It is my essential argument that Blairism is in fact the political expression of deep, negative, social tendencies which apart from being created in 1980s Britain, were analysed in 1950s America... as such it may outlast Mr Blair, without even a smirking face in the future.

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W H Whyte:

" I wish to go into some of the ideas that have helped to produce the Social Ethic... suggesting how deep are its roots and that it is not a temporary phenomenon....I will then pick up the Organization Man, follow him though his initial indoctrination and explore the impact of the Group Way upon him..
"I am going to argue that he should fight the organization, but not self-destructively. He may tell the boss to go to hell but... the real issue is far more subtle. For it is not the evils of organization life that puzzle him but its very benificence. He is imprisoned in brotherhood. Becuase the trapping is so mundane, his fight lacks the heroic cast, but it is for all this as tough a fight as ever his predecessors had to fight...
"one would be disarmed for not knowing who the enemy was, and when the reckoning came the people on the other side of the table would be a mild- looking group of therapists...
"... the point am trying to make is that it is not that the corporation, or any other specific kind of organization, is going to be THE citadel of belongingness... many a contemporary prescription for utopia can be summarised if you cross out the name of one group and substitute another in the following charge: "society has broken down, has failed to give the indidvidual the belongingness he needs and thus it is now the task of (----) group to do the job"...
" I have read definitions of equilibrium concepts but I am still not sure just what they mean... it is one of tose mushy words so servicaeble to obscuring contradictions... in borrowing the equilibrium notion from physics, most social scientists have thought only of the STABLE equilibrium... where the by-products of harmony are the 'good' things and the by-products of conflict the 'bad' things... how do we find what an organization's equilibrium is ?
there is only the message that the tensions are sickness- either in themselves or in society. it does not make any difference whether the Good Society is to be represented by a union or by a corporation or a church; it is to be A SOCIETY UNIFIED AND PURGED OF CONFLICT...
While Mayo intended Human Relations to apply to the workers and managers both, the managers seized on it as as an excellent tool for manipulating the workers into a chronic contentment taht would turn them away from the unions...
"..In the older ideology, it was the top leader who was venerated. In Human Relations it is the Organization man... the people that the workers are to co-operate with are not the top employers but enlightened bureaucrats...
Organization men publicly extol Human Relations for the beneficial effects it casts downwards... whenever there is responsible criticism there is a hurt response, something like this;

"why hurt us ? Many of the criticisms are true, but we progressives have a tough enough fight converting the reactionaries on top, and any criticism at this time only gives aid and comfort to them"

[My NB; Sounds just like Blair explaining away the latest public services scandal, doesnt it ?]

"Listening too long to trainees and personnel men describe the future is likely to un-nerve one into thinking that the complete bureaucrat is just about ready to take over... whether these poeple are riding the waves is a matter of pure prophecy..."

(1956)

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from the above, (see also yesterdays article,) it may be argued that modern British society is indeed being treated like an organization. Whyte's point is that Organizationalism, with its creepy, compulsory 'togetherness' and 'belongingness', are designed to stifle the individual while pretending to laud him.