Management as Protocol: The Subsumption of Managerial Discretion into Software Architecture

A Genealogy from Sovereign Intent to Algorithmic Governance

Abstract

This generative paper traces the evolution of management from a pre-modern practice of expressing sovereign intent through ritualized human administration to a modern discipline whose discretion increasingly collapses into software configuration. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun’s theory of state formation, early-modern print culture (Eisenstein), Lessig’s “pathetic dot” and architecture-as-law, Drucker’s managerial theory, Porter’s structuralism, Lean Startup’s feedback epistemology, Galloway’s algorithmic incentives, recent amateur research on system-level view of protocols, and contemporary cryptographic governance mechanisms such as multisigs, the paper argues that management has gradually ceased to be the authoring of organizational protocols. Instead, management has become the residual interpretive stratum beneath software architectures that encode, enforce, and execute organizational logic. In this sense, managerial discretion has been subsumed: management has shifted from the act of configuring tools, to the act of inhabiting the executable intent embedded in tools. The paper concludes by identifying what remains of management—purpose-setting, exception-handling, legitimacy production—after its absorption into computational governance.

1. Introduction: Management as a Historical Channel of System Intent

Management has always been a technology for translating intent into action. Across historical epochs, what counts as “intent” and what counts as “action” has shifted, but a recognizable pattern remains: management occupies the interpretive layer that connects some upstream source of purpose to some downstream field of behavior. In pre-modern polities, “the King”—understood not as an isolated sovereign subject but as an institutional composite of court, lineage, ritual, and territorial order—generated intent that required translation through human stewards. In the print epoch, intent became textualized and standardized. In the industrial epoch, intent became bureaucratized and embedded in organizational form. In the digital epoch, intent becomes encoded in software architectures and executable protocols.

This paper argues that the nature of that interpretive layer has changed in a structurally important way. Where pre-modern and modern management practices were primarily concerned with authoring and administering protocols—rules, procedures, and policies that guided human behavior—contemporary management is increasingly tasked with inhabiting protocols that are already encoded in software and infrastructure. Put differently: managerial discretion no longer stands outside the technical system specifying how it should behave; instead, managerial discretion increasingly exists inside the system, as a constrained, parameterized subset of its operation.

The argument is genealogical and synthetic. It draws together Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical theory of state formation and group solidarity, early modern print theory (Eisenstein), Lessig’s account of architecture and “the pathetic dot,” mid- to late-20th century management theory (Drucker, Porter), the computationalization of managerial practice in Lean Startup-style feedback loops, work on algorithmic incentives (Galloway), recent protocol studies that treat protocols as “engineered arguments” structuring behavior at scale, and contemporary cryptographic governance mechanisms such as multisignature (multisig) schemes used to manage critical digital assets and smart contracts. Together, these strands support a single claim: management has gradually ceased to be the site where organizational protocols are authored, and has become instead the residual interpretive stratum under software architectures that encode, enforce, and execute organizational logic.

To make that claim intelligible and defensible, the rest of this introduction has three tasks. First, it must define the key concepts and ontological commitments underlying the thesis. Second, it must distinguish the proposed argument from neighboring claims—particularly from simple technological determinism or “robots will replace managers” narratives. Third, it must situate the argument in existing literatures on management, governance, and protocols and outline the structure of the paper.

1.1. From Sovereign Intent to Encoded Intent

The first axis of the argument concerns intent: who or what is understood to be “wanting” something on behalf of the collective, and how that wanting is articulated.

In pre-modern political formations, Ibn Khaldun’s concept of ‘asabiyyah—group solidarity or cohesion—helps us see sovereignty as a systemic rather than merely personal phenomenon. The King embodies and channels a pre-existing cohesion that arises from kinship, tribal alliance, and shared struggle. Intent is generated at the level of this system and personified in the figure of the ruler. Management in this context is the practice of mediating between systemic intent and local circumstances: governors, stewards, viziers, and scribes interpret and apply the King-system’s will across a heterogeneous territory.

With the advent of print, as Eisenstein shows, intent takes on a new material form. Royal edicts, legal codes, theological doctrines, and administrative procedures become standardized, reproducible, and portable. The King-system’s intent is no longer only embodied in ritual and person, but also inscribed in text—a medium that stabilizes meaning and allows it to circulate beyond the immediate presence of authority. Management becomes a literacy-based craft: a matter of reading, interpreting, and enforcing texts that claim to speak on behalf of sovereign intent.

Industrialization and the rise of the modern corporation introduce still another form of intent. Here, intent is located in the “theory of the business,” to use Drucker’s phrase: the underlying set of assumptions about environment, mission, and core competencies that justify and orient organizational activity. Management is tasked with articulating objectives, designing structures, and mobilizing resources in light of this theory. Strategy, especially in Porter’s structuralist formulation, adds a further twist: intent is now partially defined by the environment itself, as firms position themselves relative to industry structure and competitive forces. Intent becomes both endogenous (issued by leadership) and exogenous (shaped by markets and institutions).

The digital epoch does not abolish these earlier forms of intent, but it adds a new one: encoded intent. In contemporary organizations, significant parts of “what we are trying to do” are embodied in software architecture: in the schemas of databases, the conditions of access-control systems, the logic of workflows, the parameters of machine learning models, and the consensus rules of distributed ledgers. These do not simply reflect managerial decisions; they increasingly constitute what it is possible for the organization to intend and enact. The practical meaning of “we will approve any transaction that meets criteria X” is no longer an instruction; it is a piece of code.

The central question, then, is how management’s role changes as intent migrates from embodied rulers to texts, from texts to bureaucratic forms, and from bureaucratic forms to executable code.

1.2. Management as Interpretive Layer

The second axis concerns management itself. To avoid equivocation, this paper adopts a deliberately narrow and functional definition:

Management is the set of practices by which a collective interprets an upstream source of intent and shapes downstream patterns of action accordingly.

This definition is deliberately agnostic about formal titles (managers vs. non-managers) and organizational charts. It instead emphasizes management as an interpretive and mediating function. Three elements are built into this definition:

1. Upstream Source of Intent. This might be a King-system, a constitutional order, a corporate board, a founder’s mission, a regulatory regime, or a protocol specification. What matters is not the metaphysics of the source, but the fact that it is experienced as authoritative: something the organization “ought” to align with.

