If in these groups, and particularly among engineers and scientists, is concentrated the technical expertise required by management in modern production processes, this does not exhaust the changes wrought by the revolution in management and technique. A mass of clerical workers has come into existence whose work embraces all that was formerly handled on an informal basis in the shop itself, or on a minimal basis in the small shop offices of the past. Since management now carries on the production process from its desktops, conducting on paper a parallel process that follows and anticipates everything that happens in production itself, an enormous mass of recordkeeping and calculation comes into being. Materials, work in progress, finished inventory, labor, machinery, are subjected to meticulous time and cost accounting. Each step is detailed, recorded, and controlled from afar, and worked up into reports that offer a cross-sectional picture at a given moment, often on a daily basis, of the physical processes of production, maintenance, shipment, storage, etc. This work is attended by armies of clerks, data-processing equipment, and an office management dedicated to its accomplishment. Since there is no way to separate this work from the other administrative work of the corporation—both because work auxiliary to production is not classified and enumerated separately, and also because it is in fact so intermingled with the rest of the administrative work that it probably cannot be subjected to separate statistical accountingwork of this sort must be left for later discussion. It must await the description of other forces in monopoly capitalism, apart from the technical ones we have been discussing, which have caused shifts in the occupations of the working population.
Notes
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
Effects of Management and Technology
171