The Changing Agenda

Abstract

Black Life in Corporate America, which I published with a colleague in 1982, attempted to look at aspects of the mostly hidden effects on the personal lives of these men and women who, in ever-increasing numbers, are trying to “make it” in the mainstream. It is also an attempt to give a view of the mainstream itself from the point of view of black managers as they attempt to swim ahead or simply to survive in these multibillion-dollar organizations— these uniquely modern ways of organizing a good percentage of the world’s trained personnel into entities called Exxons and AT&Ts, IBMs, Sears, Fords, and U.S. Steels. Black Life in Corporate America (1982) is a vision of the human side of the story of men and women operating in foreign social space with unfamiliar protocol, with habits, manners, values, and styles of thinking that until recently were very new to them.