William F. Whyte: Contributions to management

Journal of Business Research 67 (2014) 1493–1500

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Journal of Business Research

William F. Whyte: Contributions to management John C. Ickis INCAE Business School, Alajuela, Costa Rica INCAE Business School, Montefresco, Nicaragua

a r t i c l e

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Article history: Received 1 March 2013 Received in revised form 1 May 2013 Accepted 1 June 2013 Available online 31 July 2013 Keywords: William Foote Whyte Case research Participatory action research Human relations Social invention

a b s t r a c t The name of William Foote Whyte is most frequently associated with Street Corner Society, the sociological study of life in Boston's North End during the late 1930s, but his research spanned another sixty years in a range of settings on three continents. This article traces his achievements over the decades, as he developed and applied a participatory action research methodology in the kitchens of Chicago restaurants, the oilfields of Oklahoma and Venezuela, subsistence farms in Peru and Guatemala, and industrial cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. It describes how this methodology, grounded in case research, led to social change at the “Tremont Hotel” in a Midwestern city. It questions why his achievements have not received greater recognition among by academicians and practitioners, perhaps because his ideas and findings on social change produced discomfort among peers and the sponsors of his research. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Still best known for Street Corner Society, undertaken on a junior fellowship from Harvard in 1934, William Foote Whyte's research career spanned six decades and generated learning that has gone beyond the academic disciplines of sociology and anthropology to address, and in some cases resolve, real-world management dilemmas. Drawn by the discovery of human relations by Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger in Western Electric's Hawthorne Plant, he went to Chicago to pursue and deepen this line of research in the restaurant and hotel industries, where in the “Tremont Hotel” he demonstrated the power of case studies in solving managerial problems. Attracted to Latin America by the challenges of social change in both industry and the countryside, he embraced new research methodologies, combining his richly contextual socio-anthropological methods with in-depth surveys and historical perspectives in longitudinal research projects, one spanning fifteen years, that yielded new insights about conflict and cooperation, delegation and trust. Following retirement from Cornell, he continued to conduct action research for management in such diverse settings as the cooperatives of Mondragón, Spain, and the small farmer organizations of rural Guatemala. By the time he set about to work on his autobiography, he and his mentorees had produced some twenty-one books and thirty-six articles in the finest journals. Why, then, is this man not more well known or more often cited by others? It is this question that has motivated my brief examination of his life and career in this article, which was also inspired by my personal

E-mail address: [email protected]. 0148-2963/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.07.016

meeting with Bill Whyte in Nicaragua, shortly after the Sandinista revolution. 2. A visit to Nicaragua Soon after the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, one of the co-authors received a note that a Professor White from Cornell University was in Managua and wished to visit the agency responsible for the Sandinista state enterprises. He wondered whether INCAE (the Spanish acronym for the Central American Business School) might help to arrange such a meeting. At that time I was responsible for academic programs at the INCAE campus in Nicaragua, one of which was a four-week Advanced Management Program (AMP) for the People's Industrial Corporation, COIP (Corporación Industrial del Pueblo). The program was based on Harvard's AMP; INCAE had been founded in the early 60s by the Harvard Business School at the request of President Kennedy. I immediately called the Director of COIP, Ernesto Leal, and set up a meeting for the following afternoon. The professor from Cornell arrived on the INCAE campus the following day, just before lunch. I was immediately concerned to see him walking on crutches, since our campus in Nicaragua, with many stairways and few ramps, was not “incapacity-friendly” at that time. We went to my office to discuss his interests, and at some point during the conversation I realized that it was not “White” after all. I was in the presence of William Foote Whyte, author of Street Corner Society, a masterpiece of participant observation that had been required of most doctoral students at the Harvard Business School, including myself. Whyte wanted to know whether this agency, COIP, might be interested in a worker management scheme such as those that he had studied at Mondragón, in the Basque region of Spain, or in Yugoslavia. I suggested

