Men and Their Work by Everett C. HughesReview by: Henry A. LandsbergerIndustrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Apr., 1960), p. 474Published by: Cornell University, School of Industrial & Labor RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2520340 .

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474 INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS REVIEW

pelled by modesty to write pages of ex- ceptions and conditions. Almost half of the space in the final conclusions is taken up with the "limitations of the study." One is reminded of Churchill's quip about Clement Atlee: "He is a very modest chap and has a great deal to be modest about."

The unfortunate fact is that Lafitte's past record denies any grounds for mod- esty. Not only has he held important posts and has written an excellent volume on theory, but, we are told, he has been em- inently successful in applying his psycho- logical training to practical consulting. The present volume will disappoint both theorists and practitioners.

ROBERT H. GUEST

Yale Technology Project

Men and Their Work. By Everett C. Hughes. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1958. 184 pp. $4.

Superficially, there is something mis- leading about the title given this collec- tion of fourteen papers, most of which are of recent vintage, although some date back to the late thirties and even the twenties. For Professor Hughes, who has taught sociology at the University of Chi- cago for many years, talks mostly about the professions. He discusses the problems of doctors and lawyers as well as those of pharmacists and of others who aspire to professional status such as realtors, osteopaths, and personnel men. He does not, therefore, explicitly talk much about workers in the narrower and more usual sense, nor even about those latter-day heroes of the sociological literature of in- dustry: managers, bureaucrats, white- collar people, and other denizens of formal organizations.

Professor Hughes makes it clear, how- ever, that much of his interest is in the relation between man and his work re- gardless of the nature of that work. He believes that the complexities of this re- lationship are often illustrated better by the professions than by examples from the industrial world. This point is stated most clearly in the third paper, "Work

and the Self." Here, Hughes describes the struggle for prestige and the quest for autonomy and self-regulation which un- derlies all attempts to professionalize an occupation and states that these phenom- ena are but specific manifestations of ev- ery man's desire to maintain control over his work (hence the industrial worker's attempt to restrict output), and to escape judgment by all except his peers and col- leagues. Professions, in the course of their "career," attempt to have associated oc- cupations do their "dirty work" for them. (Nurses make beds less frequently today than they once did, and professors have assistants mark papers.) This, too, is re- garded as a universal phenomenon.

But while this is probably the central thesis of these essays, many others are touched upon. There is a nostalgic open- ing piece lamenting the passing of cere- monials and rituals to mark changes in a person's life (particularly, his occupation- al life) with some offhand comments on why revolutionaries have never liked cal- endars of any kind. There is a satirical postscript in dialogue form in which social scientists, running fantastically expensive and immoral experiments with "real sub- jects," are taken to task. Between these two essays are comments on how a pro- fession shapes a man's self-concept and his relation to others; how a profession- supposedly infallible-handles the occur- rence of mistakes; how professions change and what the consequent absence of tra- dition might do to the neophyte, and so on. Uncluttered by statistics and other facts except anecdotal ones, this group of essays-though its central thesis has its limits-is a delightful change for the read- er. They are well written, and while the reader is a little frustrated because none of the many provocative points is pursued in any detail and because most of them recur in so many of the essays, he yet welcomes these papers as embodying a humanistic, reflective tradition of clear writing which is fast dying out.

HENRY A. LANDSBERGER

Assistant Professor New York State School of

Industrial and Labor Relations Cornell University

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