Since many companies still deem dedication to career the sole marker of professional success, the new organization man may believe he has to hide his participation at home. Given that most American men grew up believing in the traditional symbols of manhood-wealth, power, status-there are clear emotional and financial costs involved in making other choices. Today’s organization man carries a briefcase in one hand and pushes a baby carriage with the other. His wife may have a demanding job, which he supports but he may wonder if she thinks he’s less of a man than her father, and he may resent her for the time she spends away from home. While he considers his career important, he doesn’t want to sacrifice time with his family. He’s in his late thirties or forties, balding, perhaps a bit paunchy since there’s no time these days for the health club he no longer wears power ties, and his shirts are rumpled. Rather than a suburban conformist or high-flying single yuppie, today’s organization man carries a briefcase while pushing a baby carriage.
What men want how to#
Yet in today’s insecure corporate world, we’re even less sure of how to get it.įew 1990s men fit the traditional picture of distant father, patriarchal husband, and work-obsessed bread-winner fewer still have dropped out of the working world completely into full-time daddydom and house-husbandhood. But in the professional ranks, a new organization man has indeed emerged, one who wants to be an involved father with no loss of income, prestige, and corporate support-and no diminished sense of manhood. Some still resist efforts to change the old rules for masculine behavior. Not all men want the same thing, of course. In order to do so, men of the 1990s must reevaluate what it means to be a success, both on the job and in the home. These two trends-the recent economic downturn and women’s entry into the workplace-are forcing men to redefine themselves. Though many wives of male chief executives still stay at home, spouses of most other men now work.
With wives to manage the domestic scene, working men of the past had little reason to question a system designed by and for them.īut unlike the man in the gray flannel suit of the 1950s or the fast-tracker of the 1970s and 1980s, today’s organization man faces a contracting economy in which corporations are restructuring, downsizing, and laying off thousands of employees. After all, a man’s profession and his ability to bring home a paycheck have traditionally defined who that man was. By contrast, the good doctor and countless other social commentators always assumed they knew what men wanted, especially in the realm of work. Freud’s famous cry of resignation-“Women, what do they want?”-has been a feminist touchstone for nearly a century.