The Managerial Revolution Quotes

Just as we seldom realize that we are growing old until we are already old, so do the contemporary actors in a major social change seldom realize that society is changing until the change has already come.

The promulgation of consumerism also coincided with the beginnings of the managerial revolution, which was, especially at first, largely an attack on pupular knowledge...the new bureaucratically organized corporations and their 'scientific management' sought as far as possible to literally turn workers into extensions of the machinery, their very move predetermined by someone else.

Managerial activity tends to become inbred and self-justifying. The enterprise comes to be thought of as existing for the sake of its managers – not the managers for the enterprise. A high percentage of the time of the managers and their staff is spent on “housekeeping” and other internal problems. Self-justifying managerial control tends to keep alive operations which have little social purpose other than to nourish an enclave of of managers. Tis is conspicuously true of governments. Many acute, expensive problems which our society faces – for example, in agriculture, radio-TV, railroads, finance, etc. - are largely manufactured by the managerial agencies founded to solve them.

Once the managers consoldiate their position within an institution, their objective interests no longer fully correspond to the interests of the other groups involved – voters, owners, members, teachers, students or consumers. A decision on dividends, mergers, labor contracts, prices, curriculum, class size, scope of government operations, armament, strikes, etc. may serve the best interests of the manager without necessarily contributing to the well-being of the other groups.

In a new form of society, sovereignty is localized in administrative bureaus. They proclaim the rules, make the law, issue the decrees. The shift from parliament to the bureaus occurs on a world scale. The actual directing and administrative work of the bureaus is carried on by new men, a new type of men. It is, specifically, the MANAGERIAL type. The active heads of the bureaus are the managers-in-government, the same, or nearly the same, in training, functions, skills, habits of thought as the managers-in-industry.

The divorce of control, or power, from ownership has been due in large part to the growth of public corporations. So long as a single person, family or comparatively small group held a substantial portion of the common shares of a corporation, the legal “owner” could control its affairs. Even if they no longer actually conducted the business, the operating managers were functioning as their accountable agents. But when the enterprise became more vast in scope and at the same time, the stock certificates became spread in small bundles among thousands of persons, the managers were gradually released from subordination to the nominal owners. De facto control passed, for the most part, to non-owning management.

Within the huge trade unions, a similar managerial officialdom, the “labor bureaucracy” consolidates its position as an elite. This elite is sharply distinguished in training, income, habits and outlook from the ordinary union member. The trend extends to the military world, the academic world, the non-profit foundations and even auxilliary organizations of the U.N. Armies are no longer run by “fighting captains” but by a Pentagon-style managerial bureaucracy. Within the universities, proliferating administrators have risen above students, teaching faculty, alumni and parents, their power position expressed in the symbols of higher salaries and special privileges. The great “non-profit foundations” have been transformed from expressions of individual benevolence into strategic bases of managerial-administrative power. The United Nations has an international echelon of manager entrenched in the Secretariat. There are fairly obvious parallels in the managerial structures of the diverse institutional fields. For example, managers in business are stockholders as labor managers are to union members; as government managers are to voters; as public school administrators are to tax-payers; as university and private school administrators are to tuition payers and fund contributors.

It is largely irrelevant whether the propertied elite acquires managerial skills, takes an active part in managing corporate enterprise, or has assimilated non-propertied elite manager into its own class and interests. What Mills and his disciple, William G. Domhoff and their school do not sufficiently perceive or appreciate thoroughly is that the interest of the propertied elite have changed substantially with the revolution of mass and scale. The propertied elite or “grand bourgeosie” of the bourgeois order may not have changed significantly in family composition, and certainly it retain wealth and status. Its economic interests, however, have changed from being vested in the hard property of privately owned and operated entrepreneurial firms, usually comparatively small in scale, to being intertwined with and dependent upon the de-materialized property of publicly owned, state-integrated, managerially operated mass corporations.

