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California Management Review
California Management Review is a premier academic management journal published at UC Berkeley
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Article Information
Organizational Personages--Or Is It Really A Square World?
Hobbit, J.
9
/
4
(
Summer
1967
):
91
-
93
Once it was a hierarchy, an assemblage of choirs arrayed beneath the feet of the grand master. Once it was circular with the brothers round the table. Once it was a lace of sociometric affinities. But now it is square! The organization man is now a coordinate in a matrix, in a Cartesian rectilinearity; he is located by the numbers in the grid. Clearly, no geometric figure of classic simplicity can provide the dimensionality required to fully typify the human being who occupies a place in the organizational world. In fact, there are some old types defined by these descriptors who could not be confined to the tetrahedron, so one has to bow to modern rectilinearity and admit that the model is rendered freer and more complete if the three are to represent axes in a three-dimensional space. Even an unimaginative cube of the descriptors proposed here adds some depth beyond the fiat geometries currently in vogue. Maybe one should just ought to let Euclid and his intellectual descendants drop out of the game.