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that we explore that possibility with Mr. Leal, who would be waiting for us at the COIP offices in Managua at 2 p.m. He then wanted some background on Ernesto Leal, of which I could provide him little. Ernesto Leal was son of the famous martyr, Pablo Leal, who together with a small group of Nicaraguan patriots attempted to overthrow the government of Anastasio Somoza in the 1950s. Ernesto had grown up as a strong opponent of the Somoza dictatorship but as a moderate who favored plural democracy, rather than a hard-line Sandinista. He was also highly pragmatic. In our first meeting to negotiate the PAG, he insisted on clarity in the learning objectives of each course, on the use of the Harvard case method, and on testing the participants with an exam, to be administered at the end of each week. When we suggested including new material that we had developed on social change processes, he was adamant: “what the enterprise managers need are the basics: operations, finance, control…” At the COIP offices in Managua, Professor Whyte and I were shown into the Director's office and warmly greeted by Ernesto Leal. When introductions had been made, Dr. Whyte asked about how the workers in the state enterprises were organized, and Mr. Leal explained that a government-affiliated labor union, the Central Sandinista de Trabajadores or CST, was the guarantor of worker rights in both state and private enterprise. There was a vigorous cooperative movement in Nicaragua, but its presence was felt mostly in the rural areas. Whyte asked Leal if he was familiar with the way in which cooperatives were organized at Mondragón, in the Basque region of Spain, or with the worker self-management model used in Yugoslavian industry. He went on to explain how each of these forms of worker organization had boosted productivity and job satisfaction. He wondered aloud whether the Nicaraguan economy might benefit from a similar form of worker participation. Ernesto Leal listened attentively, and I could guess what he was thinking. Relations between COIP and the labor sector were currently strained due to worker demands for higher wages in a hyper-inflationary economy. The state enterprises, which had offered generous wages and benefits in the euphoria of the 1979 revolution, were now under strict government orders to tighten wage controls, while the more innovative private companies in the export sector sought ways to “dollarize” worker pay. Any initiative involving worker participation might create false expectations, unrealistic wage demands by the CST, and possibly to a breakdown of the shaky alliance that existed between labor and the revolutionary government. After a long pause, Leal responded to the effect that he appreciated the benefits of the Mondragón and Yugoslav models, and that with greater access to education, “we hope to get there.” What was most needed now, however, was discipline and sacrifice. The meeting ended on a cordial note, but I did not expect to see Professor Whyte returning to Nicaragua any time soon. 3. Whyte's early background William F. Whyte was born on June 27, 1914 in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only son of two scholars of the German language. When he was eleven, young William made the first of several summer trips to Germany with his parents. He excelled in writing while in high school in Bronxville, where his father was teaching at the nearby City College of New York, and upon graduation in 1931 he was asked by the editor of the Bronxville Press to submit weekly columns for the paper during his father's upcoming sabbatical in Germany. Rather than write a conventional description of events, he focused upon the experiences of three families, interpreting the trauma of the post-World War I period in Germany through their life experiences. Not yet having entered college, he was becoming a participant observer and case writer. At the urging of his parents, Whyte studied economics at Swarthmore College, a Quaker institution near Philadelphia. Writing continued to be one of his chief interests, and he became editor of Manuscript, the

college's literary magazine. In his junior year he entered the honors program, which required a paper on the topic of state or local finance, and he wrote Financing New York City, subsequently published by the Academy of Political and Social Science Annals. It was the first time that the Annals had published anything written by an undergraduate. 4. Wisdom of the street corner Following graduation from Swarthmore, Whyte was awarded a junior fellowship from Harvard University that provided three years of support for a research project of his choice and freedom to take any course or seminar. The most memorable was a course by Lawrence Henderson on “concrete sociology,” where he was exposed to the classic Functions of the Executive by Chester I. Barnard, a former president of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, who remarked that nothing in the existing management literature “…treated of organization in a way which seemed to me to correspond either to my experience or to the understanding implicit in the conduct of those recognized to be adept in executive practice or in leadership of organizations” (Barnard, 1938: xxviii). Whyte was also profoundly influenced by the pioneering research in social relations by Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company. His shift of interest from economics to sociology was by now complete. He started his research project in 1936 “with a vague idea that I wanted to study a slum district” (Whyte, 1994: 62). He selected the North End of Boston on what he admitted were unscientific grounds, as it corresponded to his image what a slum should look like, and it had a rich history. As a methodology, he chose “objective observation,” strongly influenced by his professors Conrad Arensberg and Eliot Chapple. This framework was based on the idea that interactions among individuals over time produce a structure of informal leadership. The power of this framework became evident to Whyte many months later, on a Saturday night in April 1938, when as an accepted participant in North End life, he overheard the predictions by street corner boys of a bowling contest that same evening. Their predictions of the winners paralleled the informal leadership structure of the gang, despite the fact that better bowlers were competing in the contest. Whyte later reflected: At the alley that night, I was fascinated and a bit awed by what I had witnessed. Here was the social structure in action right on the bowling alleys. It held the individual members in their places—and me along with them. I did not stop to reason then that, as a close friend of Pecci, Frank, and Gillo, I held a position that was close to the top of the gang and therefore was expected to excel. I simply felt myself buoyed up by the situation. My friends were for me, had confidence in me, believed I would bowl well. I felt supremely confident. I have never felt quite that way before—or since. I was feeling the impact of the group structure upon me. It was a strange feeling, as if something larger than myself was controlling the ball as I went through my swing and released it toward the pins…

As I later thought about the bowling contest, I became convinced I had discovered something important: the relationship between individual performance and group structure. I believed then (and still believe now) that this relationship can be observed in all manner of group activities. [Whyte (1994: 38–84)] William Whyte was married to Kathleen King on May 28, 1938, and took his bride to live in the North End. By that time he had become accepted in the community and immersed in its life, but was still trying to make sense of it, and with only one year left in his fellowship. He moved ahead by writing two case studies: one on the Bennett Street settlement house, where he had first been introduced

