The revolution of mass and scale

• Organized human activity underwent a vast and dramatic

enlargement of mass and scale in the early 20th century.
• In government: the bureaucratic mass state
• In economy: the mass corporation
• In society: the mass church, the mass universities and educational
institutions, the mass media, and mass associations that contain and
discipline the population.
• Smaller and more compact traditional societies were no longer viable.
The tendency of mass organization is to grow
• This brings it into conflict with more traditional organizations and
their ideas, values and systems of belief.
• The scale of mass organization necessitates a new managerial elite.
• The complexity of mass organization depends on highly technical
functions and skills which create this new elite.
The managerial elite
• Differ in composition, structure, mentality and interests from older
elites that presided in the 18th century and from those that ruled in
the 19th century.
• Mass organizations cannot be governed through the personal skills
and character, the legal relationships, or the status categories that
sufficed to equip the elites of the smaller organizations of earlier eras.
• Instead they rely on technical, highly specialized skills and knowledge,
acquired through formal training, and necessary for the control and
direction of mass organizations.
‘Merit’
• The ability to acquire and to use proficiently the skills necessary for
the direction of mass organizations, is the criterion by which entrance
to and ascendency within the new elite are gained.
• The new elite therefore have no interest in preserving (and in fact
have considerable interest in discrediting or abandoning) other
criteria of reward and professional and social advancement such as
status, kinship, inheritance, or adherence to moral codes, which were
the prevalent criteria in traditional elites.
• They therefore have a permanent incentive to increase scale and into
increase reliance on technical skills which increases their own power
and further diminishes that of the old elites.
Against the old order
• The persistence of traditional institutions and systems of belief
constrains and impedes the continuing growth of mass organizations
and their operations, and it is imperative for emerging elites to
challenge, discredit, and erode the moral, intellectual, and
institutional fabric of traditional society that sustains older elites and
the … ideologies on which their rule is based.
• The elites of mass organizations formulate and seek to impose new
ideologies that reflect their own interests and rationalise the
dominance, functioning, and continuing enlargement of the
structures through which they hold power.
The old ‘bourgeois elite’
• The ‘bourgeois elite’ of the 19th century: depended on small scale and
relatively non-technical organizations in the economy, state, and
culture. They made use of ideologies that legitimized and rationalised
the private, individual, localized, and diversified organizations of the
order that it dominated. In contrast the structures of mass
organization tend to be public rather than private, collective rather
than individual, centralized rather than local, and homogenizing
rather than diversified.
• This was the elite of ‘entrepreneurial capitalism’
The older ‘aristocratic elites’
• Before they were displaced by bourgeois elites in the 19th century, the
aristocratic elites ruled.
• Stressed social bonds, duty and obligations.
• These were the ‘prescriptive orders’.
The remnants
• The momentum of mass society is such that the institutional
remnants of the earlier social and political orders are everywhere on
the defensive, and often in desperate efforts to sustain their
legitimacy and influence, imitate the organizations, style, values, and
discourse of mass society.
Three kinds of mass organization
1. The mass state in government
2. The mass corporation in the economy
3. The mass organizations of culture and communication (mass media,
any and all institutions through which information is disseminated
and controlled)
Skills of the managerial elites
1. Purely technical or scientific skills involving the application of the
physical or social sciences to the economic, political, and social
activities of mass organizations.
2. Verbal and communicational skills, involving the techniques by
which information, ideas, and values are transmitted to the mass
population and within the elite itself.
3. Administrative skills, by which the structure and functioning of
mass organizations themselves are governed.
The elite holds power over society through
the managerial regime
• Although there are sometimes conflicts between its three integrated
sectors – the mass state, the economy of mass corporations, and the
mass organizations of culture – there is also an underlying unity, a
common interest and a common mentality, a consensus that is often
unspoken or assumed on what constitutes the best interests and
common goals of a society or of mankind, which interests and goals
are in fact the perceived interests and goals of the managerial elite as
a whole, expressed in terms of formulas and ideologies that
rationalize and universalises the special interests of the elite as the
general interests of the community and the world.