2. Downstream Field of Action. This consists of the actual behaviors, decisions, workflows, and interactions that constitute the organization’s life: how resources are allocated, how conflicts are resolved, how work is sequenced, how risks are managed.

3. Interpretive Mediation. Management is situated between these two poles. It interprets intent (what are we trying to do?), translates it into rules and structures (how should we do it?), and adjusts practice in response to feedback (is it working?).

In Drucker’s familiar vocabulary, this involves “doing the right things” and “doing things right”; in more contemporary language, it involves strategy, coordination, and adaptation. But in all cases, management stands in a relation of translation between some source of “ought” and some field of “is”.

This translation is never neutral. It involves:

• Discretion: the use of judgment in ambiguous situations.

• Selection: choosing which constraints to impose and which to relax.

• Narration: framing decisions in ways that secure legitimacy.

• Temporalization: sequencing actions over time and regulating tempo.

For much of the history of organized life, these functions were embodied in humans: magistrates, officers, executives, project leads. The paper’s claim is not that these people disappear, but that the location of discretion, selection, narration, and temporalization has changed as more of these functions are embedded in technical systems.

1.3. Protocols, Policy, and Software Architecture: An Ontology

The third axis concerns the ontology of protocols, policy, and software architecture that underpins the subsumption claim.

For the purposes of this paper:

• Protocol refers to an engineered argument that coordinates multiple actors toward repeatable outcomes under specified conditions, stabilizing tensions necessary for collaboration. Protocols can be social (etiquette, legal procedure), technical (TCP/IP, cryptographic handshakes), or organizational (approval chains, escalation paths). Protocols constrain behavior by structuring the conditions under which actions are possible or valid.

• Policy is a textual or symbolic representation of desired constraints and procedures. Policy says “what should happen” and “under what conditions,” in human-readable form. It is the traditional vehicle through which management expresses intent and attempts to shape behavior.

• Software architecture is the arrangement of data structures, control flows, interfaces, and execution environments that determines how a computational system behaves under varying inputs. When policies are implemented as software, architecture becomes a dominant medium through which constraints are enforced.

• Configuration is the parameterization of architecture: the selection of values, thresholds, roles, and toggles that determine how a given architecture behaves in a specific context (who can do what, when, and how fast; which transactions require approval; which models are used; which chains of authority are valid).

The contemporary organization routes more and more of its “oughts” not through free-standing policy documents, but through the interplay of protocol, architecture, and configuration. Consider, for example, the shift from a written “four eyes” policy for financial transfers, to a multisig smart contract that will not execute unless multiple keys have signed within a specified window. The protocol logic—the engineered argument about who must agree and under what conditions—is no longer primarily a matter of managerial discretion; it is embedded in code and executed automatically when conditions are met.

In this ontology, management historically operated at the level of protocol and policy, deciding which procedures should govern action and how they should be described. Today, much of that work is offloaded to software architects, product teams, external vendors, regulators, and even community governance systems. Management increasingly encounters protocols as given: as a landscape of constraints to navigate rather than a malleable clay to shape.

This is what is meant by subsumption: managerial activity is increasingly structured from below by architectures and protocols not designed by the manager, and often not directly modifiable by them. Lessig’s familiar claim that “code is law,” and his depiction of the individual as the “pathetic dot” constrained by law, market, norms, and architecture, are instructive here: the manager is no longer the primary author of architecture, but a constrained actor within it.

1.4. What This Thesis Does Not Claim

Given the strength of the subsumption thesis, it is important to distinguish it from more simplistic or deterministic claims.

First, the argument is not that software replaces management. There is no claim that organizations no longer require people to interpret intent, handle exceptions, or maintain legitimacy. The later sections of this paper are explicitly concerned with what remains of management after substantial parts of its traditional remit have been absorbed by technical systems.

Second, the argument is not that technology has a single, inevitable trajectory. The genealogy presented here is selective: it traces one line of development—the increasing encoding of organizational protocols—without denying the persistence of older forms or the possibility of counter-movements. Print did not end oral tradition; bureaucratic forms did not end patronage; software will not end politics.

Third, the argument is not that software systems possess agency in the same sense that humans or institutions do. When this paper speaks of software “configuring” management, it is shorthand for a more complex process in which upstream decisions by founders, boards, legislators, regulators, architects, and communities are crystallized into architectures that then constrain the options available to managers. The subsumption is mediated: code is not an independent political actor, but a medium through which political choices become materially entrenched.

Finally, the argument is not merely rhetorical. It aims to show that something substantive changes in the distribution of discretion, temporality, and memory when organizations move from human-administered protocols to software-executed protocols. This is not simply “the same thing, now done with computers.” It is a restructuring of where and how management happens.

1.5. Situating the Argument and Structure of the Paper

This paper stands at the intersection of several literatures:

• Political and historical sociology, via Ibn Khaldun’s analysis of dynastic cycles and group cohesion, and via work on maritime power and early modern state formation.

• Media history, via Eisenstein’s account of the printing press as a technology that transforms the stability and circulation of texts.

• Management and strategy theory, via Drucker’s articulation of managerial tasks and “the effective executive,” and Porter’s structuralist approach to competitive positioning and industry analysis.

• Entrepreneurship and innovation, via Lean Startup’s view of organizations as learning systems governed by feedback loops.

• Law and technology, via Lessig’s articulation of architecture as a regulatory modality and the “pathetic dot” subject to multiple overlapping constraints.

• Software and protocol studies, drawing on recent work that treats protocols as world-shaping “engineered arguments,” and on the practical implementation of governance logics in cryptographic multisig systems.

What this paper contributes is a unifying frame that treats management as a historically contingent channel for expressing system intent, and shows how that channel has gradually shifted from being primarily human and textual to being increasingly architectural and computational. It offers a conceptual vocabulary—intent, management, protocol, architecture, configuration, subsumption—that can be used to analyze contemporary organizations in which managerial discretion appears both everywhere and nowhere: everywhere in the rhetoric of leadership, and nowhere in the actual mechanics of execution.

The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 reconstructs management in pre-modernity, focusing on Ibn Khaldun’s King-system and early maritime and fiscal infrastructures. Section 3 examines the print and industrial epochs, where management becomes first textualized and then bureaucratized, drawing on Eisenstein, Drucker, and Porter. Section 4 traces the computationalization of managerial practice through Lean Startup, Galloway’s work on algorithmic incentives, and the emergence of flexible, networked organizational forms. Section 5 presents the subsumption thesis directly, using contemporary examples such as multisig protocols to show how managerial discretion collapses into software configuration. Section 6 identifies what remains of management—purpose-setting, exception-handling, legitimacy production—after this absorption. Section 7 concludes by considering the normative and practical implications of treating management as the human interface of protocolized intent.

