Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

In contrast, psychiatrist Duhl points out, "The professional, academic and uppermanagerial class [in the United States] is bound by interest ties across wide physical spaces and indeed can be said to have more functional relationships. Mobile individuals, easily duplicable relationships, and ties to interest problems depict this group."

What is involved in increasing the through-put of people in one's life are the abilities not only to make ties but to break them, not only to affiliate but to disaffiliate. Those who seem most capable of this adaptive skill are also among the most richly rewarded in society. Seymour Lipset and Reinhard Bendix in Social Mobility in Industrial Society declare that "the socially mobile among business leaders show an unusual capacity to break away from those who are liabilities and form relationships with those who can help them."

They support the findings of sociologist Lloyd Warner who suggests that "The most important component of the personalities of successful corporate managers and owners is that, their deep emotional identifications with their families of birth being dissolved, they no longer are closely intermeshed with the past, and, therefore, are capable of relating themselves easily to the present and future. They are people who have literally and spiritually left home ... They can relate and disrelate themselves to others easily."

And again, in Big Business Leaders in America, a study he conducted with James Abegglen, Warner writes: "Before all, these are men on the move. They left their homes, and all that this implies. They have left behind a standard of living, level of income, and style of life to adopt a way of living entirely different from that into which they were born. The mobile man first of all leaves the physical setting of his birth. This includes the house he lived in, the neighborhood he knew, and in many cases even the city, state and region in which he was born.

"This physical departure is only a small part of the total process of leaving that the mobile man must undergo. He must leave behind people as well as places. The friends of earlier years must be left, for acquaintances of the lower-status past are incompatible with the successful present. Often the church of his birth is left, along with the clubs and cliques of his family and of his youth. But most important of all, and this is the great problem of the man on the move, he must, to some degree, leave his father, mother, brothers, and sisters, along with the other human relationships of his past."

This so, it is not so startling to read in a business magazine a cooly detached guide for the newly promoted executive and his wife. It advises that he break with old friends and subordinates gradually, in order to minimize resentment. He is told to "find logical excuses for not joining the group at coffee breaks or lunch." Similarly, "Miss the department bowling or card sessions, occasionally at first, then more frequently." Invitations to the home of a subordinate may be accepted, but not reciprocated, except in the form of an invitation to a whole group of subordinates at once. After a while all such interaction should cease.

Wives are a special problem, we are informed, because they "don't understand the protocol of office organization." The successful man is advised to be patient with his wife, who may adhere to old relationships longer than he does. But, as one executive puts it, "a wife can be downright dangerous if she insists on keeping close friendships with the wives of her husband's subordinates. Her friendships will rub off on him, color his judgment about the people under him, jeopardize his job." Moreover, one personnel man points out, "When parents drift away from former friends, kids go too."

These matter-of-fact instructions on how to dis-relate send a chill down the spine of those raised on the traditional notion that friendships are for the long haul. But before accusing the business world of undue ruthlessness, it is important to recognize that precisely this pattern is employed, often beneath a veil of hypocritical regrets, in other strata of society as well. The professor who is promoted to dean, the military officer, the engineer who becomes a project leader, frequently play the same social game. Moreover, it is predictable that something like this pattern will soon extend far beyond the world of work and formal organization. For if friendship is based on shared interests or aptitudes, friendship relationships are bound to change when interests change – even when distinctions of social class are not involved. And in a society caught in the throes of the most rapid change in history, it would be astonishing if the interests of individuals did not also change kaleidoscopically.

Indeed, much of the social activity of individuals today can be described as search behavior – a relentless process of social discovery in which one seeks out new friends to replace those who are either no longer present or who no longer share the same interests. This turnover impels people, and especially educated people, toward cities and into temporary employment patterns. For the identification of people who share the same interests and aptitudes on the basis of which friendship may blossom is no simple procedure in a society in which specialization grows apace. The increase in specialization is present not merely in professional and work spheres, but even in leisure time pursuits. Seldom has any society offered so wide a range of acceptable and readily available leisure time activities. The greater the diversity available in both work and leisure, the greater the specialization, and the more difficult it is to find just the right friends.

Thus it has been estimated by Professor Sargant Florence in Britain that a minimum population of 1,000,000 is needed to provide a professional worker today with twenty interesting friends. The woman who sought temporary work as a strategy for finding friends was highly intelligent. By increasing the number of different people with whom she was thrown into work contact, she increased the mathematical probability of finding a few who share her interests and aptitudes.

We select our friends out of a very large pool of acquaintanceships. A study by Michael Gurevitch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked a varied group to keep track of all the different people with whom they came in contact in a one hundred-day period. On average, each one listed some 500 names. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who has conducted a number of fascinating experiments dealing with communication through acquaintanceship networks, speaks of each American having a pool of acquaintanceships ranging from 500 to 2,500.

Actually, however, most people have far fewer friends than the twenty suggested by Professor Florence, and perhaps his definition was less restrictive than that employed in everyday use. A study of thirty-nine married middle-class couples in Lincoln, Nebraska, asked them to list their friends. The purpose was to determine whether husbands or wives are more influential in selecting friends for the family. The study showed that the average couple listed approximately seven "friendship units" – such a unit being either an individual or a married couple. This suggests that the number of individuals listed as friends by the average couple ranged from seven to fourteen. Of these, a considerable number were non-local, and the fact that wives seemed to list more non-local friends than their husbands suggests that they are less willing than their husbands to slough off a friendship after a move. Men, in short, seem to be more skilled at breaking off relationships than women.

Today, however, training for disaffiliation or disrelating begins early. Indeed, this may well represent one of the major differences between the generations. For school children today are exposed to extremely high rates of turnover in their classrooms. According to the Educational Facilities Laboratories, Incorporated, an off-shoot of the Ford Foundation, "It is not unusual for city schools to have a turnover of more than half their student body in one school year." This phenomenal rate cannot but have some effect on the children.