Whyte, William H. ("Hollingsworth" or "Holly") 1917-1999.born in West Chester, PA.
The Organization Man (text) (1956)
The Rules of Walking
William H. Whyte, 81, Author of 'The Organization Man'
New York Times
January 13, 1999By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
NEW YORK -- William H. Whyte, the author who defined corporate conformity and warned against its growth in the classic book "The Organization Man," died Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.
Whyte, who was an editor of Fortune magazine when he wrote his best-selling 1956 work, went on to a distinguished second career as a scholar of the human habitat, specifically as a close observer of street life and urban space. As an urbanologist he wrote, taught, planned and once spent 16 years watching and filming what people do on the streets of New York.He also conducted a study showing that a large percentage of companies that moved from New York City ended up in locations less than eight miles from the homes of their chief executives.
But it was "The Organization Man" that first brought him to wide public attention. It was one of several works of literate and provocative social analysis to appear in the '50s, among them David Riesman's "The Lonely Crowd" (1950), which dealt with the formation of values of the urban middle class; Vance Packard's "The Hidden Persuaders" (1957), which critically dissected advertising and consumerism; and John Kenneth Galbraith's "American Capitalism" (1952), which emphasized oligopolies and countervailing powers.
Whyte's book challenged and refuted claims of entrepreneurial vigor and daring in business by describing an ongoing bureaucratization of white-collar environments -- board rooms, offices, laboratories.
C. Wright Mills, the sociologist whose own pioneering work, "The Power Elite," appeared in 1956, said of Whyte in The New York Times Book Review: "He understands that the work-and-thrift ethic of success has grievously declined -- except in the rhetoric of top executives; that the entrepreneurial scramble to success has been largely replaced by the organizational crawl."
Whyte wrote that corporate norms based on the pursuit of safety and security and characterized by conformity had spread to academic and scientific institutions and prevailed in the white-collar suburbs then proliferating that."
Whyte spent hours, days and years watching the world go by, often filming the passing scene in time-lapse photographs or charting pedestrian movement on pads of graph paper. He found that the corner outside Bloomingdale's at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue had the most daytime pedestrian traffic. He learned that having peddlers on the street tended to increase sales in local stores, particularly if the peddlers sold food.
He said that what people wanted in the city was other people and that the inner city was as safe as suburban parking lots. He insisted that the best way to deal with undesirables was not to bring in more police officers but to make the area in question as attractive to as many other people as possible. This advice was specifically followed in the design of many places, among them Bryant Park.
His study, "Conservation Easements" (Urban Land Institute, 1959) was credited with helping to gain open-space legislation in California, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Among Whyte's books on the environment were "Cluster Development" (1964), "The Last Landscape" (1968), "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" (1980) and "City" (1989). He edited New York City's Master Plan in 1969, acted as a consultant on many building and zoning proposals, and was a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
He was a trustee of the Conservation Foundation and was active in the Municipal Art Society, the Hudson River Valley Commission and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Task Force on Natural Beauty.
Whyte is survived by his wife, Jenny Bell, a designer he married in 1964; a daughter, Alexandra, and a granddaughter, Madeleine Sperber, both of Boston.
As a friend of cities, Holly Whyte warned against "utopianism." He believed that the city "has always been a mess and always will be something of a mess."
He was an enemy of what he called "the fortressing of America" -- windowless walls, forbidding cement courtyards, bewildering tunnels, relentlessly grim megastructures and spikes that discourage sitters. He was in favor of razzmatazz, good honky-tonk and anything that invested sidewalks with hustle and bustle. "Up to seven people per foot of walkway a minute is a nice bustle," he once decided.
http://www.pps.org/Who_We_Are/whoweare_whyte.html
from Project for Public SpacesWilliam H. Whyte (1917-1999) is considered the mentor for Project for Public Spaces because of his seminal work in the study of human behavior in urban settings. Initially, William H. Whyte studied issues of urban planning and design, until 1969, when he assisted the New York City Planning Commission in drafting a comprehensive plan. While working with the Commission, he came to wonder how these newly planned spaces were actually working out. No one had researched this before. He applied for and received a grant to study the street life in New York and other cities in what became known as the Street Life Project. With a group of young research assistants, and camera and notebook in hand, he conducted pioneering studies on pedestrian behavior and breakthrough research on city dynamics.
All told, Whyte walked the city streets for more than 16 years. As unobtrusively as possible, he watched people and used time-lapse photography to chart the meanderings of pedestrians. What has emerged through his intuitive analysis is an extremely human, often amusing view of what is staggeringly obvious about people's behavior in public spaces, but seemingly invisible to the unaware.
William H. Whyte was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1917. He joined the staff of Fortune in 1946, after graduating from Princeton University and serving in the Marine Corps. His book The Organization Man (1956), based on his articles about corporate culture and the suburban middle class, sold more than two million copies. Whyte then turned to the topics of sprawl and urban revitalization, and began a distinguished career as a sage of sane development and an advocate of cities.
The core of Whyte's work is predicated on the years he spent directly observing human beings and he has authored several texts about urban planning and design and human behavior in various urban spaces. Most notable are: The Exploding Metropolis (1958), The Last Landscape (1968), Plan for the City of New York (1969), The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980), and City: Rediscovering the Center (1988). Whyte has served as an advisor to Laurence S. Rockefeller on environmental issues and as a major planning consultant for major U.S. cities, traveling and lecturing widely. He is also affiliated with the American Conservation Association and served as the assistant managing editor of Fortune Magazine from 1952 until 1958.
PPS founder and president Fred Kent worked as one of Whyte's research assistants on the Street Life Project, conducting observations and film analyses of corporate plazas, urban streets, parks and other open spaces in New York City. When Fred Kent founded PPS shortly thereafter, he based the company largely on the methods and findings of Whyte.