With this conceptual and ontological groundwork in place, the paper can now turn to its first historical moment: management under the King-system, where intent is sovereign but not yet encoded.

2. Management in Premodernity: The King as System

If management is, at its most abstract, the practice of translating an upstream source of intent into a downstream field of action, then premodern polities give us a first, relatively “unencoded” version of that structure. There is an authoritative source of intent—“the King”—and there is a heterogeneous, spatially distributed set of actions: tax collection, military campaigns, irrigation, trade, justice, ritual. Between them lies a set of human roles and routines that we can, without anachronism, describe as management.

This section reconstructs that world in terms of the ontology introduced in the introduction—intent, management, protocol, architecture—without retrofitting it with modern categories like “firm” or “software.” The goal is not to pretend that medieval empires ran SAP, but to show that they already exhibit the pattern the paper cares about: a system-level source of intent, a network of proto-protocols, and a managerial layer whose discretion is large precisely because protocols are not yet mechanically enforced.

2.1. Ibn Khaldun’s ‘Asabiyyah: Intent as a System-Level Property

Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah is one of the clearest early articulations of sovereignty as something more than the will of a single individual. Dynasties rise, he argues, on the basis of ‘asabiyyah—group solidarity—rooted in kinship, shared hardship, and religious or tribal identification. The “King” is not simply a charismatic leader at the top of a chart but the personification of a system-level cohesion.

In the terms of this paper, ‘asabiyyah functions like an underlying coordination protocol. It specifies, often implicitly:

• who owes loyalty to whom,

• which claims of authority are legitimate,

• which obligations are binding,

• how far coercion can be pushed before it fractures the group.

This protocol is not written down as such, but it visibly structures behavior. When Khaldun describes how nomadic groups with strong ‘asabiyyah conquer more sedentary, decadent polities, he is describing a protocol clash: one system of solidarity and obligation overriding another.

Management in this setting is the work of those who mediate between the King-system’s ‘asabiyyah-derived intent and the practicalities of governing territory. Governors, tax-farmers, viziers, judges, and military commanders all act as interpreters of what the sovereign system “wants” in particular contexts. Their tools are:

• oral commands and written decrees,

• customary law and religious jurisprudence,

• local knowledge of terrain, kinship ties, and factional balances.

They operate in a world where the source of intent is systemic, but the expression of that intent is improvisational. There is no central machine into which one can encode rules; management is the machine.

2.2. The King as System, Not Individual

Treating “the King” as a system rather than a person is not a mere analytic flourish; it matters for how we understand management.

The King-system consists of at least four intertwined elements:

1. Court: the immediate milieu of advisors, favorites, rivals, clerks, and guards through which access to the sovereign is mediated.

2. Lineage: the dynastic structure, including succession rules, marriage alliances, and kin-based patronage networks.

3. Ritual: the ceremonial and religious practices that make sovereignty visible and legitimate (coronations, feasts, religious festivals).

4. Territorial Order: the administrative division of land into provinces, marches, fiefs, or other units, each with its own local power structure.

These components together generate intent. A decision to raise a new tax, wage war, or build a canal is rarely the product of a solitary sovereign’s whim; it emerges from court politics, dynastic considerations, religious obligations, and material constraints. Management, in this context, is the way those decisions are:

• communicated outward,

• translated into specific instructions,

• adapted to local conditions,

• and monitored (loosely) through reports, tribute flows, and rumors.

The King-system does not contain a single “policy document” specifying how tax farmers in province X should deal with drought. Instead, it contains a set of customs, precedents, and pragmatic compromises that must be interpreted anew in each case.

The ontology from the introduction maps onto this world as follows:

• Intent: the emergent properties of the King-system (dynastic survival, religious duty, expansion, prestige).

• Management: the practices of governors, stewards, and intermediaries who interpret that intent.

• Protocol: customary procedures, ritual sequences, and recurrent administrative routines (how to collect taxes, how to convene a court, how to musters troops).

• Architecture: the physical and institutional infrastructure—roads, ports, fortresses, markets, temples—that make certain actions possible and others impossible.

Notice what is absent: policy as a standardized, widely reproduced textual layer, and software architecture as an executable substrate. That absence is precisely what gives premodern management such wide discretionary bandwidth.

2.3. Premodern Protocols: Rituals, Customs, and Administrative Routines

Despite the lack of code, premodern states are not protocol-free. They have rich, highly structured procedures, but these are:

• embodied in human memory and practice,

• enforced through social sanction and violence rather than mechanical constraint,

• locally varying and context-sensitive.

Examples include:

• Judicial protocols (who speaks first, how witnesses are examined, how oaths are taken).

• Fiscal protocols (how often taxes are collected, in what form, by whom).

• Military protocols (how levies are raised, how command structures work, how plunder is distributed).

• Ritual protocols (the order of operations in coronations, festivals, sacrifices).

In the language of recent protocol research via Summer of Protocols, these are still “engineered arguments”—structured sequences that, when followed, yield predictable outcomes and embed particular tensions (e.g. between central authority and local autonomy). But they are not yet hardened into media that are stable across time and space. They depend on:

• the memory and skill of specific officials,

• the continuity of oral and scribal traditions,

• the enforcement capacity of local power-holders.

Management, here, is almost indistinguishable from protocol execution itself. To “manage” a province is to be the protocol: to know who must be consulted, which rituals must be observed, which exemptions can be granted, and how far one can stretch custom before it fractures.

Two consequences follow:

1. Protocols are plastic. Local managers can deviate from them without immediate, system-wide breakdown. The King-system might not even find out.

2. Discretion is high. Since there is no external substrate that “refuses to execute” a non-conforming action, enforcement is relational and political, not mechanical.

This is the opposite of the world in which a multisig contract simply will not transfer funds unless the signature threshold is met. The “if–then” logic exists, but it resides in social expectations and the threat of sanction, not in code.

2.4. Sea Power, Distance, and the Extension of Managerial Reach

The premodern management problem intensifies when polities scale over long distances. Sea power—control over maritime routes and fleets—is important here not only as a military or economic asset, but as an early form of infrastructural architecture.

