> Peter Drucker is a contemporary of ex-Trotskyist and
later
> publisher of the
> National Review, James Burnham, in putting managerialism
> on the ideological
> map. Drucker published his version of managerialism in
> "The End of Economic
> Man" (1939) and "The Future of Industrial Man" (1942).
> Burnham's book was
> called the "Managerial Revolution". I would trace the
> intellectual lineage
> back to Walter Rathenau, son of the founder of the German
> General Electric
> Co. who directed the mobilization of German industry for
> World War I.
I would bet there are more roots in sociology, though
that isn't my beat.
You fail to mention the work of Galbraith
and the institutionalist tradition.
Though Galbraith does not advance your straw man--
that ownership is totally irrelevant--he does discuss
the formation of power based upon bureaucratic
functions. He does not go so far as to say that
only "performance" matters, but he does describe
to good effect the ways in which real business firms
depart, not necessarily in beneficent ways, from the
profit-maximizing model common to both Marx and
Milton Friedman. Your neglect of this idea of course
dovetails with your ultimatist view of insurgency, in
contrast to such progressive, incremental goals and
achievements of industrial democracy as Brother
Lear is currently pursuing.
> "The demands of economic performance which society makes
> on the enterprise
> are identical with the demand of the enterprise's self
> interest: the
> avoidance of loss -- that is operation at at a surplus of
> current production
> over current cost adequate to cove the risks of the
> future. There is no . . .
Galbraith's salient point is that the profit residual is
not necessarily the focus of those who control, as
oppose to merely own, the firm. There is of course
a raft of research in industrial organization which is
testimony to this insight.
> . . .
> The interesting thing about managerialism is that,
> ideological as it was
> (is), it does make a point about the ambivalence of the
> relationship between
> management and ownership of the large industrial
> enterprise.
Finally!
Of course, now
> that we've reverted to pristine 19th century competitive
> capitalism, all
> that's behind us. We wouldn't want to ask about
> management-as-a-
> labour-process and its real subsumption under capital,
> would we?
Ask and you shall receive.
Monopolies earn rents and can share them, but they
don't have to. Capitalism getting meaner is not
necessarily
equivalent to it getting more competitive in the
conventional
textbook sense.
The Marxian/Friedmanite model of the firm flatters
capitalism with the advantages which it claims for itself
and celebrated by Drucker, namely efficiency and a
kind of ideological neutrality. In so doing it loses its
grip on a positive conception of efficiency, and reduces
planning to a purely normative exercise in folks getting
whatever they want, whatever that means. It also tends
towards exaggerating the inflexibility of the system and
anticipating historical junctures that are no more than
self-adjusting hiccups. It fashions scenarios of intense
class struggle in place of practical strategies for
survival.
Have a happy,
MBS
