Meaning
An employee whose loyalty runs to the company and its management rather than to fellow workers or his own conscience; nearly always pejorative, implying uncritical obedience to company policy and a willingness to side with the boss. A separate later sense, usually 'the company man', denotes an intelligence officer, since 'the Company' is slang for the CIA. Pejorative in labour and workplace contexts; the CIA sense rests on 'the Company' as agency slang and is separate. Wiktionary lists organization man and suit as synonyms; William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) is the classic study of the type. Regional use: United States origin; now general English.
Origin
An American coinage from the country's coalfields: the OED labels the noun US English and gives earliest evidence in 1873, from the Report of Inspectors of Mines, Anthracite Coal Regions, Pennsylvania - the world of company houses and company towns. The familiar loyal-to-management sense is later, and the references disagree on it: Merriam-Webster dates it to about 1921 ('a worker who acquiesces in company policy without complaint'), fitting the union-era industrial-relations battles, while Wiktionary's earliest quotation for that sense is from 1957 (an Associated Press piece in the Spokesman-Review). The CIA sense is attested from 1990 in the New York Times, in a profile of a spymaster. Wikipedia ties the term's peak currency to the mid-twentieth-century corporate social contract of steady pay in exchange for loyalty.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- company woman
- organization man
Usage Examples
- He refused to wear the union pin, and by the end of the strike everyone on the floor called him a company man.
- The interviewers liked her record but worried she was too much her own person and not enough of a company man.
- After thirty years of relocations and unpaid overtime, he finally admitted he had been a company man to a fault.