A maritime empire faces a fundamental tension:

• It wants to project intent across oceans (collect tribute, enforce monopolies, wage war).

• It must rely on far-flung agents whose incentives are only loosely aligned with the center.

The tools available to manage this include:

• standardized coinage (for paying troops and collecting taxes),

• navigational charts and port registries,

• convoy systems and signaling protocols,

• chartered companies with delegated authority.

These are all protocolic devices in the sense used here: they structure who may do what under which conditions. However, their enforcement is still human. Captains, governors, and factors can:

• falsify records,

• delay or divert shipments,

• collude with local elites,

• ignore instructions in the face of storms, disease, or mutiny.

Sea power extends the reach of the King-system, but it also magnifies the reliance on management as an interpretive, discretionary practice. A message might take months to cross an ocean; decisions must be made on the spot. The King’s intent cannot be “encoded” in a way that fully determines which actions are taken at the edge.

From the perspective of this paper’s thesis, this is a world in which:

• Architecture (ships, ports, routes) extends potential action space,

• Protocols (convoy rules, trading charters) try to constrain that space,

• Management (local agents) mediates between protocol and reality with high discretion.

The contrast with contemporary software-based coordination—where messages travel instantly, and protocols can be enforced at the point of action—will become important later.

2.5. Fiscal Administration and Early Information Systems

Another way to see premodern management as a precursor to encoded governance is to look at fiscal administration: censuses, land registries, tax rolls.

These are, in effect, early information systems:

• They define the unit of account (household, plot, parish, village).

• They specify categories (taxable vs. exempt, noble vs. commoner, irrigated vs. dry land).

• They enable the center to see and therefore to govern.

The classic point (later formalized by James Scott) is that these abstractions are always partial and schematic. They never fully capture local complexity. Management, again, resides in the gap between the registry and the terrain:

• Tax collectors decide how strictly to apply the categories.

• Local elites negotiate exemptions and favors.

• Governors may adjust demands in response to harvest failures or unrest.

If we shoehorn this into the later ontology:

• The registry functions like a database schema.

• The categories are akin to data types and enumerations.

• The assessment and collection routines are proto-protocols.

• The officials are the execution environment—human CPUs interpreting the schema and deciding what to do.

Crucially, there is no way for the registry itself to refuse a non-compliant transaction. A tax forgiven off the books still “executes” in the world; the ledger is updated, if at all, after the fact. Enforcement remains social, not computational.

2.6. Limits of Premodern Management: Bandwidth, Latency, and Memory

From the perspective of later sections, what matters most about premodern management is not its color or romance but its limitations. Relative to what becomes possible with print and, later, software, premodern management suffers from:

• Limited bandwidth: Orders and reports travel slowly and sparsely; much of what happens never reaches the center.

• High latency: By the time information arrives, conditions have changed; decisions are often retrospective or symbolic.

• Fragile memory: Records can be lost, falsified, or destroyed; institutional memory depends on specific lineages of scribes and officials.

• Idiosyncratic execution: The same instruction can be applied differently in neighboring districts; “policy” is more aspiration than guarantee.

These constraints force management to be deeply local and embodied. The interpretive layer is thick because the system cannot be reliably specified or monitored from above. Even when written orders exist, their force is conditional on:

• the credibility of future punishment,

• the availability of alternative patrons,

• the degree of ‘asabiyyah binding local elites to the center.

From the vantage point of the subsumption thesis, this is a world in which management is not yet subsumed because there is nothing to be subsumed into. There are protocols, but they are:

• non-standardized,

• non-automated,

• easily overridden by discretion.

There is architecture, but it is physical and infrastructural, not computational. It constrains what can be done (you cannot send grain to a port that does not exist), but it does not encode rules of behavior in the strong sense that interests this paper.

2.7. Premodern Management as Baseline: Maximum Discretion, Minimal Encoding

We can now summarize the premodern condition in the vocabulary established in the introduction:

• Intent is systemic (King-system, ‘asabiyyah), but its expression is mediated through human and ritual channels.

• Management is a thick, high-discretion interpretive layer; governors and officials are both protocol designers and protocol executors.

• Protocols exist as customs, rituals, and routines, but are plastic, varied, and loosely enforced.

• Architecture is infrastructural (roads, ports, forts), constraining possibilities without encoding logic.

• Policy, in the modern sense of standardized, widely disseminated textual specification, plays a relatively minor role; where texts exist, their interpretation is heavily contextual.

This is the baseline against which later developments must be measured. The subsumption thesis claims that, over time, more of what premodern officials did with their judgment, memory, and relationships will be done by encoded systems whose logic is fixed ahead of time. To see that shift clearly, we first need to understand how intent itself becomes more stable and portable with print, and how management begins to move from being the protocol to administering the protocol.

3. Modern Management: From Policy to Organizational Architecture

If premodern management is best understood as a thick layer of human interpretation between a systemic source of intent and a recalcitrant world, modern management can be seen as a gradual thinning and formalization of that layer. The same basic problem remains—how to turn “what we want” into “what happens”—but the tools change. Intent is no longer carried primarily by persons and rituals; it is increasingly carried by texts, procedures, charts, and, eventually, designs of organizational structure. Management moves from being the protocol to authoring and administering protocols, and then to designing the architectures within which protocols run.

The turning point is not a single event but a series of overlapping transformations: the stabilization of text through print, the rise of bureaucratic states, the emergence of the modern business corporation, and the articulation of management as a distinct field of knowledge. Together they tighten the coupling between intent and action, not yet by encoding logic in machines, but by making policy and structure capable of exerting force in their own right.

3.1. Print and the Textualization of Intent

The introduction already hinted at how the printing press alters the material basis of intent. In a manuscript culture, royal edicts and legal codes are rare, expensive objects. They exist as singular artifacts, subject to copying errors and local glosses. Meaning is stabilized, if at all, through the authority of those who speak on behalf of the text: priests, judges, interpreters. The protocol is still mostly in people.

Print does not change human fallibility, but it does something else: it makes identical copies of long texts cheap and abundant. Law codes, administrative manuals, religious doctrines, and commercial regulations can now circulate in hundreds or thousands of copies with a high degree of textual fidelity. The King-system’s intent acquires a new medium of persistence. It can be consulted, cited, and contested at a distance, outside the immediate presence of sovereign power.

