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Have Our Corporate Chieftains Become Expendable?

This “bossless narrative,” the University of Manchester Business School’s Matthew McCaffrey writes in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy, has actually been around for generations and, in the 19th century, helped nu…

This “bossless narrative,” the University of Manchester Business School’s Matthew McCaffrey writes in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy, has actually been around for generations and, in the 19th century, helped nurture the cooperative movement. This narrative has become “especially popular over the last thirty years,” with a “growing literature seeking to understand the unique strengths and weaknesses of bossless organization.”

“Bosslessness” can come in a variety of shapes and sizes. At the more modest end, enterprises can move in a bossless direction by eliminating management levels and “delayering” their operations. More ambitious “flattening” efforts, McCaffrey relates, can replace “traditional managerial authority” with “self- organizing teams” that “choose their own projects” and decide — democratically — the tasks their firm will pursue.

Flatter companies, McCaffery believes, “can and do succeed in the right circumstances,” and he sees his own new scholarly work as an exploratory attempt to identify those circumstances that can “encourage experimentation with bossless models.” These circumstances, he notes, can vary. In stagnating industries, for instance, “reducing management hierarchy may be the only viable strategy” for firms with “increasingly slim” profit margins.

Moves that governments make, McCaffery points out, can also “make bossless firms more feasible than they would be under conditions of no intervention.” The world’s most famous cooperative network, Spain’s Mondragon, rests on a credit union operation that made funds available to emerging new co-ops. Spanish law allowed this Mondragon credit union to pay “slightly higher interest” rates than banks, a policy that encouraged savers to use it.

Another example comes from the Netherlands where the Dutch company Buurtzorg Nederland revolves around “teams of self-organizing nurses to provide home health care across the country.” This 17-year-old company has taken advantage of “the bureaucratization and inefficiency of many Dutch health care companies” that McCaffery, a fellow at the libertarian Mises Institute, chalks up to the Dutch government’s regulation of the health care industry.

McCaffery, as this example illustrates, comes at the study of organizational “flatness” from a distinctly non-left, “free market” perspective. But his interest in “low- or no-hierarchy organizations” bodes well for attempts to create alternatives to corporations that essentially exist to “manufacture” mega-rich CEOs.

The emerging “debate about the bossless company,” McCaffery concludes, reflects a growing public skepticism “about the value of managers and hierarchies as such.” This skepticism, he adds, “involves questioning essential principles of economics and management that can justly be said to underpin much of what goes on in the global economy.”

Analyzing — and changing — that “what goes on” may well bring together some strange political bedfellows.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.


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