"The centralization of planful reflection and the consequent expropriation of individual rationality parallel the rationalization of the white-collar hierarchy as a whole. What a single individual used to do is now broken up into functions of decision and research, direction and checking up, each performed by a separate group of individuals. Many executive functions are thus becoming less autonomous and permitting less initiative. The centralization of reflection entails for many the deprivation of initiative: for them, decision becomes the application of fixed rules. Yet these developments do not necessarily mean that the top men have less intellectual tasks to perform; they mean rather, as Henri de Man has observed, that the less intellectual tasks are broken up and transferred down the hierarchy to the semi-skilled white-collar employees, while the managerial top becomes even more intellectualized, and the unit of its intellectuality becomes a set of specialized staffs. The more those down the line are deprived of intellectual content in their work, the more those on top need to be intellectualized, or at least the more dependent they become upon the intellectually skilled" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 140-141).