This one's for the men and women of the corporation

I want to take this moment to pay tribute to men and women of the corporation.

The book, that is.

Yes, in a couple of months, we'll hit the 30th anniversary of the book, Men and Women of the Corporation. Winner of the C. Wright Mills Award (ooh!). Dubbed "a bank of candles in the dark" by Dust Cover Reviewer #1 (aah!). Written by the Class of 1960 Chair in Business Administration at Harvard Business School (stop, it's too good!). And let's not pay short shrift to Front Cover Top Reviewer: "I cannot think of a better guide to the inner workings of the modern corporation."

Now that we've properly vetted this major work, let's peer inside to find out what people were thinking about the Corporation (its men and women) way back when. Gather 'round, children! Hear what MAWOTC has to say about:

Secretaries:

"The first fact about the several thousand secretaries at Indsco [a pseudonym for an "industrial supply company"] was that they were all women, except for two men at headquarters who were classified as typists."

Their bosses:

"When bosses make demands at their own discretion and arbitrarily, choose secretaries on grounds that enhance their own personal status rather than meeting organizational efficiency tests, expect personal service with limits negotiated privately, exact loyalty, and make the secretary a part of their private retinue, moving when they move - then the relationship has elements of patrimony."

Bosses vis-a-vis secretaries:

"The boss's status determined the power of the secretary...Higher up, secretaries' power derived from control of bosses' calendars."

Rogue secretaries:

"To take initiative without taking over the job, then, marked a fine line the more ambitious secretaries walked. They ran the risk that the more they did or the better they did, the more threatening they became to bosses and Indsco."

Incompetent bosses of secretaries:

"A man who is sloppy will not only expect his secretary to compensate for his sloppiness but will inevitably suggest that her neatness and capacity for organization are proof of a tidy, and therefore limited, mind, while his sloppiness is the sign of unfettered creativity."

Wives (an entire chapter is devoted to this topic):

"Because corporate wives were generally seen to be content to operate behind the scenes and to be ambitious for their husbands rather than themselves and because they made use of social rather than intellectual skills in their hostess role, the image of women that emerged for some management men from knowing their own and other wives reinforced the view that career women were an anomaly, that they were unusual or could not really be ambitious, or that their talents must be primarily social and emotional rather than cognitive."

Sexual fantasizers of corporate women and the wives who love them:

"Several saleswomen at Indsco felt, rightly or wrongly, that they were the targets of the sexual fantasies of male peers. Some said that men used them to taunt their wives, e.g., by making innuendos about going out on a sales call with one of the women. For this reason, may saleswomen felt it important that they establish good relations with the wives, giving women an additional task men did not have. Wives, in turn, not themselves directly participating in the work world, could fear what would happen when their husbands worked with women as peers, such as the Newton, Massachusetts policemen's wives who protested the hiring of policewomen, giving as one reason the sexual potential of long shifts shared by men and women in patrol cars."

Tokens:

"If one sees nine X's and one O:

X X x x X X O X x X

the O will stand out. The O may also be overlooked, but if it is seen at all, it will get more notice than any X. Further, the X's may seem more alike than different because of their contrast with the O. "

And more on Tokens:

"One of Indsco's most senior women...was among the five women celebrated at the civic lunch for outstanding women in business. A series of calls from high-level officers indicated that the chairman of the board of the corporation wanted her to attend a lunch at a large hotel that day, although she was given no information about the nature of the event. When she threatened not to go unless she was given more information, she was reminded that the invitation had come down from the chairman himself, and of course she would go. On the day of the luncheon, a corsage arrived and later, a vice-president to escort her. So she went, and found she was there to represent the corporation's "prize women," symbolizing the strides made by women in business. The program for the affair listed the women executives from participating companies, except in the case of Indsco, where the male vice-presidential escorts were listed instead. Pictures were taken for the employee newsletter and, a few days later, she received an inscribed paperweight as a memento. She told the story a few weeks after the event with visible embarrassment about being "taken on a date. It was more like a senior prom than a business event."

You may be laughing at the matter-of-factness of these excerpts, or the obviousness (and in other instances, sheer ludicrousness) of some of the gender relations problems that they encapsulate, but this book was earth-shattering when it came out. And the book now comes with an Afterword focused on "The View from the 1990's," about such challenges as "The Empowerment Problem: The Female Service Army" and "Dilemmas of Diversity" ("But the next step up from tokenism - skewed groups in which several more O's are present although X's still dominate - can create even more problems - backlash, resistance, complaints of 'reverse discrimination.' Research shows that dissatisfaction and tension are greatest in groups in which there are several women or minorities...").

Seriously, the book offers an interesting, Weberish account of the structural determinants of behavior within an organization. Even though some of it is overly deterministic, its insights into how the organizational structures that used to be commonplace for the American worker (hierarchical, vertically integrated, stable monoliths like the pseudonymous Indsco) severely limited opportunities for women were long-overdue when MAWOTC rolled off the presses. So pick up (or, if you're getting a Ph.D. in org theory, dust off) a copy today. You just might learn something. About your sexist piggish self.

Oh, and did I mention that it was written by a woman?

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence