ABSTRACT
The modern corporation is a social structure of production; that is, it is made up of a unique relationship of different social groups in the production process itself. This is its central characteristic, much more important than its legal form, its propensity to control prices, its bureaucratic character, its addiction to up-to-date technology, or even its sheer size. The modern corporation has remade modern social structure and the modern social classes. The older classes declined and were replaced by new ones formed within the corporation. Thus there has been a radical decline in the size and importance of the pre-corporate middle or "upper middle" class whose economic role and reward came through its owning and using its own property in professional and business pursuits. The problem of managing managers or systems was equally novel and even more complex. Earlier forms of business had primarily been local or at best regional firms operating in a more or less specialized field.
