Page 134 - Culture Society and the Media

124 CONTROL OF THE COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRIES
of that power, and the character of those limits. (Marx and Engels, 1968,
p. 188)

It is this structural strand in Marx’s thought that has provided the main impetus
behind the various neo-Marxist political economies of communication.
This same division between structural approaches on the one hand and action-
oriented approaches on the other, is also evident in the ‘theories of industrial
society’ which have provided the main counter to Marxist models of modern
capitalism.
In contrast to Marxist accounts, ‘theories of industrial society’ start with the
organization of industrial production rather than the distribution of property and
the fact of private ownership. The central argument was already evident in the
writings of Marx’s contemporary Saint Simon, who saw property as a steadily
declining source of power. As the new industrial order developed, he argued,
ownership would become less and less significant, and effective control over
production would pass to the groups who commanded the necessary industrial
technologies and organizations: the scientists, engineers and administrators. This
theme of the declining importance of ownership and the rise of property-less
professionals as a key power group, was pursued by a number of later writers.
But it found its most powerful and influential expression in Adolf Berle and
Gardiner Mean’s book, The Modern Corporation and Private Property,
published in 1932. According to their analysis, the modern corporation had
witnessed a bloodless revolution in which the professional managers had seized
control. They had quietly deposed the old captains of industry and become the
new rulers of the economic order—‘the new princes’. For Berle and Means:

The concentration of economic power separate from ownership [had]
created new economic empires, and delivered these empires into the hands
of a new form of absolutism, relegating ‘owners’ to the position of those
who supply the means whereby the new princes may exercise their power.
(Berle and Means, 1968, p. 116)

This argument made an immediate impact and was widely taken up in books like
James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, whose title provided the popular
tag by which this thesis came to be known. This idea of a ‘managerial
revolution’ in industry is still very much with us and commands support from a
number of eminent political and economic commentators, including John
Galbraith, who made it one of the major themes in his best-selling book, The New
Industrial State.

Seventy years ago the corporation was the instrument of its owners and a
projection of their personalities. The names of these principals—
Rockefeller, Mellon, Ford—were known across the land…. The men who