For management, this has two consequences. First, there is now a layer of public reference that stands between the ruler and the official. A governor or judge can point to written law, to codified procedures, and claim that their action is not merely an interpretation of the King’s will but an application of a rule that exists independently of both of them. Second, the center gains a new way to extend its reach: not by sending more trusted persons, but by sending more identical texts. The administrative equivalent of a protocol specification—the detailed instructions for how to handle taxes, trials, or trade—is now reproducible as a book or pamphlet.

The protocol in this phase remains human-executed, but it is increasingly textually specified. Management becomes, in part, the craft of reading and writing rules. The interpretive layer is still thick; texts do not interpret themselves. But the character of interpretation begins to change. Where the premodern steward improvised within a fog of unwritten custom, the modern official must increasingly reconcile their judgment with a written rule that others can read.

The ontology from the introduction shifts accordingly. Intent is still systemic, but it is now articulated through documents that function as policy. Protocols, once embodied in custom, acquire textual scaffolding. Architecture is still physical and institutional, but it now includes archives, chancelleries, and standardized forms, all of which support the storage and retrieval of policy. Management is no longer indistinguishable from the protocol; it is the layer that applies and occasionally bends a protocol that has been set down elsewhere.

3.2. Bureaucracy and the Birth of Policy as a Governing Medium

By the time modern bureaucratic states take shape, this textualization has gone further. The state becomes an organization whose operations are defined not merely by who holds office, but by impersonal procedures. Offices are described by their functions; appointments are made according to formal criteria; decisions are recorded in files. Under such a regime, policy is not just an opinion of the sovereign; it is a standing order with a file number.

In bureaucratic settings, management is defined by its relationship to policy. A manager is someone who:

• helps produce policy (by drafting, revising, and recommending rules),
  
  

• applies policy (by making decisions consistent with it),
  
  

• and monitors policy (by checking whether subordinate decisions align with it).
  
  

The protocols that matter most are now these formal procedures. They are recognizable in the mode of description that eventually surfaces as “standard operating procedure”: if situation X arises, follow steps 1–5; refer to form Y; escalate to office Z if condition W holds.

From the perspective of the thesis, this is a crucial intermediate stage. Protocol is no longer purely emergent and customary; it is deliberately authored. That authorship is a managerial activity. Management is still inside the protocol in the sense that its actors execute and interpret rules, but it is also increasingly above the protocol: it designs the very sequences it later administers.

Architecture, in this world, is still a matter of offices, departments, budgets, and reporting lines. It constrains behavior by specifying who reports to whom, who signs what, and who controls which resources. Yet its logic is still largely expressed in policy documents. There is no clear separation between the rule and the structure that enforces it; the same memo that defines a process often defines the authority to carry it out.

This is the world in which the phrase “policy implementation” makes sense. The protocol exists as text; management implements it through human beings in offices.

3.3. The Corporate Form and the Professionalization of Management

The rise of the modern corporation intensifies this dynamic and adds a new element: the insistence that management is a distinct function, not merely a property of particular offices. Railroads, industrial conglomerates, and later multinational firms make it impossible for owners or rulers to oversee every important decision themselves. They require a class of people whose job is to coordinate others. Out of this requirement, management emerges as a profession.

In that context, the work of figures like Drucker is revealing. Management is no longer merely the administration of policy; it is defined as a set of tasks such as defining the mission, setting objectives, organizing work, motivating and communicating, measuring performance, and developing people. These tasks are explicitly framed as a kind of applied reasoning: the manager is one who decides “what is right for the enterprise,” then organizes efforts to achieve it. Management is described as a social function, but it is also increasingly framed as a discipline, a body of knowledge that can be taught and improved.

The crucial move for this paper’s purposes is that management theory begins to insist on a distinction between policy and management judgment. Policy, in this literature, is a tool; it is something managers use and create. A good manager does not merely follow existing rules; they are expected to design better ones. The organization is treated as a kind of machine whose settings can be adjusted through carefully crafted policies and structures.

This creates a new ontology of control. Intent resides in the “theory of the business”—the enterprise’s underlying model of its environment and purpose. Management interprets this theory and expresses it in policy and structure. Protocol is now something one engineers. Architecture is the arrangement of people, roles, and processes that makes this engineering effective or not.

Management, in this high-modernist moment, stands at the apex of the protocol hierarchy. It is the author, the designer, and the supervisor of the rules that others follow.

3.4. Strategy and Structure: Porter and the Architectural Turn

While management theory is codifying itself as a profession, strategy theory is transforming how organizations think about their own architecture. Porter’s work treats firms as bundles of activities embedded in industry structures. The firm’s performance depends on how it positions itself relative to competitors, buyers, suppliers, substitutes, and potential entrants. Competitive advantage arises from configurations of activities that are difficult to imitate.

In this language, policy is no longer the primary object; structure and configuration are. The manager’s job expands from defining what should be done inside an existing architecture, to shape the architecture itself: to decide which functions to integrate, which to outsource, which markets to enter, and how to link activities so as to produce a particular cost or differentiation profile.

Organizational design becomes an explicit managerial concern. Hierarchies, functional groupings, divisional structures, matrix organizations, and later networked forms are all answers to the question: how should we arrange our architecture so that the protocols we rely on will generate the outcomes we want?

This marks a second step in the movement from policy to architecture:

• first, policy articulates procedures within more or less given structures;

• then, architecture itself becomes a managerial variable, something to be designed and redesigned.

Management now operates at two levels of protocol. At the lower level, it defines specific rules and processes. At the higher level, it designs the frames within which rules and processes make sense: the boxes and lines of the organization chart, the division of responsibilities, the control systems that monitor performance. Protocol in this phase is still textual and human-executed, but it is tightly linked to a deliberate architecture of roles and flows.

Put differently, modern management starts to understand itself as world-building. It no longer just “runs” a given apparatus; it constructs and reconstructs the apparatus itself.

3.5. The Organization as a Machine for Protocol Execution

From the vantage point of the subsumption thesis, what matters about modern management is not only that policy and architecture are now objects of deliberate design, but also that organizations begin to imagine themselves as machines designed to execute protocols reliably.

The language of “systems” and “control” becomes ubiquitous. Budgets are control systems for financial flows; production schedules are control systems for time; HR policies are control systems for people. Performance measurement brings feedback into the picture: managers set targets, observe deviations, and adjust processes accordingly. The organization is framed as a feedback-controlled system whose behavior is steered by policy and metrics.

