MANAGEMENT'S RANKS GROW
Published by: NYT, April 14, 1983, by Karen W. Arenson

WASHINGTON, April 13 — The unusual sight of corporate managers being laid off during the recession has helped feed the notion that the ranks of managers are being thinned. But national data do not bear this out. Instead, despite two back-to-back recessions and a widely held belief that management had become swollen and top-heavy, its ranks have continued to grow.

By December 1982, there were nearly 9 percent more managers and administrators in the American economy than in January 1980, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is in sharp contrast to the nearly 1 percent decline in overall employment and the 12 percent drop in blue-collar jobs during the same period. 'Contrasting Economic Worlds'

''After all the discussion about the squeeze on middle management, the striking thing is that management has grown at all,'' said Samuel Ehrenhalt, regional commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the New York region. ''It tells us something about the contrasting economic worlds we are moving to, where some groups are going up sharply while others are plummeting.''

There is, in fact, little agreement on how to explain the increases. While some experts point to the growth in services, for example, which involve more managers, others point to problems of definition, concerning people who do not really manage others but are given managerial titles.

Part of the problem is that there simply has not been much discussion of this phenomenon, which is a surprise to most experts who had believed there had been a shrinkage in management. For example, based on his work with companies in Connecticut's Fairfield County and on conversations with executives of Fortune 500 companies, Leland I. Forst, a management consultant with A.T. Kearney Inc., recently estimated that there had been a 15 percent decline in middle management ranks, and said ''the worst is still to come.''

''We're seeing a different orientation, in which companies are trying to become more productive,'' he said. ''Even a company like I.B.M., which is trying to be quiet about it, is trying to buy people out at the middle management level.'' Incentives for Retirement

Of course, there have been reductions in the number of managers at some companies. Some managers have simply been laid off. Others, including Polaroid, Du Pont and Pacific Telephone, have offered financial incentives for certain employees to take early retirement. And many employees have.

At E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, for example, 920 professional and managerial employees among the 14,000 in the Wilmington, Del., area accepted the company's offer of one week's pay for each year on the job. At Pacific Telephone, more than 2,400 middle managers accepted the company's offer of a bonus for early retirement.

Still other companies have relied on attrition to whittle down their numbers. When Richard Schubert, a vice chairman at the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, resigned last summer, for example, he was not replaced. His duties were assumed by the other three members of the company's executive committee. Last week, the company also announced a special early retirement program for salaried employees to induce some to leave.

But as Sar Levitan, a labor economist and director of the Center for Social Policy Studies at George Washington University, notes, such examples have been blown out of proportion. 'A Big News Story'

''It's not a question of whether these people have been laid off or not; they have been,'' he said. ''But what really has happened is that we are not used to seeing a corporate officer who is making $40,000 or $50,000 a year laid off. When it happens to a few hundred of them, it becomes a big news story. When you lay off 5,000 steel workers, everyone says that's part of the recession, and they expect it.''

''Management unemployment has increased proportionately - from 2 percent to 4 percent,'' Mr. Levitan said. ''But that's not the same as going from 5 to 10 percent or from 8 to 16 percent.''

What accounts for the growth in management employment? Some experts have speculated that the shrinkage they were thinking about took place in the country's very visible ailing smokestack industries, while the growth must have taken place in the less visible but healthier sectors of the economy.

''I think you have to look at it in sectors,'' said John M. Harris, a senior vice president and managing officer for consulting services at Booz Allen & Hamilton. ''Manufacturing industries have been heavily hit, and their middle management ranks have been hit along with them. The other side of the coin is the tremendous growth in certain industries through the recession, in companies like an A.T.& T., a Citibank, a Merrill Lynch or a Prudential.'' All Segments Showed Growth

But that, too, turns out not to be quite the explanation. For what is most striking about the Labor Department statistics is that management growth stretches across all segments of the economy, including the manufacturing sector. Management has not expanded as fast in manufacturing as it has in services or transportation, but it has registered increases.

''The pattern is one of continued growth across the board,'' said Jesse Benjamin, assistant regional commissioner of labor statistics for the New York region of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. ''Or more important, there have been no declines.''

Labor and management experts offer a variety of possible explanations for the growth. Ronald E. Kutscher, associate commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, says that one thing that has helped increase the growth of managers is the shift in American business toward industries that have more managers.

For example, in the declining industries, such as primary metals and auto manufacturing, managers make up only 4 percent of total employment. On the other hand, in manufacturing businesses that are thriving, such as office and computing equipment companies and pharmaceutical concerns, administrators and managers account for 11 percent of total employment.

This means that for every 100 jobs lost in the declining manufacturing companies, on average, only four management jobs are lost, while for every 100 jobs gained in the expanding manufacturing companies, 11 management slots are created. 'Difficult to Measure'

Some experts suspect there are shifts of another sort going on within the managerial and administrative ranks that the available data do not make clear.

''Management change is a slow process and difficult to measure,'' Mr. Levitan said. ''If an airline laid off a couple of middle management people making $40,000 to $80,000, and hired some people lower down, such as computer programmers and supervisors, the numbers of managers might not even change; they might even increase.''

Mary Anne Devanna, research coordinator at Columbia University's Center of Research in Career Development, contends that another serious problem may lie in semantics. She has found in her interviews, for example, that the term ''manager'' has come to be applied to groups of people who do not really manage others, ''who may be in more of a ''coordinating function than a managerial function.''

''We're still struggling with definitions,'' she concluded. Whatever the measurement problems, the notion of growth in management generally alarms many in the business community. For unlike the conventional wisdom of 30 years ago, which held that greater depth in management was helping America to grow faster than other countries, today it is believed that multiple layers of management hinder growth and productivity. 'Too Many Layers'

''Excessive levels may be part of the problem, not part of the solution,'' said Thomas R. Horton, president and chief executive officer of the American Management Associations. ''When companies were very affluent, they developed the layered look. But companies have become inefficient now because they have too many layers. Decision-making is stifled and communications are hindered.''

Herbert R. Northrup, director of the industrial research unit at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, has a similar thought. ''I think companies got a little fat in this area,'' he said. ''There were too many people with managerial titles chasing paper. A lot of cuts deserve to be made.''

Others, however, are not so sure that the problem - if there is one -lies in an excess of managers. ''There's been lots of silly talk about thick or thin management without any talk of the function management is serving,'' said a business historian, Alfred D. Chandler of Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration.

John Kotter, another Harvard Business School professor, contends that the problem may be that organizations have become too big and unwieldy, not that there is a superfluity of managers. The Question of Size

''I do tend to worry about size,'' he said, adding that his concern extended to Government and nonprofit organizations, as well as to businesses. ''After you reach a certain scope, and so many people are involved, we don't really know how to manage. It's just a question of things getting out of control.''

Whether there are too many managers or not, many experts expect further growth. They predict that what layoffs there have been among managers are likely to be reversed as the economy improves.

''My experience is that any cutbacks have been strictly related to the economy, and are not a permanent thing,'' said Allan Cox, a Chicago executive recruiter.

Mr. Levitan concurs. ''Organizations trim for periods of adversity, not forever,'' he said. ''If and when there is a recovery, some vice president will realize he needs a couple of assistants to write his or her speeches, and the hiring will resume.''