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to North End Society by his key informant, Ernest Pecci, and the other on the Italian League. He also gave in to a reforming urge to improve the community by organizing a protest over the lack of attention to a public bathhouse. He believed that since he had begun the organizing activity, he was the logical person to lead the demonstration, but as he later recalled, “I was not prepared to depart so far from my role as observer.” Someone else took on that responsibility, and while the demonstration led to the desired improvements in the bathhouse, Whyte recognized that it was not a continuing activity that would keep the community working together. Through the first half of 1940, Whyte spent most of his time writing up his experience in the North End under the title, Street Corner Society. His fellowship ended that summer and, on the advice of Conrad Aronsberg, he enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, whose department of sociology was doing ground-breaking work in the field of social relations. He was determined that Street Corner Society be read by a wider audience, and he convinced his thesis committee to accept the completed work as his thesis because of its unique intellectual contribution: “I was trying to link together individuals, groups, and organizations in the same community and to follow the dynamics of their interactions over a long period of time. I had not seen such a study attempted in the sociological literature.” The committee members accepted the topic, but only on the condition that the story Street Corner Society be accompanied by a complete literature review on the sociology of the slums. 5. A focus on human relations in industry Whyte became aware of social relations in industry through his contact with the Hawthorne studies while he was at Harvard in 1936–40, but his interpretation of the results was different than that of Elton Mayo. The rising productivity of the women relay assemblers, in contrast to the constant level productivity of men in the bank wiring room had been attributed by Mayo to the attention given to the women by the research observer, in what has become known as the Hawthorne effect. In fact, there was also a research observer present in the bank wiring room. The difference, according to Arensberg and Whyte, is that the men were being closely supervised in a culture of control, whereas the women were working without supervision, in a culture of autonomy. Following graduation from the University of Chicago in 1941, Whyte's only job offer was in the sociology department at the University of Oklahoma, where he was also given the title of acting chairman of the anthropology department. After nine months in that position, he was allowed to pursue a research project and he chose the oil industry because he wanted to work on something linked to the war effort. The university had a close association with the Phillips Petroleum Company and he was allowed to observe its plant operations. What he discovered was the enormous impact that management style can have on worker motivation. After an authoritarian manager was brought in, a plant operator told Whyte that the new manager's crackdown had changed him from anti-union to pro-union overnight. Whyte's work in Phillips was his first experience inside industry and he enjoyed the challenge of “…trying to fit together company history, labor relations, and the personal stories of the men” (Whyte, 1994: 129). Feeling that he had to become involved in something contributing to the war effort, Whyte accepted a job at Harvard training military personnel in the cultural and language skills that they would need following the invasion of Italy. No sooner had he and Kathleen arrived in Cambridge, in June of 1943, than he felt pain in his legs and was overcome by fever. He had contracted the polio virus while in Oklahoma and would lose his ability to walk without crutches. Unable to work on the Harvard project, he was invited by the University of Chicago to work on a study of human relations in the restaurant industry, to be carried out in 1944–45 by a Committee on Human Relations in Industry in the University's sociology department and funded by the National

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Restaurant Association. This was a logical continuation of his work on social relations in industry, and he immediately accepted. The first opportunity for field research came from Vernon Stouffer, founder of the Stouffer's restaurant chain and member of the National Restaurant Association. In the Stouffer project, Whyte broadened his focus from worker–boss relationships to inter-departmental relationships and the impact of technology on human relations. Concentrating on interviews with waitresses, he found that their jobs were highly stressful, particularly during busy hours. Tensions rose when several waitresses struggled with the male kitchen staff to get their orders filled first. When he presented the draft of his book, Social Relations in the Restaurant Industry to the sponsoring committee of the National Restaurant Association, it was at first rejected. “I thought the idea of working with the University of Chicago was to raise the status of the restaurant industry,” complained one member. “If this book is published, it will have the opposite effect.” (Whyte, 1994: 152). Only after he agreed to put the “offensive” quotes by restaurant workers in an appendix did the Association reluctantly agree to its publication. 6. The Tremont Hotel case study The restaurant research, though having little impact on industry practice, helped Whyte to develop an approach to action research (Whyte, 1948). First, when diagnosing a human problem, the researcher must seek explanations and discover patterns rather than looking for whom to blame. Second, a focus on the individual is insufficient, as individuals do not work in isolation; the researcher must understand the social context. Third, it is not enough to trace cause–effect relationships to understand the consequences of management action; one must consider the actions of other mutually dependent parts of the social system. As the restaurant study was nearing its conclusion, Whyte was invited by the Restaurant Association to give a talk on its progress at a regional meeting to be held at the “Tremont Hotel” in an undisclosed northern U.S. city. To the general manager of the hotel, Mr. Smith, the human relations approach proposed by Whyte was as foreign as it was fascinating, and he wondered whether such an approach might address the many human problems that he faced. He agreed to pay the University of Chicago for a team of three researchers to diagnose the problems and present solutions: William Whyte as the project leader, Edith Lentz as principal researcher, and Meredith Wiley, to whom Smith insisted upon assigning the title “personnel manager” to add credibility. Under Whyte's leadership, these action researchers sought major changes in the work environment, in the symbols of success and failure, and in interpersonal relations. Since Whyte's recent experience had been in the restaurant industry, the team began its research in the Coffee Shop, where despite the efforts of Miss Paris, a popular supervisor, personnel rotation was running at 32% per month. Here, they discovered a contradiction between her “Y” theory of management and the “X” theory of the Resident Manager, Mr. Kraus. The waiters, receiving orders and complaints from all sides, were frustrated and confused. Whyte visited the Tremont once a month to review progress with Miss Lentz and Mr. Wiley. One of his first visits coincided with the “coffee shop meeting,” where Wiley had arranged for the waiter to meet with their supervisor, Miss Paris, and with the chef and cooks to discuss the many problems. Mr. Kraus was also present. Whyte drew a diagram for the group illustrating the many pressures exerted upon waiters and waitresses, including a long chain of vertical authority and lateral interventions from cooks, food checkers, cashiers, and customers. The simple diagram and the resulting group discussion had a lasting impact in the Tremont Hotel: too many bosses! Middle and even top managers by-passed Miss Paris to give orders to the waiters, who blew off steam in the kitchen, creating conflicts with the chef and cooks. Whyte led them through the problem analysis to solutions, some involving behavioral change. In response to employee suggestions, a water spigot was installed to save time and rubber mats were placed to