This is where the conceptual proximity to software begins to appear. Long before anyone writes code to automate a workflow, managers are already behaving as though they are designing algorithms:

• If sales fall below threshold T, then trigger cost-cutting protocol P.

• If defect rate exceeds threshold R, then launch quality-improvement protocol Q.

• If project risk exceeds rating X, then escalate to committee C.

These “if–then” structures remain in prose, but they are clearly structured as conditional logics. The organization as imagined in mid-century management theory is already an abstract machine for executing protocols. It just happens that the machine’s components are paper, people, and physical artifacts rather than code.

It is not yet true that management is subsumed into software. But it is true that management has subsumed large parts of organizational life into its own protocolic imagination. The manager sees themselves as the designer of procedures and structures that will execute intent without constant supervision. The ambition is to create a system that, once set up correctly, will behave as intended.

3.6. Limits and Tensions of the Policy–Architecture Regime

At this point in the genealogy, it might be tempting to declare victory on behalf of management. It has moved from being the improvisational practice of local notables to being a self-conscious discipline that designs policy and architecture. It has acquired a professional identity and a literature. It describes itself as the mind of the organization, the locus where the “theory of the business” is formulated and enforced.

Yet the same forces that empower management also expose its limitations. The more organizations rely on formal policy and deliberate architecture, the more they discover:

• that policies are imperfect representations of intent, constantly needing revision;
  
  

• that structures designed for one environment become rigidities in another;
  
  

• that feedback systems encourage gaming and metric fixation;
  
  

• that local contexts still resist standardization, requiring discretion at the edges.
  
  

In other words, modern management discovers that its own protocols have become a source of friction. Users push back, work around rules, or comply in ways that harm the underlying purpose. Structures ossify. Policies proliferate. The apparatus gains a life of its own.

This is where the seeds of the next transformation are sown. If organizations are machines for executing protocols, and if policy plus architecture are the mechanisms by which those protocols are expressed, then any technology that can execute protocols with greater precision and lower friction will be attractive. When software appears as such a technology—as a medium in which if–then logics can be encoded and run automatically—the managerial imagination is already prepared to see it as a natural extension of what it has been trying to do all along.

The decisive shift, however, will be subtle and far-reaching. In the modern period, management is still the author of the protocol and the architect of the structure. Software is, at first, merely a tool that helps implement management’s designs. In the next phase, this relationship inverts. As protocols move from prose into code and as architectures are inscribed into software systems, management finds itself increasingly inside the structures it once designed from the outside.

4. Protocolization and the Rise of Software as Manager

The transition from modern management to software-mediated management is often narrated as a story of automation: a slow replacement of clerks with spreadsheets, schedulers with workflow engines, and supervisors with dashboards. But this framing misses the deeper transformation at work. What software brings is not simply speed, accuracy, or convenience. It brings a profound change in the ontology of protocol itself. Where earlier protocols were textual, customary, or architectural, software turns protocols into executable logic. Once protocols acquire this property—once they can run automatically, enforce themselves, and refuse non-compliant action—the relationship between management and protocol changes in kind, not degree.

The rise of software is thus the story of an epistemic inversion. Management, which spent the 19th and 20th centuries training itself to think like a designer of procedures, suddenly encounters a medium in which procedures are no longer mere prescriptions but programs—objects with their own internal consistency conditions, dependencies, and error states. The manager who once authored rules from the outside now finds that many of those rules live inside systems whose behavior they do not fully control. Software becomes the new site where protocol is expressed, interpreted, and enforced. Management becomes the surface-level adjustment of parameters within a protocolic environment whose core logic is encoded elsewhere.

To understand this transformation, we must trace how protocolization proceeds through several stages: the informatization of work, the digitization of managerial reasoning, the emergence of software as a regulatory substrate, and the eventual displacement of managerial discretion by executable rules.

4.1. Informationalizing the Organization

The first step in this transformation precedes software in the strict sense. Long before digital systems appear, organizations begin to treat their processes as informational flows. The shift is conceptual before it is technical. Work, once defined by craft skill and embodied knowledge, becomes decomposable into discrete tasks that can be timed, measured, and rearranged. Decision-making, once localized and tacit, is expressed in procedures that can be logged and audited.

This informationalization is part of what makes the rise of software possible. When Taylor measures motions and Drucker insists on measurable objectives, they are not yet writing algorithms, but they are creating the conditions under which algorithms will thrive. A world in which work is defined procedurally is a world in which protocols already exist at a logical level, even if they remain human-executed.

The early computerization of organizations continues this trend. Payroll, inventory, and accounting systems encode simple rules—“if hours > 40, calculate overtime”—that were once embedded in managerial judgment. These early systems do not yet automate managerial reasoning, but they instantiate specific slices of it. And once such logic lives in a computer, it behaves differently than when it lived in a policy binder. It becomes deterministic. A spreadsheet does applies rules instead of “interpret” them.

This is the subtle beginning of software’s rise as a managerial force: not as a replacement for managers, but as a new medium in which some managerial functions begin to acquire a logic of their own, independent of the discretion that originally produced them.

4.2. The Digitization of Managerial Reasoning

The second stage begins when organizations place not only data but decision-making inside digital systems. Workflow software, case management systems, and enterprise resource planning tools (ERPs) do not merely store information; they shape the sequence of work. They define the allowable transitions in a process, the required approvals, the documents that must be produced, and the conditions under which exceptions are permitted.

These systems transform management in three ways.

• First, they standardize what was once variable. Ten managers may have applied a rule in ten different ways; a workflow engine applies it one way, every time.

• Second, they temporalize managerial logic. Decisions that once occurred in meetings or conversations are now represented as state transitions inside a system. The organization’s tempo becomes increasingly governed by computational clocks, queues, and triggers rather than by human rhythm or negotiation.

• Third, they externalize managerial knowledge. Once a rule is encoded in a system, it becomes part of the operational environment. It is no longer remembered or forgotten; it exists as an executable constraint. It persists beyond turnover, outlasts personalities, and molds the assumptions of future employees who encounter it as “the way things are done.”

At this stage, software is neither a manager nor a replacement for management, but it is already becoming an architecture of managerial possibility. Managers begin their work inside systems rather than outside them. Their decisions are constrained by the logic of the platforms they use. Their authority is increasingly expressed through configuration screens, dropdown menus, and permission matrices rather than through direct statements of will.

