Monopoly Capital and Capitalist Management: Too Many Managers?

Lambert, Thomas (2016): Monopoly Capital and Capitalist Management: Too Many Managers?

Abstract

The mainstream or neoclassical economics view that labor is rewarded according to its productivity has been extended to managers and management teams as justification for the levels of compensation that they receive. Additionally, the management concept of “span of management” has been used to explain the total number of and per employee number of managers in any organization along with the economics assumption that the appropriate span of management is where the marginal productivity of the last manager employed equals his/her marginal cost, or wage. On the other hand, Marxists and institutionalists hold different views of the roles and purposes of managers within organizations and attempt to explain these through either the view of managers exploiting workers on behalf of owners or the view of managers exploiting both workers and owners in order to advance their own agenda. This research note examines managerial compensation and intensity from both traditional/mainstream and alternative views by focusing on measures of managerial salaries, employee productivity, return on owners’ equity, return on assets, and rates of workers exploitation.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: bureaucracy, economic systems, managers, and productivity
• Subjects: B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B5 - Current Heterodox Approaches > B51 - Socialist ; Marxian ; Sraffian; D - Microeconomics > D2 - Production and Organizations > D24 - Production ; Cost ; Capital ; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity ; Capacity

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