-ownership plans without the tax breaks...
...Now that women are being told that it’s okay to dress pretty again and to stay home all day if that’s what makes them happy, the time is probably ripe for a book celebrating the uniquely “feminine” qualities of women in management...
...This is particularly true for afternoon papers, which must fight commuter traffic jams...
...For example, employees own one-third of Lowe‘s Companies, which has grown in only two decades to become the country’s largest retail and wholesale hardware chain...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Toward a Safe and Sane Halloween and Other Tales of Suburbia...
...Even the most satirical novels set in suburbia revealed that important things were happening there...
...Corey Rosen, Katherine J. Klein, Karen M. Young...
...a flinty-cool government appointee who worshipped schedules and hated dealing with subordinates...
...Rosen et a1 focus almost exclusively on employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), by far the most common form of employer ownership...
...The problem with capitalism is that there aren’t enough capitalists,” Senator Russell Long once said...
...In another piece, about an ordinance in River Edge, New Jersey against parking vehicles with commercial license plates in residential driveways, a truck driver complains that he’s being treated like a “second-class citizen...
...But that is, after all, the big risk in being a capitalist...
...Never mind praising women in management because they supposedly have cornered the market on intuition and team spirit...
...Those tax breaks are no pittance: the loss to the federal government in 1986 alone will be $2.5 billion...
...Their survey of 45 representative companies and 3,700 employees yields valuable statistics supporting employee ownership...
...Over the years I have had the following bosses (among others): an emotional small business owner who elicited hard work and loyalty through a combination of warmth and occasional temper tantrums...
...The rise of suburbia since the end of World War I1 has contributed to the decline of daily journalism...
...Faced with a takeover bid by Carl C. Icahn in 1983, Dan River, Inc...
...a mousy entrepreneur whose business failed because of insufficient attention paid to the books...
...Whatever the tilt of Saudi policy, though, it has become clear that the United States has fallen out of favor in Riyadh...
...The result has been a hastening of the trend toward more and more one-newspaper towns and the proliferation of bland suburban newspapers and inane local TV news shows...
...Also, while one coach would be calling a time-out, another would be telling the team to go for a field goal...
...Safran’s text lacks documentation for some key events and interpretations, indicating that he relied on confidential sources, perhaps some in the American intelligence community...
...The shortage, say the authors of Employee Ownership in America, reflects only a lack of opportunity...
...BY doing so he raised unnecessary suspicion about his intellectual integrity and independence...
...Some of the data contradict common assumptions...
...But Safran’s greater accomplishment is an insightful analysis that weaves together four important strands: the politics of the Saudi ruling elite, events in the Persian Gulf, developments in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and American involvement in the Middle East...
...The mayor answers candidly, “The ordinance may be snobbery to a certain extent, but I think the trucks do depreciate property values I’ Geist buffs will be disappointed to find that his two most famous stories aren’t here...
...Belknap/Harvard University Pms, $29.95...
...for example, in Goodbye, Columbus Roth dramatized with equal measures of pain and hilarity the agonies of assimilation that plagued ambitious young Jews in New Jersey...
...A lack of American understanding of the pressures felt by the Saudis aggravated the strain in relations, says Safran, who warns that Washington unwisely continues to depend on Saudi Arabia for providing strategic access to the Gulf and for maintaining the flow of adequate supplies of oil to the West...
...Nadav Safran...
...Her prescriptions are sweeping: uniform national standards and regulation for financial institutions, legalized interstate banking, FDIC protection for both state and federal banks, disclosure of all banking operations, and incentives to increase cooperation among banks...
...King, a professor of marketing and management, blames misplaced, misguided regulation for most of our banking problems in this often-colorful survey of American banking history...
...Glossing over the powerful cultural influences that contribute to sexual stereotypes, she asserts that women are born different-and “vive la difference...
...Despite this somewhat forced comparison, King’s book is a thorough and lively overview of American ban king...
Vol. 17 • December 1985 • No. 11
