Management consultants insist that meritocracy required the restructuring that they encouraged—that, as Kiechel put it dryly, “we are not all in this together; some pigs are smarter than other pigs and deserve more money.” Consultants seek, in this way, to legitimate both the job cuts and the explosion of elite pay. Properly understood, the corporate reorganizations were, then, not merely technocratic but ideological. Rather than simply improving management, to make American corporations lean and fit, they fostered hierarchy, making management, in David Gordon’s memorable phrase, “fat and mean.”
From “How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class” by Daniel Markovits, subtitled “Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities.”
I do enjoy his inclusion of Kiechel’s apt Animal Farm reference.