More than anything, Whyte and the people of PPS believe in the perseverance and sanctity of public spaces. For him, small urban places are "priceless," and the city street is "the river of life...where we come together, the pathway to the center. It is the primary place."
"I end then in praise of small spaces. The multiplier effect is tremendous. It is not just the number of people using them, but the larger number who pass by and enjoy them vicariously, or even the larger number who feel better about the city center for knowledge of them. For a city, such places are priceless, whatever the cost. They are built of a set of basics and they are right in front of our noses. If we will look." -- William H. Whyte
WILLIAM H. WHYTE (1917 - 1999)
In January of 1999, William "Holly" Whyte died at the age of 81. Although he was editor of Fortune magazine and an urban geographer, he is known primarily for the expression "organization man" which was the title of a book he wrote in 1956. It is a book well worth reading; one mourner wrote that "it is strange to note what slogans we remember from this classic and what wisdom we forget". Students who think this is only of antiquarian interest should note that an Appendix in the book has the title "How To Cheat on Personality Tests".
For your convenience, a list of selected obituaries is provided below. Most of them will be found in the UWOLS collection or on the database Lexis/Nexis. Only those essays that were informative and different from one another were selected.
In addition, a list of the works of William Hollingsworth Whyte found in the UWOLS collection is also provided below. If you cannot wait to get to the library to read The Organization Man, selections from it are found at the web site of Professor Alan Filreis at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches a course on "The Literature and Culture of the American 1950's" and it is here that you will find the excerpts.
OBITUARIES AND ESSAYS IN MEMORY OF WILLIAM H. WHYTE
(Listed in alphabetical order by publication name)obit. The Daily Telegraph(London), January 15, 1999, p.25.
"Secret Life of US Corporations: William H. Whyte", The Guardian (London), January 15, 1999, p.20.
obit. The Independent(London), January 15, 1999, p.7.
"Lessons From 'The Organization Man' Still Have Some Relevance for Today", Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1999, p.c5.
"Dialogue: "How Has 'The Organization Man' Aged? Nostalgia's Illusions", by Virgina Postrel and "How Has 'The Organization Man Aged? A Need to Belong", by Arlie Russell Hochschild, both in The New York Times, January 17, 1999, p.17.
obit. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 17, 1999, p.e5.
obit. Time, January 25, 1999, p.23.
"Writer Delved Into 'Obvious' Quirks of Life", USA Today, January 14, 1999, p3a.
obit. U.S. News & World Report, January 25, 1999, p.16.
"William Whye Dies: Urban Studies Author, Best Known for 'The Organization Man'", The Washington Post, January 14, 1999, p.b06.
"William Whyte, Man of the Mid-Century", The Washington Post, January 18, 1999, p.c02.
BOOKS IN THE UWOLS BY WILLIAM H. WHYTE
The books are listed in reverse chronological order. These books are found by searching "Whyte, William Hollingsworth", who should not be confused with the other prolific author in the fields of sociology and organizational behavior - "Whyte, William Foote".
City: Rediscovering the Center, DBWSTK HT151.W55 1988.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, DBWSTK HT153. W49 1980
The Last Landscape, DBWSTK HT167.W48 1968
Cluster Development, DBWSTK NA9108.W45 1964.
Securing Open Space for Urban America: Conservation Easements DBWSTK NA9000.U67, no.29-43. 1959.
The Organization Man, DBW & BUS BF 697.W62 1956
Material by Whyte is also found in the following anthologies: Great Writers on Organizations, ed. by Derek Pugh and David Hickson. American Social Character: Modern Interpretations from the '40s to the Present, ed. by Rupert Wilkinson,
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For additional analyses see also: The Death of the Organization Man, by Amanda Bennett, and The New Individualists: The Generation After the Organization Man, by Paul Leinberger.
Publications:
1 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. City : an in-depth look at the people, the movement, and the buildings that make a city live / by William H. Whyte. 1988
2 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. City : rediscovering the center / William H. Whyte ; photos. by the author. 1988
3 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Cluster development / by William H. Whyte. Foreword by Laurance S. Rockefeller. 1964
4 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Cluster development, by William H. Whyte. Foreword by Laurance S. Rockefeller. 1964
5 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Essential William H. Whyte / edited by Albert LaFarge. 2000
6 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Exploding metropolis / edited by William H. Whyte, Jr. ; foreword by Sam Bass Warner, Jr. 1993
7 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Is anybody listening? How and why U.S. business fumbles when it talks with human beings / by William H. Whyte, Jr., and the editors of Fortune. Drawings by Robert Osborn. 1952
8 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Is anybody listening? How and why U.S. business fumbles when it talks with human beings / by Willism H. Whyte Jr. and the editors of Fortune. Drawings by Robert Osborn. 19529 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Last landscape [by] William H. Whyte. 1968
10 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Last landscape / William H. Whyte ; foreword by Tony Hiss. 2002
11 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Organization man. 1957
12 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Organization man. 1956
13 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Organization man. 1956
14 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Organization man. 1956
15 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Organization man / by William H. Whyte, Jr. 1970
16 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Organization man / William H. Whyte ; foreword by Joseph Nocero. 2002
17 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Securing open spaces for urban America: conservation easements. 1959
18 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Social life of small urban spaces / by William H. Whyte. 1980
19 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Social life of small urban spaces [videorecording] by William H. Whyte. 1988
20 Whyte, William Hollingsworth. Time of war : remembering Guadalcanal, a battle without maps / William H. Whyte ; with an introduction by James C. Bradford. 2000
