Ellen Goodman's Essay 'The Company Man'

In “The Company Man” by Ellen Goodman, throughout the passage Goodman illustrates her feelings of distaste and anger toward Phil, as he in her mind represents Corporate America: routine, indifferent, almost robotic. Goodman uses numerous rhetorical strategies to convey her attitude toward Phil, including tone, repetition, the use of statistics, sarcasm, anecdotes, differing syntax, and irony.

The character of Bartleby in Herman Melville’s novella “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” is a person who refuses to become an object in capitalistic society. Initially, he is the perfect example of the objectification and mechanization of humans in the workplace. In essence, Bartleby is a machine that continually produces. Ultimately, he begins to resist the mind numbing repetition of his tasks and the mechanization of his life. The other main character, the narrator, is a facilitator of the capitalistic machine. He dehumanizes his employees by ensuring that their free will is denied in the workplace using objectifying nicknames, providing a workplace devoid of human touch and connection,; and perpetuating mechanized, repetitive work. Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” shows the dehumanizing effects of working in a capitalistic environment and ultimately suggests that one must conform to a standard way of life or will cease to exist.

Some people say that work comes before play. While this is mostly true, the real implications of this expression can be monumental. The Working Man by Ellen Goodman is about a man named Phil who died due to heart failure. Goodman however, believes that this was not the true cause of death, instead being that he worked himself to death. Phil put his work above all else, even at the expense of his health and family life. Goodman has a very negative point of view on Phil’s life, viewing it is pointless and stupid. She uses several rhetorical devices throughout the story to convey her negative attitude towards the way Phil lived his life, including, sarcasm, irony, and repetition.

This is the method to solve the problem at the end result. This will help company get rid of employees who have an unethical attitude. Keeping these people will have negative influence for company in the future as occurring now. In addition, company might lose the most talented person in company as a disadvantage.

In the satirical eulogy “The Company Man,” Ellen Goodman addresses the flaws in the business world through mourning the wasted life of Phil. Phil; one could say he lost his life but the people that knew him would ask what life? Through Satire, Goodman uses rhetorical strategies to convey her annoyance and disappointment towards Phil illustrating that value is lost in life when it derives from pursuing commercial success as an unfeeling instrument rather than pursuing emotional generosity and relationships.

Ellen Goodman knows how to get an audience thinking. In Goodman’s story, Company Man, the character Phil is made to seem as an irrelevant and unnecessary member of society through Goodman’s uses of repetition and tone.

In the writing “The Company Man”, the author, Ellen Goodman, gives us a brief, yet, fulfilling summery of a big company man’s attributes, life, and death. In this work, the author uses referential writing as her primary purpose of writing, while she also uses narration as her primary pattern for the analysis of the writing. She begins, opening up with “He worked himself to death, finally and precisely, at 3:00 AM Sunday Morning.” in order to grab our attention. She then goes into the different aspects of his life, starting with his devotion to his company and some of the different characteristics about him. Next, she lists, in chronological order, the different people in his family, and analyzes what he meant to each person listed. Finally, in closing, the author repeats some of her work, reflecting her writing in her introduction, closing with more elements about him and his work ethic, but also reminding us of how he sacrificed work for family. She then finishes her writing with “So when he finally worked himself to death, at precisely 3:00 AM Sunday morning, no one was really surprised”

¨The Company Man” was written by a columnist named Ellen Goodman, she writes about phil, a father, and a husband who puts his work before his family. Phil is a workaholic who works himself to death. Goodman feels as if Phil cares too much about work and not enough about the important people in his life. Goodman decides to use many specific numbers in “The Company Man”. She uses it because she is trying to show how “type A” personality Phil is.

Race car drivers of course accept a lot of risk when they compete in a race, and believe that in order to succeed they must take risks. Some risks include crashes with other vehicles and possible loss of life, either from crashing their cars into into the other vehicles, inanimate objects, or other people, as with the death of Kevin Ward Jr. (Daft / People.com)

The corporate ownership of the male extends to how much his life is worth. Ed Norton works in a claims department for a large car manufacture. His job is to decide what a manufacture does in case of a design flaw. Take for example, if a carburetor runs a risk of exploding after 100,000 miles; ED Norton’s job is to investigate the probability of this happening. Then take the number of vehicles on the road and multiply them it by the probable rate of failure and multiply the product again with average price of an out of court settlement. If the end result is less than the cost of a recall, there is no recall.

Stakeholders-investors, customers, interest groups, employees, the legal system, and the community often determine whether a specific behavior is right or wrong, ethical or unethical. Judgments of these groups influence society’s acceptance or rejection of a business and it’s activities.

There have been many different approaches to management theory. Each theory has made an important contribution to the way managers operate in different organizations. Douglas McGregor is perhaps one of the most interesting theorists in my opinion because he chose to approach management from two different perspectives. Douglas McGregor created two distinct assumptions about the employee. He called his assumptions Theory X and Theory Y. Douglas McGregor wrote a book, The Human Side of Enterprise, which was published in 1960. In this book McGregor goes into great detail describing his management theories, which have been impacting management styles for over 50 years.

Critical Analysis Essay of The Company Man The book defined as, “The Company Man” was based upon a businessman named Phil who worked in America’s corporate. Phil was a dedicated hard worker. He always worked six days out of the week with long hour shifts such as 8 to 9 hours long and this resulted to his death. Ellen Goodman is important to this reading because she expresses her passion towards Phil but her impression of what the business world made Phil is what Ellen strongly dislikes about him.

The 2003 Canadian film documentary, The Corporation, is about the modern-day corporation. It critiques that it is considered to be a person, but since it has so many disregards to the human well-being and only cares about making as much money as possible, if it were an actual person it would be considered a psychopath.

Both “The Company Man” and “The Unknown Citizen” tell two different stories about two hard-working men. Both men wanted nothing but the best for their families, they wanted them to be financially stable and worked just has hard to make sure that would happen. Both men worked hard until their very last breath and while doing this, they made sure that even after their death their families would be okay financially. But one thing that stood out differently about both men, were how they approached this hard working lifestyle. In “The Company Man”, he lives for his job, there’s nothing more that he could wish for while in the “The Unknown Citizen” he’s more of what you called socialite, he was popular among his “mates” and would like to have drinks.