> Bill Bartlett wrote:
>
>> The middle manager's job is to
>> manage the owner's business in the owner's interest.
>
> Mid-level managers have to deal with unhappy customers, arrange schedules,
> keep track of office supplies, call vendors, and do a thousand other
> things. It's hard, necessary and often ill-paid work.
>
> That's very different from a scion of the Walton family living off their
> securities portfolio.
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Also:
Most large non-industrial enterprises, public and private, are very hierarchical, and it follows from this that there is a very large body of workers who are simultaneously supervised and supervise others. Sometimes their title includes "manager", oftentimes it doesn't, and frequently when it does, it has more to do with top management's dispersal of "psychic rewards" than with the exercise of real managerial authority. The grey-haired clerk in purchasing has two or three junior employees to whom she assigns duties and approves time off, maybe even some power to hire and fire. But she doesn't have what is commonly referred to as "effective" control over the policies and decisions of the enterprise. That's typically concentrated in the management committee at the top composed of department heads, and within the departments, the unit heads and maybe one or two levels below that. That's where the power lies, and it is consolidated by stock options, bonuses, and other incentives often weigh more heavily than salary.
As to the rest, if this large and rapidly growing cohort is considered part of the bourgeoisie, petit or otherwise, rather than of the working class, it makes a hash out of Marx, who forecast the growth of the working class at the expense of self-employed artisans, farmers, and other nominally independent producers. In this respect, at least, Marx has been solidly vindicated by the movement of history. It would conflict with our understanding of the labour relations sytems of capitalist states: they also, for the most part (the US is again exceptional here) regard these personnel to be workers and grant them collective bargaining rights - which you would have to regard as either extraordinarily charitable or stupid or both since Bill Bartlett is convinced these workers are really part of the employing class.
Of course, the working class, broadly speaking, is highly stratified in terms of skills and status and income and divided internally along regional, gender, racial, and other lines. This results in a wide variety of "contradictory" forms of consciousness, and it stands to reason that the higher you travel up the heirarchy, the more conflicted the self-identity and loyalty of the employees, especially the newer layers with post-secondary education and those with supervisory responsibilities. I don't think describing them as having a "petit bourgeois" consciousness is especially useful because it is apt to mislead people like Bill Bartlett, but, discounting for this, what Doug, drawing on Olin Wright, was getting at is correct. But it doesn't change their "class location", and I didn't read him as suggesting that.