MANAGERIALISM 61 driving forces in material progress of society. Secondly, skilled and motivated managers are required to control the various divisions of activities implied in industrialisation. Thirdly, organisational control by management is a critical input for productive activity. Successful industrialisation depends on managerial performance. Fourthly, management is to ensure harmony out of the hierachical pattern of authority in industrial bureaucracies. Fifthly, perfect equality is impossible and undesirable. Radical changes are destructive to industrialisation. Sixthly, due to dispersal of shareholding, power is no longer exercised by owners but by highly skilled managers and the technostructure. Finally, with the emergence of a professional middle class, no bipolar class analysis is possible, Thus, management is accorded the most crucial and central place in industrial activity. The superior skill of professional managers is adduced as the justification for the prominence given to managers in the industrial system. In this context, professional managers are made to appear as the real controllers of business. Shareholders are relegated to the background. The concept of a 'soulful corporation9 is advanced to create the image that management is imbued with social responsibility rather than acting as agents of capitalists whose primary concern is profit maximisation. The plough-back of profit to finance long-term growth is cited as a social concern for the future as opposed to the shareholders' concern for quick profits. Besides, by projecting the manager as the centre of decision-making, managerialism makes class conflict appear as irrelevant, class consciousness as obstructive and dynamic changes in the system as destructive. Moreover, by playing down the contradiction between social production and private appropriation, which is the basis of class conflict in capitalist societies, the convergence theorists of "post-industrial society" have emphasised the universality of managerialism as if it were neutral between social systems. Mohinder Kumar has refuted these claims by exposing the real face of managerialism. He has addressed himself to the basic question of wheather diffusion of ownership results in devolution of real power in the hands of professional managers. Even the most popular apologists of monopoly capital like Peter Drucker lament that corporate management can never afford to become the leading elite or even the most powerful of the leading elite. According to them, the sons and daughters of the traditional power elite are anchored in positions of power. They have only assumed different titles. Under modern conditions, majority ownership is not necessary for enjoying a controlling interest in corporate business. About 10 per cent of ownership is enough for effective control. Interlocking directorships will enable owners to control the destinies of a whole range of corporate entities and satisfy their drive for accumulation, concentration and centralisation. Mohinder Kumar maintains that the argument of dispersion