The business literature says middle managers form an essential part of the company. But, really, why do companies have middle managers? Do they perform some essential task or service? Do they serve some rhetorical or ideological function? I’ll lay out some thoughts on middle managers, what they do, who they serve, and why the role exists.
History of Middle Managers
Companies didn’t always have middle managers. It’s a mostly 20th century trend, and it follows the rise of the corporation. They grew in size, and the work grew in size and complexity. Corporations had to organize the work in new ways. Whether they actually ‘had’ to do any of this is a separate issue. Let’s set it aside. They thought they had to, and that’s enough for now.
Even this starting point is a little arbitrary. It predates the 20th century. Way back in the 19th century, Marx already pointed out in Capital that companies divorce ownership from control. Whereas the owner once worked each day and barked out orders to subordinates, he (and it’s almost always ‘he’) now hires a manager (or a CEO) to do that stuff. What I’m getting at here is the birth of a professional-managerial class.
For a more 20th century focus, check out Duff McDonald’s book The Firm. He gives a history of the consulting industry, focusing on McKinsey. But getting at a history of consulting requires a history of the modern corporation and managerial capitalism. McDonald points out how this produced more complicated regulatory structures and corporate decisions. Hence the consulting industry. In turn, the consulting industry produced various (pseudo)scientific tools, budgets, strategies, and evaluative methods.
The Job
What do middle managers do, exactly?
There’s not a universal answer to this one, but the job converges on several points. And, really, conceptual analysis of ‘middle’ and ‘manager’ hits pretty close to the mark. The company wedges middle managers between two groups. On the one hand, there’s line managers (or ‘lower managers’ if you like consistency in metaphor). And on the other hand, there’s senior leadership (or ‘upper managers’ for the same consistency).
Middle managers manage in multiple directions. They manage, in the more direct sense (i.e., pass down directives, manage work and tasks), line managers, or direct supervisors of rank-and-file employees. And they manage, in what I might call the more compensatory sense (i.e., defer to, implement policies of, manage the feelings of), senior leaders.
But what does any of that mean?
Communication and Flak
In practice, this often amounts to two things. First, middle managers prevent communication between senior leaders and rank-and-file employees. Senior leaders fancy themselves ‘deciders’, in that most George W. Bush of senses. They decide what to do, middle managers massage and announce it, and rank-and-file employees do it. Senior leaders hire middle managers to understand the rhetoric of the policy and defend it against criticism. Why? So they don’t have to spend time on such things themselves.
Second, and related to the first, middle managers absorb flak from rank-and-file employees. When employees object to senior leaders, middle managers stand in the way. It’s not their primary function. In fact, it’s more a primary function of line managers. But it’s something they do. Especially when a company does unpopular things, like issue layoffs.
There’s a third thing here I haven’t stressed. And it’s what’s on the job description of most middle managers. They direct departments or divisions of a large company. And sometimes they actually do this. They might have a budget, staff, administrative assistants, and so on. However, this is rarely, if ever, their primary function in a large organization. And even when it’s a part of the job, senior leaders rarely allow them significant autonomy in their work. They follow the company line, set by senior leaders.
Profits and Middle Management
So that’s all well and good. Middle managers bolster the power of senior leaders by keeping people in line. But do they make money for the company? And do companies share those profits with middle management in the form of higher salaries or bonuses?
I’ll answer the second question first because the literature provides a clear answer. No, they don’t. At least, not usually.
In a recent article in Catalyst called ‘The Global Class War‘, Ramaa Vasudevan cites the literature on this question. She finds significant stagnation of management salaries, even middle management, even during times of higher profits and productivity. Almost all gains from profit and productivity go to the top 1% of income earners. Even many senior leaders fail to hit the 1% mark, and so middle management collects almost none of these gains.
I’m stressing this because it has implications for some internal leftist debates. Certain kinds of socialist anti-imperialists, particularly (some) Leninists and Maoists, claim there’s a ‘labor aristocracy‘ where all workers in advanced capitalist nations benefit from the (particularly extreme) exploitation of workers in less developed nations. Maybe this happened in earlier decades, but there’s little evidence it’s happening now.
I’m much less confident in any answer to the first question. Maybe middle managers boost profit via gains in productivity. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe their role in the corporation relates more to vanity or politics than to productive work, as David Graeber suggested in Bullshit Jobs. Or maybe the consulting industry drove the whole thing, as McDonald might suggest in The Firm. Hard to say.
Flattening the Hierarchy
We’re moving away from 20th century managerial capitalism. Corporate downsizing plays a key role here, and the elimination of management layers plays a key role in downsizing. Sometimes companies do this in sneaky ways. For example, some companies retain common middle management titles, e.g., Director, Senior Director, Program Manager, et al., but assign to the officeholders tasks formerly done by line managers or rank-and-file employees.
Some companies even turn to a flattened hierarchy where senior leaders and rank-and-file employees compose the entire corporate structure. I should probably put ‘flattened’ in quotes here. We’re not talking about syndicalism here, since there’s still a hierarchy and set of leaders. It’s just that leaders run a close fiefdom without managerial buffers between them and their workers.
But we shouldn’t exaggerate any of this. When companies downsize, they eliminate line managers more often than middle managers. They recognize the continued role of middle management. As long as senior leaders, particularly CEOs, retain power beyond that of boards of directors, I suspect this continues.
