sometimes individually and sometimes in groups. Neighboring wives, or husbands, encountered each other casually, while out gardening and cleaning up the yard or in tending children. And, of course, there were the usual meetings brought about by the children, who themselves often were the first to establish contact with the human population of the new environment.'
Local organizations also play an important part in helping the individual integrate quickly into the community. This is more likely to be true among suburban homeowners than among housing development residents. Churches, political parties and women's organizations provide many of the human relationships that the newcomers seek. According to Gutman, 'Sometimes a neighbor would inform the newcomer about the existence of the voluntary association, and might even take the newcomer to his first meeting; but even in these cases it was up to the migrant himself to find his own primary group within the association.'
The knowledge that no move is final, that somewhere along the road the nomads will once more gather up their belongings and migrate, works against the development of relationships that are more than modular, and it means that if relationships are to be struck up at all, they had better be whipped into life quickly.
If, however, the breaking-in period is compressed in time, the leave-taking – the breaking-out – is also telescoped. This is particularly true of service relationships which, being unidimensional, can be both initiated and terminated with dispatch. 'They come and they go,' says the manager of a suburban food store. 'You miss them one day and then you learn they've moved to Dallas.' 'Washington, D. C., retailers seldom have a chance to build long, enduring relationships with customers,' observes a writer in
Even babies soon become aware of the transience of human ties. The 'nanny' of the past has given way to the baby-sitter service which sends out a different person each time to mind the children. And the same trend toward time-truncated relationships is reflected in the demise of the family doctor. The late lamented family doctor, the general practitioner, did not have the refined narrow expertise of the specialist, but he did, at least, have the advantage of being able to observe the same patient almost from cradle to coffin. Today the patient doesn't stay put. Instead of enjoying a long-term relationship with a single physician, he flits back and forth between a variety of specialists, changing these relationships each time he relocates to a new community. Even within any single relationship, the contacts become shorter and shorter as well. Thus the authors of
Each time the family moves, it also tends to slough off a certain number of just plain friends and acquaintances. Left behind, they are eventually all but forgotten. Separation does not end all relationships. We maintain contact with, perhaps, one or two friends from the old location, and we tend to keep in sporadic touch with relatives. But with each move there is a deadly attrition. At first there is an eager flurry of letters back and forth. There may be occasional visits or telephone calls. But gradually these decrease in frequency. Finally, they stop coming. Says a typical English suburbanite after leaving London: 'You can't forget it [London]. Not with all your family living there and that. We still got friends living in Plumstead and Eltham. We used to go back every weekend. But you can't keep that up.'
John Barth has captured the sense of turnover among friendships in a passage from his novel
'This ability to form and then to drop, or lower to the level of acquaintanceship, close relationships quickly, coupled with increased mobility, will result in any given individual forming many more friendships than is possible for most in the present ... Friendship patterns of the majority in the future will provide for many satisfactions, while substituting many close relationships of shorter durability for the few long-term friendships formed in the past.'
One reason to believe that the trend toward temporary relationships will continue is the impact of new technology on occupations. Even if the push toward megalopolis stopped and people froze in their geographical tracks, there would still be a sharp increase in the number, and decrease in the duration of relationships as a consequence of job changes. For the introduction of advanced technology, whether we call it automation or not, is necessarily accompanied by drastic changes in the types of skills and personalities required by the economy.
Specialization increases the number of different occupations. At the same time, technological innovation reduces the life expectancy of any given occupation. 'The emergence and decline of occupations will be so rapid,' says economist Norman Anon, an expert in manpower problems, 'that people will always be uncertain in them.' The profession of airline flight engineer, he notes, emerged and then began to die out within a brief period of fifteen years.
A look at the 'help wanted' pages of any major newspaper brings home the fact that new occupations are increasing at a mind-dazzling rate. Systems analyst, console operator, coder, tape librarian, tape handler, are only a few of those connected with computer operations. Information retrieval, optical scanning, thin-film technology all require new kinds of expertise, while old occupations lose importance or vanish altogether. When
Job turnover, however, is not merely a direct consequence of technological change. It also reflects the mergers and acquisitions that occur as industries everywhere frantically organize and reorganize themselves to adapt to the fast-changing environment, to keep up with myriad shifts in consumer preferences. Many other complex pressures also combine to stir the occupational mix incessantly. Thus a recent survey by the US Department of Labor revealed that the 71,000,000 persons in the American labor force had held their current jobs an average of 4.2 years. This compared with 4.6 years only three years earlier, a decline in duration of nearly 9 percent.
'Under conditions prevailing at the beginning of the 1960's,' states another Labor Department report, 'the average twenty-year-old man in the work force could be expected to change jobs about six or seven times.' Thus instead of thinking in terms of a 'career' the citizen of super-industrial society will think in terms of 'serial careers.'
Today, for manpower accounting purposes, men are classified according to their present jobs. A worker is a 'machine operator' or a 'sales clerk' or a 'computer programmer.' This system, born in a less dynamic period, is no longer adequate, according to many manpower experts. Efforts are now being made to characterize each worker not merely in terms of the present job held, but in terms of the particular 'trajectory' that his career has followed. Each man's trajectory or career line will differ, but certain types of trajectories will recur. When asked 'What do you do?' the super-industrial man will label himself not in terms of his present (transient) job, but in terms of his trajectory type, the overall pattern of his work life. Such labels are more appropriate to the super-industrial job market than the static descriptions used at present, which take no account of what the individual has done in the
