ALAN WOLFE
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Academic social scientists from both the right and left began to no–
tice the emergence of a new leadership style more than twenty years ago.
The term that came
to
symbolize this transformation was "the new
class ." There were as many variations of new class theories as there were
proponents of the concept, but most of them agreed that leadership
roles were passing to a younger generation whose power lay more in
command over communication than it did in command over substance.
There was once a time when large corporations were dominated by
production people, such as engineers, who were intimate with the prod–
ucts made by the company. They were slowly replaced by specialists in
organization itself, people who were trained to achieve objectives, no
matter what the particular objective may have been.
The success of the new class was
to
some degree related to the suc–
cess of the new left, for both were the product of the same chronology.
As Peter Berger and his colleagues have shown, new-class leadership styles
came
to
embody the look and language of the therapeutic side of new
left politics. Managers were facilitators, helping all the members of their
organization reach their full potential. They sponsored weekend retreats
in which notions of participation and sharing were exchanged.
Authoritarian styles of leadership were replaced by committee decision–
making that required consensus whenever possible. Inclusion became the
objective of the organization, as minorities and women were made to
feel at home. The new class of managers were trained at business schools
whose faculties were f:1r more attracted to leftist ideas than, say, academic
departments of ecomonics. They were comfortable talking to their
counterparts in other organizations, such as governments, foundations,
churches, and unions, for there, as well, a new class of facilitators had
emerged. The old class may have managed things; the new class managed
people.
In the 1980s, the new class came home to the universities that first
formulated the concept. Just as General Motors was once led by men
who, in their personalities, seemed to reek of General Motors, university
presidents had at one timc been closely identified with the universities
over which they presided. They were chosen in secret by small groups of
trustees who gencrally restricted themselves to alumni or f:1culty from the
institution in question. Once chosen, they remained in office for long
periods of time, usually around two decades. They were not paragons of
intellectual virtu osity; according to Thorstein Veblen they were little
different from the captains of industry with whom they liked to hobnob.
But although they usually had given up on scholarship , they also tried at
least to be familiar with the academic work that characterized their insti–
tution. From time to time, one of them might even write a book or
contribute an interesting article to a symposium on the future of the
