The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  But the harmony of feelings between manager and worker often matters more to the manager than to the worker or the work process, partly because, as we have seen, the other-directed manager cannot stand hostility and conflict; partly, as we have also seen, because trying to eliminate hostility and conflict keeps him busy; more important, perhaps, because contemporary American ideology cannot conceive of the possibility of hostility or indifference between members of the work-team not adversely affecting production. The achievement of harmony sometimes becomes not a by-product of otherwise agreeable and meaningful work but an obligatory prerequisite. The consequence in some cases may even be to slow down the work because people have been led to expect harmony of mood, and need to be persuaded and repersuaded constantly that it exists.

  This does not deny that much can and needs to be done to reduce the monotony of the production line and the tactlessness of the supervisors. When the morale engineers have power to move people from job to job and to change team patterns, they accomplish a great deal. But, as I have said, it is often the psychological needs of the managers that determine the emphasis and priority of factory reorganization.

  Meanwhile, two groups stand out against the better integration of the workers into the work-team; the isolates, who, while doing their production job, refuse to involve themselves in the harmony of feelings of the factory workers and, on the other hand, the much larger group of featherbedders who involve themselves all too well. Both these groups seek to retain their emotional freedom against the efforts of the factory to force them to mix work and play. The isolate does not want to be involved in emotional planning and factory-group dynamics. The featherbedders simply resist what they consider the boss’s exploitation.

  Obviously, in the face of such resistance it will be a long time before the factory worker follows the example of the white-collar worker and, in imitation of the boss, puts pressure on him to personalize still more and better. But perhaps we see here one source for the envy of the working class that many middle-class people feel: they envy not only its greater freedom in overt aggression but also the very refusal to get involved in the work situation and the consequent ability to save reserves for play even where the work is monotonous, physically tiring, or sweated.

  THE CLUB OF INDISPENSABLES

  Responding to the personalizations of the secretary or trying to give mood leadership to the factory floor—these occupations do not alone account for the manager’s keeping himself busy. He is busy because he is more than busy: he is indispensable. He clings to the notion of scarcity that was so thoroughly elaborated in the official American culture of the school, the church, and politics. He needs to combat the notion that he himself might not be so scarce—that he might be dispensable. And surely, in the world as it is now, this fear of being considered surplus is understandably frightening.

  Yet the other-directed man buys his feeling of being scarce at the expense of failing to see how little work, and much less teamwork, is needed in many productive sectors to keep the society rolling.2 It is of the very nature of false personalizing to conceal this fact. And of course the cultural definitions of work also play a part in building up the notion of indispensability—for instance, by making paid work an ideal expression of man’s effortfulness—and in providing the indispensables with secondary gains, such as sympathy from wives and children and exculpation from demands and possibilities of leisure.

  III. The Overpersonalized Society

  One of the possibilities for opening up channels for autonomy, then, is to de-personalize work, to make it less strenuous emotionally, and to encourage people to decide for themselves whether and how much they want to personalize in what the culture inescapably requires in the way of work. But of course there are psychological obstacles in the way of any institutional changes. The character of the other-directed man is elicited by contemporary institutions, and then, as an adult, he demands that the institutions exploit the character he has come to assume as his. Consequently, if the institutions should no longer employ him in the way he expects to be employed, will he not feel empty emotionally?

  Percival and Paul Goodman asked themselves this same question in Communitas, a book which includes one of the most imaginative discussions of work and play in any contemporary writing.3 They portray a utopia in which people could earn their living by a minimum of effort and would then be faced with the really shocking problem of how to get through the day:

  Suddenly, the Americans would find themselves rescued from the physical necessity and social pressure which alone, perhaps, had been driving them to their habitual satisfactions: they might suddenly find the commercial pleasures flat and unpalatable, but they would not therefore suddenly find any resources within themselves.

  Like that little girl in the progressive school, longing for the security of the grownup’s making her decisions for her, who asks: “Teacher, today again do we have to do what we want to do?”

  There appear to be two major ways of reducing the demands of work, one through automatization, which would release the attention of many of us from productive processes entirely, and the other through making use of the potentialities for impersonality in our productive and distributive processes. Both these developments are strenuously resisted, and not only by men who find work as a machine tender, boring as it sometimes is, less boring than the alternatives; in fact, I believe we would now be much further on the road to the wholly automatic factory if management did not harbor residual—and surely understandable—fears that without work we would be lost.

  This fallacy is characteristic of the proposals for introducing joy and meaning into modern industrialism that come from the schools of De Man, Mayo, and many other recent writers. These men, like some of the syndicalists and those who put their faith in the cooperatives, want to restore the personal relations at work characteristic of a society dependent on tradition-direction as well as of the earlier stages of inner-direction. They would like, in a fallacy of misplaced participation, to personalize, emotionalize, and moralize the factory and white-collar worlds at every point. At least in America they make the mistake of seeing our civilization as an impersonal society and bemoaning it. For the long run, I think it makes more sense to work with rather than against the grain of impersonality in modern industry: to increase automatization in work—but for the sake of pleasure and consumption and not for the sake of work itself.

