Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

William Whyte in The Organization Man pointed out that the impact of such mobility "is as severe on the teachers as on the children themselves, for the teachers are thereby robbed of a good bit of the feeling of achievement they get from watching the children develop." Today, however, the problem is compounded by the high rate of turnover among teachers too. This is true not only in the United States but elsewhere as well. Thus a report on England asserts: "Today it is not uncommon, even in grammar schools, for a child to be taught one subject by two or three different teachers in the course of one year. With teacher loyalty to the school so low, the loyalty of children cannot be summoned either. If a high proportion of teachers are preparing to move on to a better job, a better district, there will be less care, concern and commitment on their part." We can only speculate about the overall influence of this on the lives of the children.

A recent study of high school students by Harry R. Moore of the University of Denver indicated that the test scores of children who had moved across state or county lines from one to ten times were not substantially different from those of children who had not. But there was a definite tendency for the more nomadic children to avoid participation in the voluntary side of school life – clubs, sports, student government and other extra-curricular activities. It is as though they wished, where possible, to avoid new human ties that might only have to be broken again before long – as if they wished, in short, to slow down the flow-through of people in their lives.

How fast should children – or adults for that matter – be expected to make and break human relationships? Perhaps there is some optimum rate that we exceed at our peril? Nobody knows. However, if to this picture of declining durations we add the factor of diversity – the recognition that each new human relationship requires a different pattern of behavior from us – one thing becomes starkly clear: to be able to make these increasingly numerous and rapid on-off clicks in our interpersonal lives we must be able to operate at a level of adaptability never before asked of human beings.

Combine this with the accelerated through-put of places and things, as well as people, and we begin to glimpse the complexity of the coping behavior that we demand of people today. Certainly, the logical end of the direction in which we are now traveling is a society based on a system of temporary encounters, and a distinctly new morality founded on the belief, so succinctly expressed by the co-ed in Fort Lauderdale, that "frankly, you'll never see these people again." It would be absurd to assume that the future holds nothing more than a straight-line projection of present trends, that we must necessarily reach that ultimate degree of transience in human relations. But it is not absurd to recognize the direction in which we are moving.

Until now most of us have operated on the assumption that temporary relationships are superficial relationships, that only long-enduring ties can flower into real interpersonal involvement. Perhaps this assumption is false. Perhaps it is possible for holistic, non-modular relationships, to flower rapidly in a high transience society. It may prove possible to accelerate the formation of relationships, and to speed up the process of "involvement" as well. In the meantime, however, a haunting question remains:

"Is Fort Lauderdale the future?"

We have so far seen that with respect to all three of the tangible components of situations – people, places and things – the rate of turnover is rising. It is time now to look at those intangibles that are equally important in shaping experience, the information we use and the organizational frameworks within which we live.

One of the most persistent myths about the future envisions man as a helpless cog in some vast organizational machine. In this nightmarish projection, each man is frozen into a narrow, unchanging niche in a rabbit-warren bureaucracy. The walls of this niche squeeze the individuality out of him, smash his personality, and compel him, in effect, to conform or die. Since organizations appear to be growing larger and more powerful all the time, the future, according to this view, threatens to turn us all into that most contemptible of creatures, spineless and faceless, the organization man.

It is difficult to overestimate the force with which this pessimistic prophecy grips the popular mind, especially among young people. Hammered into their heads by a stream of movies, plays and books, fed by a prestigious line of authors from Kafka and Orwell to Whyte, Marcuse and Ellul, the fear of bureaucracy permeates their thought. In the United States everyone "knows" that it is just such faceless bureaucrats who invent all-digit telephone numbers, who send out cards marked "do not fold, spindle or mutilate," who ruthlessly dehumanize students, and whom you cannot fight at City Hall. The fear of being swallowed up by this mechanized beast drives executives to orgies of self-examination and students to paroxysms of protest.

What makes the entire subject so emotional is the fact that organization is an inescapable part of all our lives. Like his links with things, places and people, man's organizational relationships are basic situational components. Just as every act in a man's life occurs in some definite geographical place, so does it also occur in an organizational place, a particular location in the invisible geography of human organization.

Thus, if the orthodox social critics are correct in predicting a regimented, superbureaucratized future, we should already be mounting the barricades, punching random holes in our IBM cards, taking every opportunity to wreck the machinery of organization. If, however, we set our conceptual clichés aside and turn instead to the facts, we discover that bureaucracy, the very system that is supposed to crush us all under its weight, is itself groaning with change.

The kinds of organizations these critics project unthinkingly into the future are precisely those least likely to dominate tomorrow. For we are witnessing not the triumph, but the breakdown of bureaucracy. We are, in fact, witnessing the arrival of a new organizational system that will increasingly challenge, and ultimately supplant bureaucracy. This is the organization of the future. I call it "Ad-hocracy."

Man will encounter plenty of difficulty in adapting to this new style organization. But instead of being trapped in some unchanging, personality-smashing niche, man will find himself liberated, a stranger in a new free-form world of kinetic organizations. In this alien landscape, his position will be constantly changing, fluid, and varied. And his organizational ties, like his ties with things, places and people, will turn over at a frenetic and everaccelerating rate.

Before we can grasp the meaning of this odd term, Ad-hocracy, we need to recognize that not all organizations are bureaucracies. There are alternative ways of organizing people. Bureaucracy, as Max Weber pointed out, did not become the dominant mode of human organization in the West until the arrival of industrialism.

This is not the place for a detailed description of all the characteristics of bureaucracy, but it is important for us to note three basic facts. First, in this particular system of organization, the individual has traditionally occupied a sharply defined slot in a division of labor. Second, he fit into a vertical hierarchy, a chain of command running from the boss down to the lowliest menial. Third, his organizational relationships, as Weber emphasized, tended toward permanence.