Technostructure

Abstract: Explores the problems in controlling and evaluating a radical process innovation in a batch manufacturing firm. Data come from interviews with individuals in various hierarchical levels and functions. The decision to adopt tended to be qualitative in nature and essentially made by two representatives of the organization's technostructure. Their major objective was to minimize the chance of disaster rather than to maximize efficiency. During implementation, quality control faced frequent, complex technical problems at the same time that there was pressure for immediate solutions. Cost accounting procedures were affected by the difficulty in developing completely objective standards. The strategies employed to solve these problems are discussed along with implications for the design of control procedures. One intriguing implication is that the characteristics of a radical new technology, along with other factors, influence the validity of the control procedures designed to evaluate it.

Abstract: One consequence of the global financial crisis has been to prompt debate over macroprudential regulation – meant to limit private risk-taking that threatens systemic stability. In this paper, we stress the roots of macroprudential ideas in the Institutionalist economics of Veblen and Galbraith in a way that highlights both unrecognised policy possibilities and underappreciated impediments to policy effectiveness, arguing in particular that regulatory success can breed overconfidence. First, we argue that while Veblen's views anticipated macroprudential arguments, they also obscured tensions between the technocratic acumen of policy ‘engineers’ and popular legitimacy. Second, we argue that while Galbraith's views similarly shaped the postwar Keynesian policy mix, they also echoed Veblen in underrating the potential for populist resentment of an intellectual ‘technostructure’. We conclude that while this analysis can be seen as highlighting an overlooked century of macroprudential debate, it also demonstrat...

Abstract: In the early twentieth-century new middle-class groups broke into the vision of social science wearing masks and costumes. Nearly a century later, ever more important in social processes, they are still largely inscrutable.' In the sociological literature these strata have been called everything and its opposite professional and managerial revolutionaries, the core of the "technostructure," new corporatistic egotists, a new class, labor aristocrats, new workers, new "petit bourgeois," new bourgeois, denizens of "contradictory class locations," parts of the collective laborer, non-productive workers, the social cement of democracy, basic threats to democracy ... and we could go on... 2 We suspect, in fact, that the variable geometry of the new middle classes in sociological discussion has as much to do with the desires of sociologists to act on the social world as to explain it.3