People thought, and still think, so automatically in these terms that they do not realize they are doing anything more than recording unchangeable fact. That the owner of a factory should own also its products; that we need money to buy things; that most people should work for wages for others; that a business has to lower production or cut wages or even stop when it can’t make a profit—all this seems as natural to many as the need to breathe or eat. Yet history tells flatly that all of these institutions are so far from being inevitably “natural” to man that they have been present in only a small fraction, the last few hundred years, of the lengthy history of mankind.

worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.

SIXTY glittering, clannish families do not run the American economy, nor has there occurred any silent revolution of managers who have expropriated the powers and privileges of such families. The truth that is in both these characterizations is less adequately expressed as ‘America’s Sixty Families’ or ‘The Managerial Revolution,’ than as the managerial reorganization of the propertied classes into the more or less unified stratum of the corporate rich.

Essentially Kelly was creating interdisciplinary groups—combining chemists, physicists, metallurgists, and engineers; combining theoreticians with experimentalists—to work on new electronic technologies. But putting young men like Shockley in a management position devastated some of the older Labs scientists. Addison White, a younger member of the technical staff who before the war had taken part in Shockley’s weekly study group, told Hoddeson he nevertheless considered it “a stroke of enormously good management on Kelly’s part.” He even thought it an act of managerial bravery to strip the titles from men Kelly had worked with for decades. “One of these men wept in my office after this happened,” White said. “I’m sure it was an essential part of what by this time had become a revolution.

An ideology is not a scientific theory, but often nonscientific and even antiscientific. It is the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals, not a hypothesis about events--though ideologies are often thought by those who hold them to be scientific theories. Thus the theory of evolution or of relativity or of the electronic composition of matter are scientific theories; whereas the doctrines of the preambles to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States, the Nazi racial doctrines, Marxist dialectical materialism, St. Anselm's doctrine of the meaning of world history, are ideologies.

Some apologists try to excuse Marxism by saying that it has ‘never had a chance’. This is far from the truth. Marxism and the Marxist parties have had dozens of chances.

Have not these chief executives carried through a silent revolution, a managerial revolution from the top, and has not their revolution transformed the very meaning of property? Are not, in short, the old expropriators now expropriated by their salaried managers? Maybe the chief executives are trustees for a variety of economic interests, but what are the checks upon how fair and well they perform their trusts? And was it not the state, subject to the control of a free electorate, that was to be the responsible trustee, the impartial umpire, the expert broker of conflicting interests and contending powers?

Men are prepared to be heroes for very foolish and unworthy ideals; but they must at least believe in those ideals.

What Burnham is mainly concerned to show is that a democratic society has never existed and so far as we can see, never will exist.

In 1982, Wall Street had taken home 6 percent of America’s corporate profits. In 2017, it took home 23 percent. With so much money going to trading and bonuses, banks spent far less on lending to create new jobs and businesses. Between 1978 and 2012, the percentage of American businesses that qualified as new declined by 44 percent, according to an analysis of census data. In all, the stock-option revolution transformed corporate behavior so radically that Michael Jensen, the professor who launched it, eventually lamented that it had become, as he put it, “managerial heroin.

Marx and Engels, in their giddy enthusiasm for the industrial revolutions of their day, [...] were wrong to predict that market competition would compel factory owners to-go on with mechanization anyway. If it didn't happen, it can only be because market competition is not, in fact, as essential to the nature of capitalism as they had assumed. If nothing else, the current form of capitalism, where much of the competition seems to take the form of internal marketing within the bureaucratic structures of large semi-monopolistic enterprises, would presumably have come as a complete surprise to them.

As the Court in Howey determined, an investment contract requires (1) an investment of money (2) in a common enterprise (3) with a reasonable expectation of profits (4) to be derived from the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of others. All elements must be met for a security to be found, thereby implicating securities laws and regulations.

Marx’s original definition of “bourgeoisie” referred to ownership of the means of production. One of the characteristics of the modern world is that this form of property has become vastly democratized through stock ownership and pension plans. Even if one does not possess large amounts of capital, working in a managerial capacity or profession often grants one a very different kind of social status and outlook from a wage earner or low-skilled worker.