  For many white-collar workers, as we have seen, false personalization is the only personalizing that they meet. For many factory workers featherbedding is the only sociability they get. Work, when it has these overtones for people, still remains real, important, and magnetic. This was one lure that during the last war drew many women of the middle and lower middle classes into the factories and held them there despite poor working conditions, inadequate transportation, and pressure from spouses. Escaping from domestic lives of extreme privatization, they were willing, even eager, to accept the most monotonous-seeming jobs. Any effort, therefore, further to automatize work must take account not only of temporary technological unemployment but of the situation of those overly privatized ones who still suffer from the residual barriers of family, poverty, and hierarchy we have inherited from the era dependent on inner-direction. But surely we can think of better things for them than the factory as a refuge from home, just as we can think of better ways of giving poverty-stricken people security and good medical care than shutting them up in prison or mental hospitals.

  THE AUTOMAT VERSUS THE GLAD HAND

  In the present state of our social and economic accounting, I find it impossible to say where necessary personalization ends and unnecessary personalization begins. Nor have I the indices to separate profitably productive effort from busy work. I cannot tell, for example, how much the slow progress toward automatization in the tertiary trades is due to low wages, engaging Negro laundresses and pressers in a muscular race with existing mechanical power, how much to failure to invent the necessary machinery, h
ow much to consumer demand to buy personalization along with a product, and how much to the needs of the work force itself to personalize, for reasons already given, whether the consumer asks for it or not.

  It is also hard to judge how much the consumer’s demand for individual attention inevitably conflicts with the producer’s right to freedom from unnecessary personalization. Retail trade offers a particularly difficult problem in this connection. The growth of the consumer and luxury market in the United States, coupled with the rise of other-direction, make the salesperson’s work harder than it was in 1900. Then, for example, the salesgirl in the Fifth Avenue store sold her limited stock to the carriage trade at a pace set for her by the relative slowness of the trade itself. To be sure, shopping was a pastime even then. But the customer was not in a hurry, nor, within the range of her class-based style, was she too anxious about her choice. Moreover, the salesgirl, serving only a few customers, could recall their requirements and therefore be of some assistance where assistance was in order. Today the salesgirl in the department store, a typical figure in the distributive chain of personalization, faces a mass clientele huge in size, nervous in motion, and unsure in taste. She is asked to respond in a hurry to a series of vaguely specified wants.

  These observations suggest that much of the pathos of our current stage of industrialism resides in the fact that we need rapidly to expand the tertiary trades that cater to leisure, while these are the very trades which may today combine the greatest difficulty and tediousness of physical work—there is much of this, for instance, in the department store—along with the severest emotional demands. The problem of where to automatize is generally looked at by economists as a problem in investment and reinvestment, and also in labor mobility. Yet perhaps a national capital goods budget should include in its forecasts a guess as to the degree of false personalization that it may evoke or eliminate.

  What we very much need is a new type of engineer whose job it is to remove psychic hazards springing from false personalization, as safety engineers now remove hazards that endanger life and limb. For instance, such an engineer might seek a way of making gas pumps automatic like slot machines and of turning service stations into as nearly automatic form as some of the most up-to-date roundhouses for engines now are. In factories and offices, an effort could be made, by careful layout engineering, to eliminate working conditions and locations that coerce the emotions—making sure meanwhile that other jobs are available for those displaced by automatization. Some imagination and ingenuity will be required to construct indexes by which to measure the amount of false personalization required by a given job under normal conditions and to set ceilings beyond which such personalization would not be allowed to go.

  It would be interesting to review from this perspective the present trend in America to get rid of private offices and have everybody work democratically in a single accessible and well-lighted room. For many, I would guess, the dual requirement that one be sociable and get the work done has the same consequences that it does in school and college, of leading to censure of those who too obviously like their work, and of anxiety on the part of those who cannot simultaneously orient themselves to the task at hand and to the human network of observers. For others, there must be a reduction in the anxiety of isolated work, and a net gain in friendliness.

  In the distributive trades, where the salesperson is confronted at every turn by customers, there can be no solution through private offices, but only through further automatization. Bellamy saw some of the possibilities quite lucidly, and in Looking Backward he made consumer purchasing take the form of giving an order “untouched by human hands” to merchandising centers much like the local depots in which one today can make out orders to Sears or Montgomery Ward. Clearly, if most vending could be made automatic, both consumers and salespeople would be saved from much motion and emotion. The supermarket, the Automat, the mail order house, all dependent on colorful, accurate display and advertising, are the technical inventions that widen the interstices of the distribution system where autonomy can thrive.

