ABSTRACT
Corporate service staffs—the people who analyze and plan, supply knowledge, design policies, and give advice—have been growing at very high speed in most American organizations. Their growth is even faster in the nonprofit sector than in business. But since the 1950s at many major manufacturing companies, staff employment has grown five to ten times as fast as the number of “operating” people in production, engineering, accounting, research, sales, and customer service. The unchecked growth and excessive power of service staffs is considered by practically all our foreign critics to be a serious weakness of U.S. industry, and a major cause of its poor performance.
