Casey Eilbert

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: This paper considers how management thinkers and business leaders pursued corporate decentralization and reorganization in effort to become more “democratic” in the decades following World War II. In the Cold War era, with the Soviet Union a looming example of the perils of bureaucracy, Americans came to see large organizations at home – in business, labor, and government – as unfree and democratic. Concerns with “industrial society” – characterized by big, soulless, and impersonal bureaucracies – were widespread, and in the 1950s, diatribes against “the lonely crowd,” “the man in the grey flannel suit,” and “the organization man” abounded. Americans searched for a way to restore individual autonomy and democracy in a society of large organizations. Their pursuit only intensified in the 1960s as calls for “participatory democracy” became a central part of the American political landscape. Management thinkers and business leaders claimed that they had the solution. Popular management experts, most notably Peter Drucker, argued that ‘decentralization” – which dismantled hierarchies and moved discretion down the corporate ladder – was not only efficient, but also democratic, offering workers more opportunities for participation and “workplace democracy.” Business leaders eagerly adopted this form and the rhetoric of democracy that accompanied it. In doing so, they established business – not labor or government – as the most democratic sphere in the American political economic landscape. Going forward, this claim would prove an effective way to ward of intervention by government and labor – spheres they portrayed as bureaucratic and thus undemocratic. In the coming decades, when many reorganizations done in the name of “worker participation” proved to their detriment, they would be hard to contest.

2026 London

Abstract: Since the 1970s, the organizational synthesis has been a defining framework in the study of the modern United States. Its classics remain central in the historiography. Robert Wiebe’s The Search for Order has been cited 6,000 times; Alfred Chandler’s The Visible Hand nearly 20,000. But if a “synthesis” emerges in today’s literature on the modern United States, it emphasizes disorganization. In the history of capitalism, studies of the gig economy supplant those of corporate giants. In political history, we see accounts of decentralization and persistent localism. This paper historicizes the development of the organizational synthesis. It shows that a confluence of forces at midcentury – concerns about totalitarian bureaucracies abroad, an attendant interest in Weberian theory, and the wartime growth of corporations and the federal state –gave rise to cross-disciplinary studies of organizations. As these conditions evolved, so too did the organizational synthesis. As the century progressed, corporate behemoths came to seem more like dinosaurs, and downsizing shattered faith in bureaucratic inevitability and hegemony. A shift to post-Weberian theory brought more contingent accounts of organizational development which stressed “adhocracy” over bureaucracy. In the 1980s, efforts to “bring the state back in” saw new applications of bureaucratic theory – but eventually it too would search for a theory of organizations beyond the Weberian paradigm. Scholars wondered: had bureaucratic organizations dominated American life after all? Fifty years on from the organizational synthesis’ heyday, this paper considers its past and its lessons for the present day.