MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION

Traditionally, manufacturing enterprises had been owned and controlled by individuals or families.

In the mid 19th century however, joint-stock companies began to emerge and over time increasing numbers of investors held a share of ownership and received a portion of the profits.

These companies no longer had a single owner and managers emerged to control business operations.

It was assumed that this new breed of salaried workers would transform the workplace: values other than profit would enter into business calculations and there would be greater harmony between workers and executives.

Since most managers have become large stock holders (and thus owners) the significance of the managerial revolution has been called into question.

The managerial revolution represents the emergence of an institutional structure inherently superior for all times and places to that of decentralized ownership and market exchange in all its forms.

Managerial revolution through which specific governments sought to control costs and increase governability in the public sector has been extended to NGOs.

The managerial revolution revisited: the moderating impact of top managers’ social class position - Donald Palmer, Michael Maher, University of California, USA 
This article draws on early sociological critiques of the managerialist thesis to develop a new conceptualization of corporate ownership and control which is used here to inform an analysis of the propensity of large corporations to complete diversifying acquisitions in the 1960s. We categorize firms on the basis of the social class position of their top managers, focusing primarily on three types of firms, those run by: established capitalist owners, new capitalist owners and autonomous professional managers. We develop theoretical arguments that lead to two sets of predictions. First, we predict that firms run by new capitalist owners and autonomous professional managers exhibited a greater tendency than firms run by established capitalist owners to complete diversifying acquisitions in the 1960s. Second, we predict that the relationship between a firm’s financial, organizational and managerial capacities to pursue diversifying acquisitions, on the one hand, and the rate at which it completed such acquisitions, on the other, was stronger among firms run by new capitalist owners and autonomous professional managers than among firms run by other types of top managers. Finally, we conduct discrete-time event history analyses of the likelihood that firms completed diversifying acquisitions in the 1960s, which generate results that are largely consistent with our predications. - soq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/3/4/385

Loss of Shareholder Control and the 'Managerial Revolution'? Anders Brostrom, The Swedish Center for Working Life 
The debate on economic democracy has to some extent centered around the role of the mandators within the enterprise. It has been an assumption since the work of Berle and Means The Modern Corporation and Private Property - was published, that the separation of ownership and control has meant a loss of control for the mandators. This article discusses that thesis and claims that the company is still in the hands of the owners through delegation and proxy. There is no such thing as a managerial revolution. - eid.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/1/1

On Ownership and Membership - Yohanan Stryjan, Stockholm and Uppsala University 
The issue of ownership occupies a central place in research on selfmanagement. This preoccupation has all but relegated other, no less central elements of self-management to a residual role. The actual contribution of ownership is examined in two groups of cases where worker ownership was grafted upon an existing organizational structure: a Swedish sample of worker-owned firms and American ESOP schemes. The findings, buttressed by a theoretical review of the mandator approach and of the managerial revolution thesis, suggest that the conventional model of the self-managed enterprise as a 'firm owned by workers', is theoretically inconsistent and yields, where followed in practice, highly unsatisfactory results. The issue is then reexamined in a theoretical consideration of the concept of ownership and of the way property rights approaches may be applied in the case of complex, indivisible assets, such as an industrial plant. Different ownership constructions are discussed, and the concept of ownership is contrasted with that of membership. It is argued that ownership constructions current among worker-owned enterprises do, in fact, represent attempts to convert ownership to membership. - eid.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/2/217

Managers after the era of organizational restructuring towards a second managerial revolution? Bill Martin 
Managers’ careers and career orientations have changed significantly since the era of organizational change that began around 20-30 years ago. This article focuses on how managers have responded to these changes. It suggests a significant change in the kinds of ‘capital’ that managers mobilize, and the uses to which they put it. At least some managers now mobilize a form of ‘social capital’ in the form of reputations that are grounded in informal networks. However, this reputational capital can be difficult to stabilise and therefore risky to hold. Managers therefore attempt to convert it into wealth - economic capital. The article illustrates these arguments using interview data from a longitudinal study of Australian managers. - wes.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/19/4/747

The Managerial Career after Downsizing: Case Studies from the `Leading Edge' 
Patrick McGovern, London School of Economics 
Veronica Hope-Hailey, Cranfield School of Management 
Philip Stiles, University of Cambridge 
This paper sets out to investigate whether the recent wave of organisational restructuring has contributed to the further decline of the internally promoted manager or produced a new model of managerial employment in large organizations. Our research, which is based on in-depth case studies of eight major British-based employers, finds no evidence of the kind of transformational change associated with the introduction of a new model. Instead, we find that the traditional model of managerial employment has been eroded rather than replaced. The most notable changes include less job security - especially for those older than fifty - more emphasis on `managing your own career', fewer opportunities for upward promotion, and an increased emphasis on lateral career moves. We conclude by arguing that this restructuring adds further impetus to the decline of the internally promoted middle manager. - wes.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/3/457

A Marx for the Managerial Revolution: Habermas on Law and Democracy Andrew Fraser 
The early work of Jïrgen Habermas stressed the corrosive effects of the state and the market on the socio-cultural life-world. There could be no administrative creation of meaning. His more recent work argues that the system can redeem itself without sacrificing the emancipatory interests of humanity. However, this shift does not represent an abandonment of the revolutionary project of critical theory. On the contrary, the communicative model of proceduralist law-making is designed to promote the revolutionary transformation of Western civilization under the auspices of managerial and administrative elites. The radical ideal of cosmopolitan democracy becomes an essential ingredient in the effective management of a complex socio-economic system operating on a global scale. The demos in Habermas's vision of radical democracy is not the people of any particular nation but humanity at large. As a consequence, the proceduralist model of law-making provides the philosophical justification for a bizarre social experiment which aims to dissociate Western nation-states from their core ethno-cultural identities. - blackwell-synergy.com

The promises of managerial revolution theory Author: Nodoushani O
Abstract: Posits that since the New Deal era, 1933-1940, the theory of managerial revolution has sparked tremendous debate concerning the governance of the USA’s large corporations. Argues that an interpretation of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, within the context of other works by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, could raise profound insights in terms of a paradigm shift concerning the governance of big corporations in contemporary economy. - ingentaconnect.com

The Managerial Revolution. Porter, John W. 
Abstract: Changing demographic, economic, social, and political conditions are forcing a managerial revolution upon the academy, resulting in an entirely new set of mechanisms being put into place to maintain credibility and survival. There is no longer any significant campus support for error in judgment. - eric.ed.gov  

E-Books