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Book Review
| Nikki Mandell, The Corporation as Family: The Gendering of Corporate Welfare, 1890–1930, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. ii + 208. $49.95, cloth (ISBN 0-8078-2658-5); $19.95, paper (ISBN 0-8078-5351-8).
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| Who were the Progressives? It has remained a perennial question for historians, and in the past ten years in particular, it has provided fertile ground for historiographical reinterpretation by scholars in an increasingly wide range of fields. Amid the sheer volume of new research and the diversity of approaches, some new consensuses on early twentieth-century reform are nevertheless emerging. One of the most important concerns is the centrality of the family in the Progressive Era. A major animating force behind reforms as diverse as welfare programs, criminal justice, social insurance, and education, among others, was concern about the family. Historian Nikki Mandell adds to this new consensus on the period in her study of corporate welfare in the earlier twentieth century, The Corporation as Family: The Gendering of Corporate Welfare, 1890–1930. In this slim volume of business and labor history, Mandell makes a significant argument: welfare capitalism was more than merely an attempt to limit the growth of unions. It was a fundamental reform of business/labor relations that sought to transform corporations and employees into a "corporate family" based on the model of the Victorian family. Mandell finds that "family" welfare capitalism provided hope for more harmonious relations between owners, managers, and workers in America's corporations. |
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Mandell's argument rests on her discovery of a neglected group of historical actors who were business Progressives—corporate welfare managers. They fashioned a model of the corporation as family at a pivotal moment in the history of business and labor relations. When earlier models of benevolent paternalism and overt repression were no longer viable, welfare managers served as intermediaries between owners and their vast pools of employees and offered welfare services rather than repressive measures in order to win workers' loyalty. |
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The Victorian family model of labor relations featured business owners in the role of the father, workers in the role of children, and welfare workers—over half of whom were women—in the role of corporate mother. Welfare workers drew on "maternal" virtues of caring, domesticity, and social housekeeping, and the Social Gospel virtue of service to claim legitimacy for themselves and their work. They expected owners, in turn, to yield to the persuasion of the welfare manager in his or her "sphere" of expertise—caring for the corporate family. Welfare managers envisioned employees as children in the corporate family. With the care, guidance, and advocacy of welfare managers, these children might "grow up" into fuller and more responsible family members. |
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Welfare work took several forms. Educational programs aimed at encouraging Victorian ideals of fatherhood and motherhood: men were offered savings programs to teach them fiscal responsibility and sports activities to promote competition and teamwork. Women, by contrast, were offered classes in sewing and cooking and dining halls, where good nutrition and proper table setting were modeled. Workers of both sexes were also provided with safer and cleaner working environments, gardens, and washrooms in order to make the factory seem more like "home." Welfare managers also saw economic security as important to preserving the welfare of employees, and some pressed owners to raise wages and reduce hours. |
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It was this latter economic goal of welfare work that put into stark relief the weaknesses of the corporate family model. The model only worked if each actor agreed to play his or her part. But Mandell shows that, in reality, only the welfare managers played the part of corporate mother—and often with great difficulty. Owners refused to relinquish control of labor management or the shop floor and thus limited welfare work largely to savings, health, and education programs. But these, of course, were the issues that concerned workers least. Just as owners chafed at their roles as corporate fathers, workers refused to be classified as corporate children. Wage-earning men and women did not reject welfare work out of hand—in fact, they used it to suit their own agendas quite brilliantly; but they did not believe that it required any increased loyalty to the firm on their part. Only higher wages and shorter hours would accomplish that. |
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The model of the corporate family fell out of favor in the 1920s, replaced by a competing model of personnel management. In a story that mirrors narratives of Progressive-Era welfare law, Mandell argues that a family-based reform model generated largely by women was replaced by a nonfamilial model generated by men. At the same time, women welfare workers were driven out of the corporate world. Unfortunately, Mandell devotes only one chapter—the last—to this important story, and its brevity reduces the force of some of Mandell's arguments. For one, Mandell introduces the new "male" gendered field of personnel management suddenly and briefly. Without a fuller rendering of its institutional origins and its gendered ideological challenges to the corporate family model of labor relations, the reader has difficulty understanding its triumph and its significance as a new kind of gendered professionalism in the corporate world. In a related vein, readers are only provided an extensive institutional history of welfare managers and the National Civic Federation in this last chapter where their demise is discussed. Until this point, however, readers may struggle to place welfare workers in a concrete social, political, and institutional context. Finally, the story of the demise of the corporate family model of labor relations is presented as exogenous to welfare managers and their model—a challenge beyond their control. Yet by Mandell's own reckoning, the model of the corporate family was, from the beginning, unrealistic, ineffective, and never fully adopted. At the end, Mandell leaves readers with some important questions. But her research is provocative and pushes the historiography of family, business, and reform in the early twentieth century in promising new directions. |
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| Jennifer Mittelstadt
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Brooklyn College,
City University of New York |
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