‘The Organization Man’ William H. Whyte’s newly re-released classic analysis of anonymous, overworked guys in suits and the big corporations that love them remains almost as trenchant now as it was when first published in 1956. Whyte, who died three years ago, believed that the American credo of individualism and hard work, essentially the Protestant work ethic, was giving way to a “social ethic” that rewarded conformity over creativity and, even worse, misappropriated science to enforce that conformity. (Whyte comes up with great advice for gaming personality tests: “Give the most conventional, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian answer possible… If you were this kind of person you wouldn’t get very far, but, unfortunately, you won’t get very far unless you can seem to be this kind of person.”)

The book has a few anachronistic sections. Women figure only as wives, and there’s a long rant about the end of the movie “The Caine Mutiny.” But the core of the book still resonates. Today we see fitting into “corporate culture” as a necessary prerequisite for happiness in a job. “Sociability” remains, in many organizations, a criterion for promotion. And bureaucracies still try to instill in their workers a loyalty that they will never return.

‘Searching for a Corporate Savior’ Rakesh Khurana’s subtitle is “The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs.” That’s particularly relevant at a time when so many former high fliers like Enron’s Ken Lay and Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski are getting spanked. The book expands on Khurana’s dissertation at Harvard Business School, where he’s now a professor. Khurana comprehensively skewers corporate boards of directors (an incestuous clique of buddies, he explains) for drawing from a small group of flashy “outsider” candidates to save their companies, like the new CEOs at United and the Gap.

That trend has its roots in the 1970s, Khurana says, when Whyte’s drone-managers started taking perks while their businesses tanked. In response, investors took over the companies through leveraged buyouts, increasingly drawing capital from institutions like mutual funds. By the early ’90s, those institutional investors had enough power to force directors to make changes. Khurana deduces that the quickest fix was in the CEO spot. Directors seized control of the CEO search process, ignoring well-trained insiders familiar with their company in favor of so-called change agents who, with the aid of lazy business media, would achieve short-term gains in stock prices.

As a result, CEOs often write their own tickets when they ride to the rescue of a company in distress. Khurana details the ways that CEO accountability has diminished and compensation has skyrocketed (while workers’ pay, in real dollars, has gone down). Boards of directors give up their power to the change agent, weakening corporate governance. And charismatic, evangelistic CEOs have transmogrified their companies’ missions into pseudo-religious callings, which is scarier than any drudgery that Whyte described.

‘Net Loss’ Like Khurana’s book, Nathan Newman’s explanation of how the business growth spawned by the Internet has hurt local and regional communities is based on Ph.D. work–Newman did his at the University of California, Berkeley. Sadly, it reads like a dissertation, a stylistic distraction that weakens an otherwise compelling thesis. Newman, a progressive union lawyer in New York, says the Internet wouldn’t have been born without government support, in the form of funding and standard-setting. In Silicon Valley, the Net was supposed to further regional growth, but the new technologies created there gave corporations global reach.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but Newman says those changes hurt the very regions they were supposed to benefit. Formerly regional institutions like banks and power utilities could shop the globe for customers, sweetheart tax deals and labor, which freed them from supporting local institutions. Newman thinks that only grass-roots anti-globalization activists might combat this unintended consequence. Fortunately, he points out, the Net has also elevated them from regional influence to global scope.