White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

The managerial demiurge has come to contain three trends which increasingly give it meaning and shape. As it spreads (i), its higher functions, as well as those lower in the hierarchy, are rationalized; as this occurs (II), the enterprise and the bureau become fetishes, and (III), the forms of power that are wielded, all up and down the line, shift from explicit authority to manipulation.

I. The rationalization of the corporate structure, even at the top, may not be lodged in the head of a single living man, but buried in an accounting system served by dozens of managers, clerks, and specialists, no one of whom knows what it is all about or what it may mean. The man who started the enterprise, if there ever was such a man, may long be gone. Franz Kafka has written of ‘. a peculiar characteristic of our administrative apparatus. Along with its precision it's extremely sensitive as well... suddenly in a flash the decision comes in some unforeseen place, that moreover, can't be found any longer later on, a decision that settles the matter, if in most cases justly, yet all the same, arbitrarily. It's as if the administrative apparatus were unable any longer to bear the tension, the year-long irritation caused by the same affair-probably trivial in itself-and had hit upon the decision by itself, without the assistance of the officials. Of course, a miracle didn't happen and certainly it was some clerk who hit upon the solution or the unwritten decision, but in any case it couldn't be discovered by us at least, by us here, or even by the Head Bureau, which clerk had decided in this case and on what grounds... we will never learn it; besides by this time it would scarcely interest anybody.'