  Bellamy also suggests to us how we may reduce some of the guilt many of us feel at living a relatively easy life while others are engaged in the irreducible minimum of hard and unpleasant jobs—a guilt which is certainly far more widespread in an era of other-direction, and which may deepen rather than not with an increase in autonomy. His plan, requiring all youth to serve a three-year term in the “industrial army,” was designed by him to facilitate national industrial organization and to guide the young in their final vocational choices. When the CCC gave us something of the same sort, it was, like so many of the good things we do, only for relief; the well-off were excluded. Something like a combination of Bellamy’s army and the CCC would perhaps serve all of us as an initiatory alleviation of guilts about later “un-productive” work, pending the arrival of our new definitions of productiveness. Once people had done an arduous stint in the late adolescent years of strong energies and, for some, of strong idealisms, they might feel entitled to the life of Riley. Certainly, many veterans, studying or loafing in an interesting way under the GI Bill of Rights—the phrase is exceedingly important— would feel guilty about pulling down a check from Uncle Sam had they not suffered their share of deprivation.

  These are suggestions for social solutions: but we need not wait on them. Those seeking autonomy might simply refuse to take the cultural definitions of what constitutes work for granted —a kind of strike, not against work as such but against the requirement that all recruitable emotional energies be harnessed to work by an endless reciprocal chain.

  Thoreau was a first-class surveyor; he chose this occupation— a near-vanished craft-skill par excellence—as a well-paying one that would give him a living if he worked one day a week. Dr. William Carlos Williams is a popular general practitioner in Rutherford, New Jersey. Charles Ives “worked” by heading an agency that sold half a billion dollars’ worth of insurance, and he “played” by composing some of the more significant, though least recognized, music that has been produced in this country. Ives felt not in the least guilty about the money he made or about the fact that he lived a “normal” American life, rather than a Bohemian one. Yet many men are unwilling to do what these men have done or what Charles Lamb or Hawthorne or many others did in the nineteenth century: to justify their work primarily by its pay check, especially if the work is short and the pay check large. Instead as we have seen they try by false personalization, by mood leadership, by notions of indispensability, and by countless similar rituals and agendas, to fill up the vacuum created by high productivity. Yet people’s real work—the field into which, on the basis of their character and their gifts, they would like to throw their emotional and creative energies—cannot now conceivably coincide, perhaps in the majority of cases, with what they get paid for doing.

  XIV

  Enforced privatization: obstacles to autonomy in play

  I may remark… that though in that early time I seem to have been constantly eager to exchange my lot for that of somebody else, on the assumed certainty of gaining by the bargain, I fail to remember feeling jealous of such happier persons—in the measure open to children of spirit. I had rather a positive lack of the passion, and thereby, I suppose, a lack of spirit; since if jealousy bears, as I think, on what one sees one’s companions able to do—as against one’s falling short—envy, as I knew it at least, was simply of what they were, or in other words of a certain sort of richer consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them.

  Henry James, A Small Boy and Others

  Because the distribution of leisure in America has been rapid as well as widespread, leisure presents Americans with issues that are historically new. At the same time part of the promise of leisure and play for the other-directed man is that it may be easier in play than in work to break some of the institutional and characterological barriers to autonomy. Play, far from having to be the residual sphere left over from work-ti
me and work-feeling, can increasingly become the sphere for the development of skill and competence in the art of living. Play may prove to be the sphere in which there is still some room left for the would-be autonomous man to reclaim his individual character from the pervasive demands of his social character.

  Admittedly, we know very little about play, partly as the result of the cultural definitions that give priority to work. Research has been concerned mainly with the social character of the producer; only recently has the same attention been paid to the consumer; we have still to discover the player. Yet is it sensible to suggest research into play when it is possible that it would lead to increasing public and systematic interference with an area that ideally deserves privacy and lack of system? Perhaps a conspiracy of silence about leisure and play is their best protection?

  Rather than speaking about how one should play, or what the play of man seeking autonomy should be, which is in any case beyond me, I turn to a consideration of restrictions on freedom in the field of play generally.

  I. The Denial of Sociability

  In the previous chapter we noted the excess of sociability, in the form of false personalization, which is forced on many people in our economy. Nevertheless, I do not deny that for the other-directed man a deficit of sociability is even more serious than an excess. The presence of the guiding and approving others is a vital element in his whole system of conformity and self-justification. Depriving him of the sociability his character has come to crave will not make him autonomous, but only anomic—resembling in this the cruelty of depriving the addict of liquor or drugs by a sudden incarceration. Moreover, if the other-directed man is seeking autonomy, he cannot achieve it alone. He needs friends.