Great Expectations?

"When I was a college senior in 1939, we used to sing a plaintive song about going out into the 'cold, cold world.' It wasn't really so very cold then, but we did enjoy meditating on the fraughtness of it all. It was a big break we were facing, we told ourselves, and those of us who were going to try our luck in the commercial world could be patronizing toward those who were going on to graduate work or academic life. We were taking the leap." When William H. Whyte Jr. wrote that description in "The Organization Man," in 1956, he was chronicling the birth of "a generation of bureaucrats."

Whyte's book advanced a simple yet damning argument about the nature of work in the old economy: The power of the organization had increased so much that workers had been forced to surrender their individuality. The problem, Whyte said, was not that work and life were too much in conflict. In fact, the opposite was true: The inherent conflict between the interests of the organization and those of the individual had been completely neutralized. Conformity, congeniality, and conspicuous consumption had converged to create a kind of suburban womb. The "organization man" gladly surrendered his opinions, his outside interests -- and, potentially, his personality -- to fit the requirements of life inside the organization. In return, he got a warm, comfortable, yet totally homogeneous world of work.

That was the social compact, the unspoken agreement that defined the arrangement between the company and the individual for most of the post - World War II period. Companies got reliable, predictable, stable employees. Workers got jobs that had many of the same attributes. And if the arrangement seemed a little too confining, a little too complacent, and a little too boring, well, it was a compact that fit the temper of the times.

But times change. Today, we're witnessing the emergence of a generation of entrepreneurially minded change agents and free agents -- along with a renegotiation of the social compact between company and worker. According to the new social compact, we're not consigned to our fathers' workplace, or even to our mothers' workplace. It's a new economy, and we've got a new deal.

That deal begins with the promise that we will be rewarded for our contribution. Yes, we will work long and hard -- probably longer and harder than we would like to. But justification will arrive in the form of remuneration that acknowledges our value to the organization. "A fair day's pay for a fair day's work," the old trade-union battle cry, doesn't stir the juices the way it used to. The new deal not only says that we will be paid well -- it says that our pay will reflect our true worth.

And our true worth will increase because we will be responsible for what we do. The organization man had to check his identity at the office door. People today, meanwhile, are demanding the right to display their integrity and the opportunity for self-expression. In the new-economy organization, employees define what they do and make real decisions in their work. They think for themselves. In fact, their success depends on their ability to do so.

The new workplace also holds forth the promise of community -- or some semblance thereof. Because we spend so much time at work, and because teamwork is a core organizational value, we expect to develop close bonds with our teammates. We confide in them, we party with them, and they become friends as well as colleagues. More likely than not, our relationship with our boss also transcends professional bounds. The workplace provides a sort of home. Indeed, for better and for worse, work and life outside work blur into each other.

Jobs are not just "jobs," nor are they simply a means to a paycheck. They absorb and challenge us. They offer fulfillment. We enjoy going to the office -- because doing so clarifies our sense of possibility.

The reality? There are, of course, many realities. For a surprising number of people, the new-economy canon is delivering exactly as advertised. For a smaller number of people, the promise has proved crushingly empty: They feel betrayed. Between those two poles lie the majority of respondents, whose hopes have been neither fully realized nor hopelessly dashed. For them, work is eminently enjoyable -- but not as meaningful or as fulfilling as they had once hoped it would be.

This month's Fast Company - Roper Starch Worldwide survey explores this treacherous ground between expectations and reality. In an online poll of 1,122 college-educated, working adults, we probed the proposition that work is, indeed, personal.

Our expectation: People's relative satisfaction with their work would correspond to the gap between what they thought had been promised to them and what they have actually experienced. No great intellectual leap there: Disappointment, as we learned in Psych 101, bums most folks out. More interesting are the subtle motivators -- including satisfaction or dissatisfaction itself -- that determine that gap in the first place. Work truly is personal, and our attitudes toward work are truly human, truly emotional, and truly complex. Here is our reading of the swirling tea leaves.