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avoid accidents. Inter-departmental meetings had led to cooperation with the kitchen. “Honest, it's like a miracle,” reported one waitress. “That kitchen's a different place. It's almost a pleasure to go out there…” Rotation among the coffee shop waiters and waitresses fell from 32% to 8% per month (Whyte, 1965). The results of the Coffee Shop Study were key in establishing the Whyte team's credibility among executives, supervisors, and workers at the Tremont. This gave them the confidence to undertake their second study. They chose the Housekeeping Department, the largest in the hotel, which at the time was plagued with conflict and split into two opposing camps. The first was loyal to Mrs. Grellis, who had run the department for nine years and “never had a bit of trouble.” The second camp sided with Mr. Kane, who had recently been brought in by CEO Smith to as the new Housekeeping Director, to whom Mrs. Grellis reported. Kane had worked for 17 years under Smith at the Sheridan, making him a part of the “Sheridan clique,” old and trusted friends of Smith who supposedly had an inside track to favoritism and promotion. This presented Whyte and his team with an even more challenging situation than had existed in the Coffee Shop. Mrs. Grellis was frustrated and constantly complaining, but Mr. Kane also confessed to Whyte that he had a problem. He could not understand why “old employees don't want to help break in the new ones.” Employee turnover was even higher than it had been at the Coffee Shop. Successive rounds of individual interviews and group meetings eventually produced a solution that provided Ms. Grellis with the recognition she sought, responded to Mr. Kane's concerns about training for new maids, and boosted morale among all employees in the department. The interviews revealed that it was the time pressures of the housekeeping job, and not the fear that of being replaced, that was discouraging older employees from coaching new hires. It was suggested that Mrs. Grellis take charge of a new training program, giving her a specific area of responsibility for which she was well suited and for which she would receive recognition. The participation by the maids in the individual interviews and group meetings, in which their concerns about time pressure were heard and respected by both Grellis and Kane, had the effect of boosting their morale and self-esteem. They had seen the demands by Kane to provide coaching to new hires as an imposition; they now viewed the training program led by Grellis as an opportunity for advancement. The third challenge faced by Whyte and his team arose from complaints by waitresses about “food checkers” who were constantly scolding them for errors in food portions, arrangements of food, or choices of China. A study of this situation led the Whyte team to uncover problems of leadership, coordination, and work flow. The food checkers, together with the cashiers, reported to the auditor but their jobs were quite different. The food checkers' station was located in the kitchen, in front of the dishwashing machines; while the cashiers worked in one of the Tremont's three restaurants, where they scanned the saleschecks to be sure the waiter or waitress had made no mistakes. Neither the checkers nor the cashiers were sure who their “real” boss was. “Nobody tells us anything,” one checker told Miss Lentz. “Nobody comes around; they don't know what we're up against.” As the volume of business in the hotel was rapidly increasing, things got worse. One food checker suggested that Lentz spend an evening at her station, observing the chaos as waiters and waitresses for the three restaurants converged at a single desk amid the heat and noise, those leaving the kitchen with full trays sometimes colliding with those entering to fill new orders. To reduce the congestion, a second food checker station was placed, outside the kitchen. The new checker's stand served as an example which Whyte used to encourage other employees to give suggestions, saying “That was the checkers' idea and it helped everyone, didn't it?” The one area of the Tremont that seemed to be working well was the Front Office, where employees and guests came together. It had not always been so; there had been severe problems of over-booking due to the excess demand for the hotel's limited number of rooms. In the

