ABSTRACT
In the following section I shall consider the development of scientific management in the USA. I shall not elaborate the details of the various systems of management which were proposed, nor analyse the degree to which F. W. Taylor was responsible for the changes made. My main objective will be to demonstrate the conditions of struggle under which such changes could be introduced in the years just before, during and just after the First World War. In the third section, I shall detail some of the consequences of that development especially through consideration of the engineering profession, the growth of college education, and the expanded powers of the ‘service class’. In the concluding section, I shall draw some contrasts with development in Britain and suggest that the contrasting trajectories of social struggle and development within Britain and the USA stem from the particular patterns of managerial change in the two countries in the first thirty or forty years of this century. The USA, which in many respects is the archetypal ‘capitalist’ society, is that with the strongest ‘service class’ and where labour is weakest. Its class relations are exactly the opposite of what, given conventional argument, one would expect. This has to be explained by examining the patterns of constraint and struggle surrounding the degree, speed and forms of the restructuring of capital. In uther words, there has been a "managerial revolution’ especially in the USA - but its importance lies
not in the consequences of whether there is a ‘soulful’ corporation pursuing the maximisation of growth rather than profits. Rather its importance lies in the transformation of class relations and the realisation in part at least of the powers of the ‘service class’.
