The Acquisitive Society by R.H. Tawney

The conversion of industry into a profession will involve at least as great a change in the position of the management as in that of the manual workers. As each industry is organized for the performance of function, the employer will cease to be a profit maker and become what, in so far as he holds his position by a reputable title, he already is, one workman among others. In some industries, where the manager is a capitalist as well, the alteration may take place through such a limitation of his interest as a capitalist as it has been proposed by employers and workers to introduce into the building industry. In others, where the whole work of administration rests on the shoulders of salaried managers, it has already in part been carried out. The economic conditions of this change have, indeed, been prepared by the separation of ownership from management, and by the growth of an intellectual proletariat to whom the scientific and managerial work of industry is increasingly entrusted. The concentration of businesses, the elaboration of organization, and the developments springing from the application of science to industry have resulted in the multiplication of a body of industrial brain workers who make the old classifications into "employers and workmen," which is still current in common speech, an absurdly misleading description of the industrial system as it exists today.

To complete the transformation all that is needed is that this new class of officials, who fifty years ago were almost unknown, should recognize that they, like the manual workers, are the victims of the domination of property, and that both professional pride and economic interest require that they should throw in their lot with the rest of those who are engaged in constructive work. Their position today is often, indeed, very far from being a happy one. Many of them, like some mine managers, are miserably paid. Their tenure of their posts is sometimes highly insecure. Their opportunities for promotion may be few, and distributed with a singular capriciousness. They see the prizes of industry awarded by favoritism, or by the nepotism which results in the head of a business unloading upon it a family of sons whom it would be economical to pay to keep out of it, and which, indignantly denounced on the rare occasions on which it occurs in the public service, is so much the rule in private industry that no one even questions its propriety. During the war they have found that, while the organized workers have secured advances, their own salaries have often remained almost stationary, because they have been too genteel to take part in trade unionism, and that today they are sometimes paid less than the men for whose work they are supposed to be responsible. Regarded by the workmen as the hangers-on of the masters, and by their employers as one section among the rest of the "hands," they have the odium of capitalism without its power or its profits.