face of rising customer complains, General Manager Smith replaced Front Desk manager, a personable but disorganized man, with a long-time Tremont employee, Mr. Hume. One of Hume's first actions was to channel the flow of all business through his desk, establishing order and minimizing the problem of over-booking. This, plus a better work environment and a raise in salaries, improved the morale of the department. But when the Whyte team arrived, much later, Hume admitted to being perplexed by the low spirit among his employees, and he asked Whyte to conduct a study of the Front Desk. Interviews revealed that people in the department felt good about the changes but had not participated in them. There was respect for Hume but little warmth; he was not open to their suggestions. The Whyte team believed that group meetings could help bring these problems to the fore and improve communication in the department. However, their plans for action were disrupted when a new man, Mr. Kent, was hired by Mr. Smith as Assistant Manager of the Front Office and Stevens, a long-time Tremont employee, was demoted from that position. The repercussions of Smith's decision, taken just before leaving on a two-month tour of hotels in South America, caused Whyte to reflect on why they had been unable, after all this time, to “get through” to Smith. How could he be so insensitive to the social system, and fail to understand the consequences of this decision? Not only did he choose a Sheridan man, reinforcing the idea that only the “Sheridan clique” could get ahead; he also refused to allow Stevens to keep the title of Assistant Manager. Had Smith consulted Wiley, his personnel man, the bad feelings that spread from the Front Office to other departments of the hotel, where Stevens was also much respected, might have been avoided. In the end, Smith did not renew the University of Chicago project. Lentz returned to the University; Wiley stayed on at the Tremont Hotel for another two years, before moving to California as a consultant to the hotel industry. From an unlikely meeting of William Whyte and Mr. Smith came this extraordinary case study of a complex organization. Unlike conventional case studies, the researchers produced change within the organization in the course of the year-long study, and Wiley was in every sense a participant, having assumed both the traditional and non-traditional duties of personnel manager. While disappointed at not having changed the CEO's mindset, Whyte could point to tangible achievements: (1) a reduction in employee turnover from 22 percent to 4 percent per month during the 18 months following the start of the action research; (2) a reduction in average person-days lost from 25.5 when the project began in July 1945 to 1.0 July three years later, when Meredith Wiley left as personnel manager; (3) improvement in the quality of human relations, supported by voluminous interview data (due to the high anxiety levels when Whyte arrived, he decided not to distribute questionnaires at the outset of the project); (4) improved efficiency and productivity according to opinions of key managers; (5) improved managerial capacity for decision-making, taking initiative, and assuming responsibility for results, as reported by participants, though objective measures of such improvement are difficult in a service industry. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the Tremont Hotel case, however, was the development of a new roles for the manager of human resources, long before David Ulrich (19xx) addressed the topic. Originally as part of the research team, the idea was that Meredith Wiley conducts interviews with employees to improve interpersonal relations. Smith wanted Wiley to undertake new projects in such areas as recreation programs and health benefits, but Whyte protected him, knowing that the action research project would consume most of his time. However, when it became clear that the person in charge of the routine functions of personnel administration was not up to the task, there was no choice for Wiley but to assume those tasks, though he was eventually able to delegate most to her. In his best-selling work, Human Resource Champions, David Ulrich describes four roles of the HR manager, which may be viewed as follows (Fig. 1). As Whyte considered the evolving role of Meredith Wiley during the course of the study and afterward, he suggested seven features of a role

J.C. Ickis / Journal of Business Research 67 (2014) 1493–1500 STRATEGIC

Support the strategy implementation process

Lead processes of organizational change

PROCESSES

PEOPLE

Design and perfect innovative HR processes

Open two-way channels of communication

OPERATIONAL

Fig. 1. The four roles of HR manager.

very different than that of people who worked in personnel departments at that time: (1) keeping confidences; (2) interpreting rather than blaming; (3) working with the man most immediately responsible; (4) consulting with the top man; (5) utilizing research data; (6) assuming responsibility for rewards and punishments; and (7) counseling and controlling. Some of these may be easily placed in the Ulrich quadrants: (4) is the role of strategic partner; (6) is the administration of HR infrastructure; and (1) refers to the trust that is absolutely necessary if the HR manager is to perform the “protector” role effectively. But the other features contain subtleties that do not lend themselves to easy classification. (2) and (5) are both related to the role of the HR manager as an expert in the study of organizations. She must understand the social system to understand why people behave as they do, and to convey this interpretation to other people in the organization, rather than simply laying blame on particular individuals (2). But it is the utilization of research data (5) that offers the greatest opportunities for growth. Wiley began by simply presenting recommendations on the basis of research data, as in the installation of a spigot in the Coffee Shop. He then proceeded to present alternatives and to ask the group for recommendations. Finally, he simply presented the data to the responsible executive and aided him in interpreting those data. The idea that the HR manager should work closely with line managers and supervisors (3) is implicit in Ulrich (19xx) but Whyte emphasizes the specific benefits that come from measuring and reporting progress, so that “supervisors look upon the HR manager as someone who could help them to do a better job—and to get them credit for improved performance” (Whyte, 1965: 166). With respect to (7), counseling is an accepted part of the HR manager's job and would fall easily within Ulrich's “protector” quadrant, but “control” refers to dealing with resistance to change (the “change agent” quadrant). In Whyte's (1965: 170) words,

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management people. Beyond this, Smith was known even to his associates as “a hard fellow to get to know.” He did not encourage informality. My meetings with him were generally held in his office, with an atmosphere of strictly business. Even when we had lunch together, the businesslike atmosphere prevailed. Had I been able to see him more than once a month, it might have been possible to reduce these barriers, although I am convinced that much of the problem would still have remained. I now feel that my approach to Smith was too indirect and cautious. While I found many shortcomings in is pattern of managerial leadership, I never discussed these with him directly. Our talks centered on what he should do with Kraus, how group meetings might be stimulated, and so on—all matters in which Smith necessarily played a prominent role. No doubt he could infer from things I said some criticisms of his own behavior, but in our discussions I never confronted him with these criticisms. 7. The shift to Latin America

Whyte did not write anything about the Tremont Hotel for another fifteen years, mostly because of his desire to protect the individuals who participated in the study. A chance meeting with Meredith Wiley at a Los Angeles conference in 1960 prompted him to begin his book with Edith Lentz on Action Research for Management (1965). But during those years, he often reflected on his relationship with Mr. Smith and whether he might have handled it differently (Whyte, 1965: 176-177):

