There is an extraordinary proliferation of managers in our society, an ever increasing percentage of people who control events but do not themselves produce anything real or useful. The problem of the growth of management and its influence penetrates nearly every area of modern life. Yet after decades of pervasive overmanagement, comparatively few people understand it as a widespread destructive force.
Overmanagement is a by-product of an exploitative age in which the massive extraction and processing of natural resources have been accompanied by the release of huge amounts of surplus wealth. Managers feed on this wealth, dissipating it as management grows and rendering it unavailable for future use, somewhat like the burning of waste gases at an oil refinery. Unlike the gas flares, however, the growth of management is uncontrolled: Eventually it consumes and extinguishes the power of the society that nurtured it, as resources dwindle and wealth, wasted, declines....
If this is an indictment, it is an indictment of modern society, not management. Yet management, from being a service, can become a raison d'etre and take on a life of its own. Swelling beyond all reasonable size, it appropriates and stifles the life of society; at this point it becomes utterly counterproductive and destructive. As a result, we stand at the beginning of a new societal conflict, the successor to the Marxist-capitalist debate: the struggle of the producers of goods and services against centralized management.
David Ehrenfield, Rutgers University
Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millennium
From The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 31, 1993, p. B2.