Managerial capitalism
• The characteristic that ordinarily distinguishes the mass corporation
from the entrepreneurial firm that predominated in the bourgeois
economic order in the 19th century is the dispersion of ownership of
the corporation into the hands of the mass of stockholders.
• Dispersion of ownership means that the owners themselves cannot
operate the corporate enterprise necessitating the hiring of
professional managers.
Owners vs. managers
• Owners are primarily interested in the increased yield of the dividend.
• Managers, on the other hand, are interested in the wellbeing and particularly in
the growth of the corporation itself, and they typically desire not to pay out
higher yields to the owners but to reinvest corporate profits in an increased
capacity for greater output and enlargement of facilities and operations.
• The goal of corporate growth, the ever increasing expansion of the mass
economic organization, has become embedded in the professional code of
modern corporate managers, and the goal corresponds to their group interests.
• The managerial class have wrested effective control over corporations from the
owners. Even if owners ‘revolt’ all they can do is end up hiring new managers.
• Owners are reduced to being the mere ‘beneficiaries’ of managerial capitalism
and thereby are assimilated into the same set of interests as the managers.
The entrepreneurial firm
• The small entrepreneurial firm is an obvious source of conflict for the
managerial elites, and so the mass corporation aims to absorb them
or drive them out of business as quickly as possible.
• This ensures that the mass economy of managerial capitalism is
oligopolistic, with the concentration of industry among relatively few
large corporations that seek to regulate prices independently of the
market.
• The emergence of a managerial economy thus challenges the
sovereignty of the market and the consumer as well as the
entrepreneurial economic structures of the old bourgeois order.
Hard property vs. ‘virtual’ property
• The old bourgeois order favoured hard currency and hard property because
private property was central to its worldview
• However, in the managerial order, there is a separation of ownership and control,
and property is thus ‘dematerialised’ leading to a more abstract conception of
property leading to inflation, unreality, at times spiralling into madness.
• Hence the managerial elite favours economies based on fiat currency and debt in
which everything is rented or borrowed, promoting consumption through credit.
• Inducing this frame of mind in the mass society is useful for the managerial elites
because it reduces opposition to public regulation of the economy, while at the
same time undermining the autonomy and power of the bourgeois and other
social forces that challenge or resist the managerial regime.
• Managerial capitalism, unlike its ancestor, entrepreneurial capitalism, is directly
dependent on the state, and the fusion of the state and the economy represents
also a fusion of the managerial elites of those sectors.
Civilizational struggle
• This conflict between managerial and entrepreneurial elites is part of
a wider struggle over moral and social codes, as well as political
structures.
• The interests of the managerial elite lie in the growth and expansion
not only of the mass corporation but also of the mass state and mass
society, which necessitates the subversion of bourgeois institutions
and values.
• To do this they must be wedded to mass media, mass advertising and
control over education to strike at the very root of the old social and
moral order.
Bourgeois values
• The bourgeois values are summarised by John Lukacs as ‘Domesticity,
privacy, comfort, the concept of the home and of the family.’ It
emphasised the virtues of hard work, thrift, prudence, and the
deferral of gratification. It regarded laziness, conspicuous
consumption and luxury, and immediate gratification of appetites as
morally evil and the root of social decadence.
• However these values prove ineffective at disciplining the mass
society, and their persistence acts as a constraint on the development
of managerial capitalism and an obstacle for the growth of mass
corporations.
Managerial values
• Must seek to foster collective conformity and diminish individualism: the individual
eccentricities of managers and workers must be subordinated to collective goals.
• Conformity is reflected in social life including dress, tastes, uses of leisure and so on.
• Seeks to breakdown the diversity of the bourgeois order to impose homogeneity which is
in the nature of mass production and mass consumption.
• Managerial capitalism must therefore articulate and sponsor an ideology of
cosmopolitanism that asserts universal identities, values, and loyalties.
• In the cosmopolitan view of man: family, local community, religious sect, social class,
sexual and racial identity, and moral character are at best subordinate considerations and
are regarded as artificial, repressive, and obsolete barriers to the fulfilment of human
potential.
• Because of all of this it seeks to destroy individualism by promoting mass hedonism and
consumption. The social function of this hedonism is not liberation but a form of
conformity and consumer discipline. In other words, get excited for the next Star Wars
film and do not question the product.