Two Patterns of Industrial Administration

Abstract

Although everyone agrees that administrative personnel are essential for a bureaucratic organization, the effect of organizational size in determining the proportion of personnel who perform administrative tasks is in doubt. From a variety of organizational settings, positive, negative, and nonexistent relationships between organizational size and relative size of the administrative component have been reported, leaving the question for organizations in general largely unanswered. Nevertheless, when a distinction is made between studies of industrial and non-industrial organizations, on the one hand, and between managerial and clerical personnel within industrial organizations, on the other, certain hypotheses are suggested.