There are a couple of additional questions here, poorly and inexpertly formulated, but worth putting on the board.
Firstly, to what extent was corporate leadership with technology, and to what extent was it acting against it? If it is genuinely the case that new computing logics greatly increase the power of the top at the expense of middle-management, it seems clear that the errors of this class magnify in importance, when they make these errors. This is actually a truism - our hyperconnected world, etc, in which someone sneezes in China (or in Argentina, or Russia) and then stockbrokers in New England catch a cold.
On the other hand - is there a possibility (an old Marxist argument, this one) that existing hierarchies ("relations of production") were in effect operating against the cutting edge of a new (computerised) form of production, and thereby distorting it - so that intra-office, bureaucratic politics came to distort wider business practices.
Finally - and here is were things become strange. In theory, the new logic of power which Sennett analyses (the text is The New Culture of Capitalism) should make business more efficient, more rapid, more practical, irrespective of its human costs, such as they are, and which Sennett also draws attention to. This has not happened - the general stupidity of a company like General Motors, for instance, has become even more pronounced. How to explain this? A lag behind the technological development curve, or what?
Firstly, to what extent was corporate leadership with technology, and to what extent was it acting against it? If it is genuinely the case that new computing logics greatly increase the power of the top at the expense of middle-management, it seems clear that the errors of this class magnify in importance, when they make these errors. This is actually a truism - our hyperconnected world, etc, in which someone sneezes in China (or in Argentina, or Russia) and then stockbrokers in New England catch a cold.
On the other hand - is there a possibility (an old Marxist argument, this one) that existing hierarchies ("relations of production") were in effect operating against the cutting edge of a new (computerised) form of production, and thereby distorting it - so that intra-office, bureaucratic politics came to distort wider business practices.
Finally - and here is were things become strange. In theory, the new logic of power which Sennett analyses (the text is The New Culture of Capitalism) should make business more efficient, more rapid, more practical, irrespective of its human costs, such as they are, and which Sennett also draws attention to. This has not happened - the general stupidity of a company like General Motors, for instance, has become even more pronounced. How to explain this? A lag behind the technological development curve, or what?