The organization is no longer simply a machine that managers imagine; it becomes a machine they must operate through interfaces designed by others.

4.3. Software as Regulatory Substrate

The third and decisive stage emerges when software no longer merely expresses managerial intent but regulates behavior directly. This is where Lessig’s “code is law” becomes more than a metaphor. When software determines what actions are permitted, what data can be accessed, and what sequences are valid, it ceases to be a neutral tool and becomes a governing medium.

The regulatory power of software comes from two properties:

1. Executable determinacy: Software does not allow ambiguous or contradictory interpretations. It either runs or errors out. This is in stark contrast to policy, which is always subject to negotiation.
   
   

2. Embeddedness: Software is omnipresent in the workflows of contemporary organizations. It structures how work is requested, performed, verified, compensated, and audited. It shapes not only outcomes but also the space of possible actions.
   
   

Protocol, in this environment, no longer exists primarily as a document. It exists as code. To change a protocol is to submit a ticket, rewrite a function, adjust a schema, or deploy a new version of a workflow. The authority of this logic is immediate and unambiguous. A workflow engine that requires two approvals will not execute a task with one. A permissions system that bars access will not permit it. A smart contract that lacks a path for reversal cannot be reversed.

As software becomes the substrate through which organizational protocols run, managers find that the binding force of policy is increasingly located in the system rather than in their authority. They are not asked to interpret a rule but to comply with one. They do not instruct subordinates to follow a procedure; they enroll them into a system that enforces the procedure automatically.

This is the critical point at which software begins to function as a managerial actor, not because it possesses goals or judgment, but because it constitutes the environment in which goals and judgment are exercised.

4.4. The Rise of Protocol Logic

Alongside this regulatory shift comes a conceptual shift. Managers begin to think in terms of protocols in the software sense: sequences of actions defined by state transitions and executed consistently. The logic of management, already proceduralized through decades of policy-writing, now becomes algorithmic.

Lean Startup is an instructive example here. Its core premise—that organizations should be governed by rapid experimentation, validated learning, and measurable outcomes—maps cleanly onto the logic of computational feedback loops. A manager practicing Lean Startup does not merely set goals; they design hypotheses, define metrics, run tests, and adjust parameters. They behave like operators of a system whose behavior is driven by signals and thresholds. Software is not incidental to this methodology; it is its natural habitat.

Galloway’s work on algorithmic incentives extends this further by showing how actors inside digital systems increasingly optimize not for human evaluations but for machine-evaluated signals. When ranking systems, reputation engines, or scoring algorithms govern access to resources, management becomes the interpretation not of human responses but of automated signals. Managers govern by designing surfaces that algorithms will respond to, not by directly commanding human behavior.

These developments make explicit what was implicit in modern management: protocols are not merely tools; they are environments. In a world structured by digital protocols, management becomes increasingly concerned with engineering the conditions under which desirable behaviors emerge, much as software engineers design protocols to produce consistency, fairness, or liveness in distributed systems.

The gap between organizational management and protocol design narrows. Both become practices of constraint selection, state management, and behavioral shaping across time.

4.5. Smart Contracts, Multisigs, and the Executable Organization

The most extreme form of protocolization comes from cryptographic governance mechanisms—multisignature wallets, threshold schemes, and smart contracts. These systems are not merely software tools; they are formal instantiations of organizational authority. They take managerial functions—approvals, custody, escalation, quorum—and encode them in contracts that cannot be violated without changing the code itself.

A multisig policy, for example, is not a set of guidelines about how many signatures are recommended; it is an executable requirement for how many signatures the system will accept. The protocol decides whether an action is valid; the manager’s role is to comply or escalate. The “if–then” logic becomes literal. Decision rights become cryptographically enforced, not merely rhetorically asserted.

In this regime, protocol is not only a means of coordination; it is a governance object. Authority is distributed through keys, thresholds, and execution conditions. Tempo is regulated by block times, signing windows, and validation delays. Organizational memory is inscribed in immutable logs.

This is the pivot point where software ceases to assist management and begins to subsume its discretionary space. The manager is no longer the primary author of protocols; they are a user of protocols authored by architects, developers, and governance systems. Their discretion is bounded by configurations; their judgment is invoked only when the system cannot proceed.

4.6. The Manager Inside the Protocol

By the end of this transformation, the relationship between management and protocol has inverted. In the modern era, the manager stands outside the system, designing procedures and structures that others execute. In the software-mediated era, the manager increasingly stands inside a system whose logic is pre-specified and whose behaviors are constrained.

To manage, in this environment, is to:

• interpret system outputs,

• set configuration parameters,

• monitor exceptions,

• and work within architectures designed by others.

Software becomes what Lessig calls an “architecture of constraint,” a world in which the individual manager is the “pathetic dot”: a constrained actor inside an environment they did not author but must navigate. They can recommend changes, file tickets, or escalate issues, but the protocol is the operative reality.

Management becomes a residual interpretive function rather than a primary site of rule creation.

5. The Subsumption of Managerial Discretion into Software

If the previous section traced the rise of software as a medium in which organizational protocols are expressed and executed, the present section makes explicit the claim that follows from that development: managerial discretion—the interpretive freedom, situational judgment, and sequencing authority that once defined the managerial role—is increasingly absorbed into, constrained by, and re-enacted through software systems. Subsumption means that managerial discretion survives only in the interstices of systems that encode most of the logic that managers once supplied. What remains of discretion becomes reactive: invoked to decide how to proceed when the system cannot.

To describe subsumption in this strong sense is to assert that the ontological location of discretion shifts. Discretion no longer resides primarily in the human who applies rules; it resides in the architecture of the system itself—the structure of workflows, the permissions model, the data schema, the thresholds and timers, the error-handling routines. What the system permits or denies, accelerates or slows, reveals or conceals, determines what managers can do and when they can do it. They remain responsible for outcomes, but responsibility is exercised within an environment that has already made most of their decisions for them.

