What do bosses do?

I've been reading an interesting article today from Stephen Marglin of Havard challenging the notion that the benefits of industrialization lie primarily in the technological efficiency of the factory:

"A due regard for the role of economic power and the institutional constraints on the use of power are as important to understanding socialist economic development as to understanding the development of earlier economic systems. Under socialism (at least in its Soviet strain), no less than under feudalism and capitalism, the primary determinant of basic choices with respect to the organization of production has not been technology -- exogenous and inexorable -- but the exercise of power -- endogenous and resistible."