Abstract

"Organizational Syntheses, New/Professional-Managerial Classes, and the Politics of Resentment"

Lee Vinsel, Virginia Tech (leevinsel@gmail.com)

At about the same time the Organizational Synthesis literature was emerging and developing, several authors, on both the right and left, were criticizing the role of bureaucratic knowledge workers in society. On the left, Barbara and John Ehrenreich hypothesized that a “Professional-Managerial Class” was taking an ever more dominant role in culture that had an ambiguous and even conflicting and undermining relationship with the older working-class. On the right, neoconservative Irving Kristol argued that a “New Class” of condescending bureaucrats was interfering with ordinary people’s daily lives, and alt-right progenitor Samuel T. Francis passionately asserted that progressive-minded “managerial elites” were making traditional ways of life impossible. Across the political spectrum, these critics believed that the relationship between professionals and their others was one of resentment and animosity, though they had different ideas about which group held most of these negative emotions. Fascinatingly, the Organizational Synthesis literature and these critics all had shared intellectual roots in mid-20th century “Weberian” literatures on bureaucracies and large corporations, perhaps most of all the writings of John Burnham. In this talk I will explore two themes: First, whether the Organizational Synthesis can help us make sense and deepen the insights of New/Professional-Managerial Class writings. Second, the degree to which the Organizational Synthesis saw this rising hatred of the institutional forms it so closely tracked. For this latter point, I will trace Louis Galambos’s attention to the downsides of organizational culture from his first Org-Syn essay from 1970 to his 2012 book, The Creative Society – and the Price Americans Paid for It.