Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin
Pamela Walker Laird
Harvard Studies in Business History
Harvard University Press
“Even the most extraordinary people have never achieved ordinary success alone.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction “Connections at Work”
In the America of our ideals, merit alone determines success. In the real America, however, opportunities to exercise merit are distributed by social capital, that is, connections and connectability. Social assets determine who can attract the respect, confidence, affection, and loyalty of those who hold the keys to opportunity. Access to informal and formal networks, mentors, role models, and gatekeepers determines who gets pulled in to as well as who gets pushed out of opportunities. It can inspire as well as advance ambitions.
Chapter 1. “Social Capital and the Mechanisms of Success”
The power of social capital in American enterprise leaps out from the very stories that are usually held up as evidence of the archetypal American hero, the self-made man. Stories of American business successes began with small colonial shops, and Pull starts there with Benjamin Franklin, then moves through the great fortunes of the nineteenth century, including Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. No matter how brilliant or hard working they were, whether they began with rags or riches, their successes required mentoring from important gatekeepers and access to powerful networks. Their pull made possible the opportunities where they could apply their talents. Although we commonly refer to “Horatio Alger successes” as if he wrote about self-made men, Alger actually distrusted rugged individualism. His heroes all moved within webs of social relationships that made success possible.
Chapter 2. “Organizing and Synthesizing Social Capital”
Between the Civil War and World War I, Americans tirelessly formed trade and other associations to benefit members and exclude others. Organizations as different as corporations, unions, and professional associations flourished despite the ascendancy of praise for individualism. Marginalized groups of African Americans and women also organized during this period to compensate for their social capital disadvantages, openly admitting that self-help required collective efforts.
Chapter 3. “Social Rungs on Corporate Ladders”
In the twentieth century, the growth of corporations raised new questions and problems for youths seeking careers as well as for managers constructing new, formalized practices to recruit, hire, and promote people. Despite vigorous attempts to build merit-based objectivity into corporate personnel systems, social capital still determined access to opportunity. Stereotypes—both positive and negative patterns of expectations—marked some people as having “potential” and others as presumptive failures.
Chapter 4. “Contacts and Buffers”
Through most of the twentieth century, corporate success hinged on deep and often invisible mechanisms that limited opportunity to those whom gatekeepers deemed socially acceptable. Universities, professional organizations, and country clubs filtered out the socially unacceptable, so that business leaders could feel comfortable in developing and promoting the meritorious of those who remained. Seemingly objective and meritocratic personnel practices perpetuated standards for hiring and promotion so that “promising” young employees continued to look and sound like their bosses.
Chapter 5. “The Business of Integration”
Men of ethnic minorities and all women began to expand their expectations for participating in the business world after World War II. The GI Bill and postwar economic expansion, then the Civil Rights Act of 1964, peeled away layers of exclusionary discrimination within firms and unions, exposing the social dynamics that pulled some people into place and pushed others away. The National Urban League and other advocates for marginalized people worked to overcome the disadvantages of negative social capital, institutionalizing social capital to gain access to unions and jobs for their constituencies.
Chapter 6. “Strangers on the Ladder”
After the 1964 Civil Rights Act, women and minority men entered American corporations in unprecedented numbers, often in positions never previously available to them. Their managers, however, were uncomfortable in working with people who were strangers by sex or race. Therefore, such strangers could not expect—and did not receive—ready promotion through a system to which their meager social capital barely allowed entry. What were considered good management techniques for developing mainstream individuals were thought to be “experimental” when applied to women or African-American men. After a decade or so, many of these “strangers,” including Mary Kay Ash, left the corporate world to set up their own firms, where they flourished without the burdens of self-fulfilling presumptions that they were likely to fail.
Chapter 7. “Uncovering the Power of Pull”
Only after the worst practices of exclusionary “push” discrimination diminished with enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did the importance of “pull” discrimination—inclusion because of advantageous social capital—become apparent. In 1986, the Wall Street Journal named the “glass ceiling” and explained how it caused so many frustrations. Social scientists, management analysts, and civil rights and feminist activists figured out that no one and no amount of force could crack that barrier to top management positions from below. Only pull from above could move people up the top rungs on the corporate ladder. Ambitious but marginalized people learned to build social capital through mentoring, networking, and providing role models. They and their social science advocates developed these concepts and built the social capital lexicon to label and explain the barriers to success and the means of surmounting them.
Chapter 8. “Social Tools for Self-Help”
Social capital’s primary mechanisms—mentors, networks, gatekeepers, and role models—became buzz words during the 1990s. Marginalized people and their advocates promoted them as tools for redistributing opportunity and fracturing the glass ceiling. Affirmative action policies institutionalized some of those mechanisms of pull to make them more broadly available. By the end of the century, these terms became part of our everyday language. As tools of social capital, they moved to the foreground of management training and public conversation. The new century opened with these words in everyone’s vocabulary as the social bootstraps for individual success. They became part of how we now think about doing business. Individual “merit” has come to include how much pull someone has. And social capital has changed from being what successful people used but did not talk about to what everyone talks about and what successful people still use best.