NONFICTION - Sept. 15, 1991

THE NEW INDIVIDUALISTS: The Generation after The Organization Man by Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker (HarperCollins: $24.95: 464 pp.). It’s a good question: If Organization Man, in William H. Whyte’s famous formulation, was an ingenuous cog in an enormous corporate machine, what sort of career path would his children take? Paul Leinberger, a consultant and himself the son of one of Whyte’s original subjects, and Bruce Tucker, a free-lance writer, have tracked down hundreds of organization-man families and discovered both enormous disappointment and hope: companies that broke implied promises to loyal employees, and children who pursue an independence their fathers never dreamed of. “The New Individualists” suffers from an overabundance of pop-psych social science--the authors cite everyone from Freud and Max Weber to David Riesman, Gail Sheehy and Theodore Roszak--but their extended profiles of two organizational families, the Myerses and the Harrisons, are remarkable jobs of reporting.