ABSTRACT
While there is some debate over William H. Whyte's initial motivation in his research and publication of The Organization Man, he certainly made a major contribution to the social critiques of the Frankfurt School, the growing dominance of large corporations over business and everyday life, and the trend toward mass conformity in the 1950s. Whyte was himself an Organization Man and had a strong interest in understanding social behavior and the relationship between social structure and urban development. Whyte developed his contrasting 'Social Ethic' through one-on-one interviews that he drew together into generalized conclusions. This Social Ethic, he concluded, had supplanted the Protestant Ethic within the middle-class workforce. The main competing theory on workforce determination at the time was the Protestant Ethic and this stemmed largely from the work of German sociologist Max Weber. Whyte's work, however, was unique it its approach and form.