By 1948 several of Whyte's colleagues had left the University of Chicago and, ready for a new challenge, he decided to accept an appointment at the newly-created School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. Tragedy once again struck soon after his arrival in Cayuga, when his eldest son drowned while the family was vacationing at one of the region's famous finger lakes. Needing a change of scene, Whyte took his family with him on sabbatical to Maracaibo, Venezuela, where the University had arranged a research project with the oil industry, where he could build upon his research in Oklahoma. Drawing upon his street corner Italian and a crash language course at Cornell, Whyte soon became fluent in Spanish and, true to his role as participant observer, insisted upon living outside the “camp” for expat executives, with ordinary Venezuelans. Creole Petroleum, the Standard Oil subsidiary that was to be his host, quickly agreed on a research project that would focus on company community relations, a topic of great interest to Creole. As part of an effort to break the paternalistic relation with employees and their families that had existed since the company's founding in 1913, the industrial relations department was seeking to move them out of the “general camp” for workers and into their own homes. The purpose of the study was to find out how people felt about living in the company camp and whether they would be willing to move out. This study signaled a broadening of Whyte's methodological repertoire. He and his research assistant began with open-ended interviews, but it became clear that these would provide only a broad overview. “Having never directed a survey, I hesitated to do one, but clearly numbers were required, so we plunged in,” recalled Whyte. “I was pleased to find that our survey yielded a rich harvest of data.” They found that people in the general camp appreciated access to running water, cooking gas, electricity, and sanitary services, but “resented Creole's ban on keeping chickens, pigs, and other animals and not being able to choose their neighbors.” The study provided Creole management with useful information, but in the absence of functioning municipal governments, the idea of moving families out of the camps was unrealistic. A second study conducted by Whyte, on the development of Venezuelan supervisors, ended in strained relations with Creole's IR department, but contributed to his own development as an action researcher. As had happened with Philips Petroleum in Oklahoma, he presented management with ideas that they did not want to hear, but upon reflection he concluded that he might have handled the situation differently:

I must confess at the outset that I never felt at ease in dealing with Smith. Perhaps my insecurity stemmed in large part from my youth and lack of much previous experience in dealing with

I had felt compelled to report everything important that I had found out, as if I were writing an academic paper. Instead of submitting a formal report, I could have simply informed the IR

The personnel man should regard personal resistance as entirely normal and simply as presenting problems that he has to contend with. At the same time, he must have a clear idea of his own role and functions. He must be prepared to explain them fully when asked. He must also be prepared to take a firm initiative in cases where others take such actions as may jeopardize his role.”

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authorities that I had some ideas and information on the IR program that I wanted to discuss with them. In that case, the IR people might have given my criticisms some attention. In any event, they would have been more likely to let me know whether any of the recommendations in my other reports had been acted on—and with what results. [Whyte (1994: 196)] Whyte returned to Cornell in 1955 where he became director of the University's Social Science Research Center and was named Editor of the prestigious journal, Human Organization. In the preparation of a special issue on “Human Problems of U.S. Enterprise in Latin America,” he met social anthropologist Allan Holmberg, who was working on a project in Vicos, on a hacienda that had been leased to the University. The purpose of the Cornell-Peru Project was to transform the hacienda, which under the former landowner had been run as a semi-feudal estate, into a democratic and self-governing community. 8. The Cornell-Peru Project At the time of Whyte's first exploratory visit to Vicos, the former landowner attempted to reassert his rights to the hacienda and when the indigenous farmers passively resisted, the local police opened fire, leaving four dead and four wounded. Vicos became a highly politicized topic, receiving international attention when President Kennedy's brother Edward visited the community in 1961. He later met with Peru's president and asked why the hacienda had not been sold to the indigenous farmers as had been agreed to by the government. Kennedy was assured that this would be done and in 1962, five years after the commitment should have been honored, the land purchase took place in a public ceremony. Whyte, who had been given a courtesy appointment by Holmberg as member of the Cornell-Peru project, commented that Vicos was “…a great achievement in applied anthropology. It showed that in just a few years, a poverty-stricken, exploited, and disorganized population could be transformed into a democratically governed and economically progressing community” (Whyte, 1994: 213). Whyte's own research in Peru began as an extension of his cross-cultural study of supervision. In Venezuela he had studied the relations between U.S. expatriate managers and local first-line supervisors; in Perú he centered on the relations between Peruvian managers and supervisors. He and Peruvian researcher Graciela Flores found that Peru's prevailing low level of trust was a serious barrier to economic progress. The unwillingness of supervisors to assume responsibility was based, they concluded, “on the belief that subordinates cannot be trusted to do things right unless they are closely supervised” (Whyte & Flores, 1965: 228). These findings were an important influence for Stanley Davis in his work on comparative management (Davis, 1971: 173–187). In 1964, when the manager–supervisor relations project was completed, Whyte began his most far-reaching research program, a longitudinal study that combined surveys with anthropological studies in a dozen Peruvian villages that would continue for fifteen years. Initially, his survey consultant advised interviewing all male adults in 20% of the households because in his view, females would answer the same as the men, but Whyte went against this advice and found marked differences by gender. There were also sharp contrasts among the villages surveyed: Pacaraos was a very poor community of corn and potato farmers, while Huayopampa, having built its social and economic development on a base of collective solidarity, was much more affluent. Its inhabitants had diversified their agricultural production, cultivating tropical fruits, and had organized several cooperative enterprises. The same villages were resurveyed in 1969, and as Whyte was reviewing the anthropology report on the village of Mito, he was surprised by the statement that this village was low in both conflict and cooperation, which ran contradictory to the academic literature. The team ran the correlations of the two variables for the twelve

