The Management Explosion and the Next Environmental Crisis

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.

David Ehrenfeld examines the consequences of "the extraordinary proliferation of administration, of bureaucracy, of management, the increasing percentage of people in our society who control events but do not themselves produce anything real." He gives examples of management that has become itself a raison d'etre, grown far beyond a size appropriate to its necessary modern-day role. When management grows so large, "it appropriates and stifles the life of the society." He then gives several suggestions on how to curb managerial excess, with the admonition that "[t]o survive with the many good features of our society intact and with our environment in a liveable condition, we must solve the problem of bureaucracy before it solves itself . . ." because "management, like anything undergoing perpetual growth, will eventually bring itself under control by running out of resources."