disciplined work schedules, cost reckoning, and the seeking of customers

were addressed and the solutions built into systems.14

Interorganizational consolidation was matched by functional
consolidation; an increasing number of functions were brought together
and merged in a single corporate administration. More and more formerly
independent occupations became located inside large organizations under
the “guidance” of professional managers. Earlier, businesses had
contracted for the performance of certain tasks such as sales and
distribution; during this period, they were taken over by the company. It
was a way to gain control over activities that would otherwise have a high
quotient of uncertainty, and coping with uncertainty was a principal aim of
the new forms of organization. For example, Pittsburgh Plate Glass
Company, dissatisfied with the practices of jobbers, established a chain of
its own warehouses throughout the country.15 Inventors and lawyers went
to work for the company. Public relations departments were established a
few decades later. The practice of “inside contracting,” in which foremen
were treated as independent contractors with the power to hire, fire, and
manage, gave way to central personnel functions and centralized
administration. 16 The need to coordinate different operations at scattered
sites made management a specialized occupation, and managerial skills
began to be more rewarded in business than technical manufacturing work,
especially the tasks that came to be the province of managers, internal
professionals, and clerks.17
The tools, techniques, and functions of management had to be invented,
and an occupational culture had to be put in place. The development of
titles and labels, such as “vice-president of marketing,” and names for
specialized officers emerged with the railroads in the mid-nineteenth
century, but they did not catch on with other large companies until the
twentieth.18 The first school of business at an American university was the
Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of
Pennsylvania, founded in 1884; the name provides a clue to the training
the school was intended to provide. Management as a separate field was
not introduced until several decades later at the Harvard Business School,
which itself produced the crème de la crème of the managerial elite. Titles
and schools supported the development of a new occupation.
The new career managers lacked a class position buttressed by tradition
that would provide grounds for legitimation of their authority. After all,
they were neither owners nor a traditional “ruling class.” (Reinhard
Bendix discussed the concerns about authority this evokes in Work and
Authority in Industry. 19) Managers had to seek legitimation instead in the
increasing professionalization of management, in the development of a
“spirit of managerialism” that gave ideological coherence to the control of
a relatively small and exclusive group of men over a large group of
workers, and that also differentiated the viewpoint of managers from that
of owner-entrepreneurs.20 The managerial viewpoint stressed rationality
and efficiency as the raison d’être for managerial control. Without the
power of property to back them, the new managers created and relied,
instead, on a claim of “efficiency,” in order to “justify the unilateral
exercise of power by management.” 21 Control by managers was held to
provide the most “rational” way to run an enterprise, and, as Michel
Crozier pointed out, rationality represents one of the best grounds for
challenging entrenched power groups.22 On their claims to hold the keys
to efficiency, then, and to know the “one best way” to organize work,
managers provided a basis for their ever-extending role. A review of the
origins of modern management theory shows just how “masculinized” and
paternalistic the definition of this role was. To paraphrase Max Weber’s