villages for both 1964 and 1969, and found that they were virtually zero. They then classified the anthropological data for 1964 and 1969 in a two by two matrix, as Fig. 2 shows, and found that at least one of the twelve villages fell into each of the four quadrants. Furthermore, five of the twelve villages had moved from one quadrant to another from 1964 to 1969. To Whyte, this demonstrated the power of combining surveys with anthropological methods. As he put it, Without this combination of research methods, it is hard to imagine how this theoretical advance could have been achieved. If I had only relied on the anthropological studies, I would not have believed a student's report when professional anthropologists provided conflicting interpretations of the same community. Relying on the survey data alone, it would not have occurred to me to check the correlations between perceptions of conflict and perceptions of cooperation. If I had found a zero correlation, I could not have known how to interpret it. [Whyte (1994: 242)] This ambitious project resulted in three major books and seven articles, including the seminal work on Power, Politics, and Progress: Social Change in Rural Peru, co-authored by Georgio Alberti, Cornell's field director (Whyte and Alberti, 1976). The project also led to social change in the Andean community of Kuyo Chico and to the strengthening of the Peruvian partner organization, the IEP. Whyte and his team did, however, abandon the objective of strengthening six Peruvian universities, which had become highly politicized. 9. Innovation in agricultural research As his next challenge, Whyte decided to focus on the organizational and human elements of agricultural research. This was a pragmatic decision, as it allowed him to build on his years of study of organizations from the restaurant to the petroleum industry, as well as his years of community research from the North End of Boston to Peruvian highland villages. He was also attracted by the fact that, as far as he knew, no one before him had designed such a study. His initial contact was with the International Potato Center (IPC) in Peru, but he soon hooked up with the other international agricultural research centers, including the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) in Mexico, which he first visited in 1975. These centers were dedicated to the concept of technology transfer, and he was therefore intrigued by the CIMMYT researchers' finding that some of the more successful nonadopters were achieving total crop yields of twice the value of the adopters. The answer to this riddle lay in the failure of agricultural scientists to recognize that the logic of the Iowa corn system did not necessarily apply to the Mexican farm. This led Whyte to develop a framework which viewed the agricultural

Cooperation High

Low

High

Conflict

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Fig. 2. Cooperation and conflict in Rural Peruvian Villages.

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research process as involving two-way communication and action between scientists and small farmers. The unlikely location for Whyte's new research was Guatemala; unlikely because of his aversion to dictatorships following unpleasant experiences in Venezuela and Peru. He initially went to Costa Rica, but heard of a highly innovative project financed by the Rockefeller Foundation at the Guatemalan Institute for Agricultural Science and Technology (ICTA). Working together with a multidisciplinary group of professionals that included agricultural scientists, economists, political scientists, and anthropologists, he sought to understand why small farmers had received so little benefit from the great scientific advances of the “green revolution.” They discovered that what the agricultural experts had assumed to be peasant resistance to change was actually pragmatic calculation. 10. Worker ownership models Upon returning to Cornell in the late 1970s, Whyte met Jaroslav Vanek, the leading American authority on the Yugoslav system of worker self-management. Intrigued by this different model of governance, Whyte agreed to serve on Vanek's Federation for Economic Democracy (FEDO) and took over as chairman when Vanek went on sabbatical leave. This ended badly for Whyte, as he became involved in a bitter struggle between those FEDO members favoring a grassroots approach by which workers would gradually start up new companies, and those arguing for a buy-out approach, where workers would acquire plants facing shut-downs. Whyte favored the latter approach, later admitting that he had made the wrong judgment. Buy-outs were not often occurring, and without a resource base FEDO ceased to exist. Whyte's friendship with Vanek led to his discovery of the Mondragón worker cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. Vanek had visited Mondragón in 1974 and his enthusiasm was contagious. Whyte's first opportunity for a visit came in April 1975, when he was able to meet the inspiring founder of the Mondragon movement, Father José María Arizmendiarrieta, a “man of simple tastes who never sought any material comforts for himself” (Whyte & Whyte, 1965: 242). Impressed with the accomplishments of the Mondragón cooperative movement, Whyte set out to understand how it had managed such rapid and sustained growth. He began a research project that was to last ten years and that would see dramatic changes: Mondragón continued to grow rapidly through 1979; then, in the face of a severe economic recession, its growth leveled off and declined slightly in 1981–83, but then began to recover in 198486. This led to a second research question: how had Mondragón been able to survive, and even resume modest growth, in the face of economic adversity? The lessons of Mondragón, described in the book that he co-authored with his wife Kathleen, were rooted in three essential aspects: an understanding of its founder; the ethnic and organizational cultures of the Basque region; but above all, an array of structural and procedural innovations that he was later to call “social invention.” 11. A call for social invention In 1981 William F. Whyte was elected President of the American Sociology Association (ASA). In his inaugural address, he noted the decline of importance given to the discipline by policy makers and he called for re-focusing sociology toward “the discovery, description, and analysis of social inventions for solving human problems” (Whyte, 1981: 1). He defined “social invention” broadly: it could be (1) a new element in organizational structure or inter-organizational relations: (2) new sets of procedures for shaping human interactions and activities and the relation of humans to the natural and social environment; (3) a new policy in action (that is; not just on paper); and (4) a new role or sets of roles. Whyte presented two examples of social intervention from his recent sociological research: the Mondragón system of worker cooperatives and the ICTA system of participatory agricultural research.

