White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

According to Edwin G. Nourse, recently head of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, ‘Responsibility for determining the direction of the nation's economic life today and of furnishing both opportunity and incentive to the masses centers upon some one or two per cent of the gainfully employed. ' The managers, as the cadre of the enterprise, form a hierarchy, graded according to their authority to initiate tasks, to plan and execute their own work and freely to plan and order the work of others. Each level in the cadre's hierarchy is beholden to the levels above. Manager talks with manager and each manager talks with his assistant managers and to the employees, that is, those who do not plan work or make decisions, but perform assigned work. Contact with non-managerial employees probably increases down the managerial hierarchy: the top men rarely talk to anyone but secretaries and other managers; the bottom men may have 90 per cent of their contacts with managed employees. In employee parlance, The Boss is frequently the man who actually gives orders; the top men are The Higher Ups who are typically unapproachable except by the narrow circle directly around them.

Down the line, managers are typically split into two types: those who have to do with business decisions and those who have to do with the industrial run of work. Both are further subdivided into various grades of importance, often according to the number of people under them; both have assigned duties and fixed requirements; both as groups have been rationalized. The business managers range from top executives who hold power of attorney for the entire firm and act in its behalf, to the department managers and their assistants under whom the clerks and machine operators and others work. The industrial managers range from the production engineer and designer at the top to the foremen immediately above the workmen at the bottom. The engineering manager and technician are typically subordinated to the business and financial manager: in so far as technical and human skills are used in the modern corporation they serve the needs of the business side of the corporation as judged by the business manager. The engineering manager, recruited from upper middle-income groups, via the universities, is assisted by lower middle-income people with some technical training and long experience.