Professional management class. Various major reforms toward “more efficient” management, first in manufacturing and such, then applied to knowledge work. Reduced specialization when it comes specifically to bureaucratic tasks in white collar work (everyone’s their own secretary, among other things, now—even doctors)
[edit] anecdotally, as related by people who watched the transition happen, one of the things this new management culture screwed up was management itself, especially lower and middle management. There used to be a gradient of how much time managers spent in meetings with peers and higher-ups, with the lowest ones doing very little of that and mostly focusing on the needs of their subordinates and keeping things running well—after the shift, all levels of management got sucked into a culture of meetings, meetings, meetings, most of them very low-value. Posturing and politics soaked down into lower levels of organizations so-afflicted to a much more extreme degree than before.
[edit] anecdotally, as related by people who watched the transition happen, one of the things this new management culture screwed up was management itself, especially lower and middle management. There used to be a gradient of how much time managers spent in meetings with peers and higher-ups, with the lowest ones doing very little of that and mostly focusing on the needs of their subordinates and keeping things running well—after the shift, all levels of management got sucked into a culture of meetings, meetings, meetings, most of them very low-value. Posturing and politics soaked down into lower levels of organizations so-afflicted to a much more extreme degree than before.