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Critics of Whyte's conclusions about Mondragón argued that it was not a social invention but a product of (1) the uniqueness of Basque culture and (2) the charismatic leadership of don José María and therefore not replicable. Whyte rejected both ideas. First, the Basque culture favors small, cohesive organizations that have traditionally not been able to scale up. In contrast, the Mondragón cooperative system grew rapidly in 1960–1979 because of financial innovation through the use of debt rather than equity finance by members, and by leveraging member resources with funds from the Caja Laboral, a cooperative bank, to finance the creation and growth of industrial cooperatives. This was an innovative role for Basque banks that had customarily focused on consumer credit. The leadership role of don José María and other founders was acknowledged by the Whytes in their book Making Mondragón (1960), but their true contribution was in “…the design of the organizational structure, on interorganizational relations, and on sets of procedures for shaping interactions, activities, and relations of humans to the natural and social environment” (Whyte, 1982: 2). In rural Guatemala, Whyte learned first-hand how social invention takes place, as he described in his presidential address. First, the researcher must visualize the “traditional” system, which in Latin American agricultural development included the experimental station; weak links between agricultural research an extension agencies; a focus by extension agents on credit, mainly to more affluent farmers; a disregard by agriculture professionals for peasant social organization; and a definition of the problem as “peasant resistance to change.” The next step for the action researcher is to challenge these assumptions. In doing so, Whyte found that (1) the agricultural professionals were in fact fallible; (2) peasant ideas and information have value; and (3) effective R & D systems in Latin American countries must involve the active participation of small farmers in the R & D process. Even in the repressive political atmosphere of Guatemala in the late 1970s, ICTA stood out as a model of success in agricultural development that benefitted the small farmer, making it “unique among implementing organizations of the public agricultural sector” (Ickis, 1978: 102). Concluding his inaugural speech, Whyte suggested that the research strategy described in the Guatemalan agricultural example might in itself be a social invention. He made no claim to invent the concept of social invention, which had appeared in the sociology literature of the 1920s and 1930s, and went on to clarify that something can be classified as an invention without having yet proven its true potential, as in patented technologies that have not yet been profitable. He then made a call to his colleagues in sociology: “if you use it—and improve upon it—then this Presidential Address will prove to have more than ceremonial value” (Whyte, 1982: 13). 12. Some concluding remarks William F. Whyte's many contributions to management may be categorized as methodological and conceptual. In methodology, Whyte was truly a giant in participant observation. Street Corner Society was a classic in this regard. But he drifted from the community to the factory, not to return until he began observing behavior in rural Latin America, where some of his richest work may be found. Conceptually, he demonstrated that the field of Human Relations does in fact have relevance to management, not simply as a device to increase productivity but as a path to worker satisfaction and organizational change, as in the Tremont Hotel. The traits that made Whyte so effective as a researcher were his boundless curiosity, his ability to relate to the participants that he was observing, his perseverance in a life was punctuated by personal tragedy, and his intellectual honesty. But the same integrity that made Whyte a great researcher also placed him in the frequent role of a messenger of bad news to the recipients of his research reports.

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Though he often formed close bonds with his counterparts in the field, his colleagues on the faculty, and with the researchers that he mentored, he seldom related well with the sponsors and intended beneficiaries of his research. In the restaurant industry, in the Tremont Hotel, in both the Philips and Creole petroleum companies, and with Peruvian authorities, he wore out his welcome with the occasional consequence of being unable to publish the results of his work: the Tremont story was not told until many years after the event, when the actors had changed. As I sat beside him in the offices of the Sandinista Peoples' Corporation, it was clear to me that the Director had enough problems and did not want to hear about Yugoslavia or Mondragón. So in remembering Bill Whyte, it may be that his greatest strength was also his greatest limitation.

References Barnard, C. I. (1938). The functions of the executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davis, S. (1971). Authority and control in Mexican enterprise. In S. Davis (Ed.), Comparative management (pp. 173–187). New York: Prentice Hall. Ickis, John C. (1978). Strategy and structure in rural development. Boston Massachusetts: Harvard Business –School doctoral thesis. Whyte, W. F. (1982). Social inventions for solving human problems: American Sociological Association, 1981 Presidential Address. American Sociological Review, 47 (February), 1–13. Whyte, W. F. (1994). Participant observer: An autobiography. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Whyte, W. F., & Flores, G. (1965). Los valores y el crecimiento económico en el Perú. In J. A. Kahl (Ed.), La industrialización en América Latina. México, D.F.: Fondo de la Cultura Económica. Whyte, W. F., & Whyte, K. K. (1965). Making Mondragón: The growth and dynamics of the worker cooperative complex. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.