My comments on Bad Company: The Cult of the CEO by Gideon Haigh have just been published in Quarterly Essay along with a response by Haigh. He argues that a focus on managerialism as an expression of the interests of the managerial class/caste as a whole is out of date because there’s now a cleavage interests between top managers and ‘middle managers’.
This got me thinking that although the phrase ‘middle managers’ is used a lot, I don’t know what it really means. In the large organisations I’ve worked in, people could be classified into three main groups. There are the people who actually do the work, the managers who tell people what to do and a group in-between, consisting of skilled and experienced workers who supervise others.
Sometimes the dividing lines are fairly sharp and sometimes not, but there’s usually a pretty clear line separating the managers proper from everybody else. In the public service, for example, the dividing line is generally provided by the boundary between the Senior Executive Service and what used to be called the Third Division.
What isn’t clear to me is whether the term ‘middle managers’ applies to the intermediate group I’ve described or (as Haigh implies) to managers other than CEOs and those in their immediate circle.
In debating things like managerialism, the two interpretations have radically different implications. I would certainly agree that the last decade has been a pretty miserable one for people in my worker-supervisor category. On the other hand, as David Gordon pointed out in Fat and Mean the idea that the corporate sector moved to slimmed-down management and flat organizations in the 1990s is a myth. Gordon was writing in 1996, but the dotcom boom was characterized by even more proliferation of management to the point where some firms had more vice-presidents than programmers.
John Quiggin 
“Gordon was writing in 1996”
It must have been earlier. He died in March 1996, and had been ill.
In Australian Public Service offices in Canberra the lines are fairly clear.
As you say there’s the SES – their offices are physically guarded by executive assistants. They are allowed to use their own names for signing things, appear before Senate Estimates committees, and can find themselves quoted in newspapers.
Below them are directors. These people have offices but not executive assistants. Very often they are anonymous and faceless. Their major function is to prevent SES officers from being distracted by junior staff members or bits of paper that are not ready for signing. Directors are too busy managing their in-trays to do any work, hence they qualify as middle-managers.
Below the directors are the assistant directors. They have two jobs. First, to protect directors from junior staff members and bits of paper which aren’t ready to be tinkered with before being sent to an SES officer for signing. And second to provide directors with bits of paper to tinker with. It’s not always clear whether a particular assistant director is a manager or not – it depends on their tinkering to writing ratio.
Below the assistant directors is the class of public servant against which such elaborate protection mechanisms are necessary. An important function of management is filter out important information before it reaches junior staff members. It might seem that this elaborate structure is only necessary in order to preserve the illusion that junior staff members are ignorant and stupid and require managers in order to be productive. This, however, is a misconception.
To those who think the purpose of bureaucracy is get things done this structure might seem crazy. However it is important to understand that a major purpose of bureaucracy is to PREVENT things from happening. Is is vital that incorrect decisions are not made, that erroneous or embarrassing things are not said or published, and that money is not spent inappropriately.
The more decisions which are made, the more things which are written or said, and the more times approval is given to spend money, the more risk there is that something which is not supposed to happen will happen. And with thousands of staff on hand to do things the risk is great. Hence the need for managers – lots of managers.
Milton, you’re correct. The book was published in 1996, shortly after Gordon’s death.
Don, your comment is useful and penetrating as usual. Keep ’em coming.