This section traces the mechanisms of this shift. It shows how software absorbs discretion through formalization, how it displaces discretion through self-enforcing logic, how it reconstitutes discretion at the margins in diminished form, and how it redefines the manager as a configurator and caretaker of systems that embody organizational intent. The argument proceeds through several overlapping dynamics: the migration of decision logic into systems, the tightening of temporal and informational constraints, the proceduralization of authority, the emergence of “architecture-as-decision,” and the relocation of managerial judgment to moments of failure or exception. Together these dynamics produce a recognizable condition: the manager no longer stands above the system, instructing it; the manager is positioned inside the system, conducted by it.

5.1. The Migration of Decision Logic from Judgment to System

The most straightforward vector of subsumption is the direct migration of decision logic from managerial judgment into software. Any organization that implements automated approval flows, predictive scoring models, or rules engines that evaluate conditions and trigger actions engages in this migration. What once required managerial discernment—Is this request valid? Should this transaction be approved? Is this deviation acceptable?—now becomes a matter of system evaluation.

Once encoded, these rules cease to be tentative or provisional. They operate with mechanical confidence. A software system cannot wonder whether this case is exceptional or whether the rule might need to be bent. It applies the rule as written, without hesitation or embarrassment. To change the behavior of the system, one must change the rule in its encoded form, not in one’s head.

This shift has two consequences. First, many decisions that once demanded judgment become trivial from the perspective of the manager: the decision is simply not theirs anymore. Second, the discretion that remains becomes more cognitively demanding. Since the system handles the routine cases, the manager’s work increasingly consists of interpreting only the ambiguous, anomalous, or catastrophic ones. The managerial role narrows while the complexity of what remains increases.

5.2. Procedural Lock-In and the Loss of Interpretive Flexibility

Managerial discretion also erodes because software formalizes how an organization is allowed to act. Software protocols encode sequences. They structure the order of operations. They define dependencies, required fields, validation checks, and handoff points. They prescribe the tempo of work. Once encoded, these sequences are difficult to override. Even when the intent behind them becomes outdated, the cost of altering them—technically, organizationally, and politically—can be prohibitive.

This creates a condition we might call procedural lock-in. In earlier regimes, policy could be bent, suspended, or reinterpreted when circumstances demanded. A written rule could be treated as guidance rather than law. In software-mediated regimes, the rule functions as law because the system simply will not proceed until the conditions it recognizes have been satisfied. The manager who wishes to proceed differently must either manipulate the system, circumvent it, or submit to it. In practice, most comply.

The irony is that managers themselves often choose these constraints. They approve the implementation of systems that formalize their own authority out of existence: a workflow that requires its own approvals, a dashboard that determines its own metrics, a risk model that flags deviations before the manager can evaluate them. They do so because the demand for consistency, auditability, and scale is irresistible. But the price is that the interpretive flexibility that once defined the managerial role diminishes.

5.3. Architecture as Decision: The Rise of Structural Determinism

Lessig’s claim that “code is law” appears most clearly in the phenomenon of architecture-as-decision. In a computational environment, many decisions that were once matters of judgment become matters of structure. For example: who can see which information is no longer a procedural rule but a permissions matrix. Who can approve which action is not a policy but a role-based access control model. When a process can proceed is not a matter of manager’s timing but of system triggers.

In each case, architecture—not the manager—materializes the decision. Once materialized, the decision acquires a stubbornness that discourse cannot undo. Architecture is the hardest form of policy. It forecloses as much as it enables. When managerial authority confronts architectural constraint, the architecture wins.

This inversion shifts the source of organizational authority. Decisions are made not at the moment of their execution but at the moment when the architecture that governs them is designed. The locus of power migrates from operational managers to system designers, infrastructure teams, product managers, and vendors whose choices shape the architecture. Decisions become prior: they are embedded at the moment of deployment rather than at the moment of action. The manager inherits a world of decisions already made.

5.4. The Temporal Subsumption of Managerial Action

Another axis of subsumption is temporal. Software systems impose their own time. They generate tasks at fixed intervals, send alerts, escalate tickets, synchronize events, and impose deadlines. They collapse latency to near zero. They deliver information in real time, and therefore demand response in real time. They establish rhythms—daily standups, sprint cycles, commit windows, block confirmations—that managers must adapt to rather than define.

The manager’s time, once structured by meetings, calendars, and embodied social rhythms, becomes structured by systems. The tempo of organizational life shifts from human pacing to machine pacing. The manager becomes reactive to the timing of alerts, service-level agreements, and automated escalations. Their work is carved into units defined by systems rather than by deliberation.

This temporal subsumption narrows discretion further. To decide slowly, or out of sequence, is to fall out of alignment with the system’s expected tempo. To ignore the system’s signals is to incur risk or trigger further automated actions. The manager’s freedom to choose when to act diminishes.

5.5. Exceptions as the Last Refuge of Discretion

As software absorbs routine decision-making, managerial discretion migrates to the edges: to exceptions, breakdowns, and crises. The manager becomes, in effect, the handler of cases the system has not been designed to handle.

Exception-handling has always been part of management, but in the software-mediated organization it becomes the defining feature. The manager’s role is to determine what to do when the process cannot run. They become a specialist in failure analysis, escalation, and interpretation of ambiguous system outputs. As a result, their authority emerges most clearly when the system is failing.

This redistribution of tasks transforms the character of managerial discretion. It becomes more episodic, more contingent, and more dependent on understanding how systems behave rather than how people behave. It becomes a form of applied epistemology: a practice of making sense of failure modes, error states, and misalignments between encoded logic and lived situations.

5.6. The Manager as Configurator

Finally, subsumption reconstitutes the manager as a configurator of systems. The site of managerial agency shifts from adjudicating cases to selecting parameters. Managers choose threshold levels, enable or disable features, assign roles and permissions, define escalation paths, and adjust weights in models. Configuration becomes the primary modality through which managerial intent is expressed.

Configuration demands understanding of how systems behave under different parameterizations, how rules interact, and how workflows propagate effects downstream. But configuration is not discretion in the classical sense. It is a circumscribed choice within a predefined space. It is the exercise of agency inside a lattice of possibilities determined by system design.

This is the ultimate sense in which managerial discretion is subsumed. The organization becomes a protocolic environment that managers inhabit. Their authority is real but bounded. Their decisions matter but only within a structured domain of permissible variations. Their work is meaningful but not foundational. They no longer are the primary authors of protocol.

5.7. Subsumption as a Structural, Not Psychological, Condition

It is important to emphasize that subsumption is not a psychological claim about how managers feel, nor a moral claim about whether software is good or bad. It is a structural claim about where in the organization key forms of discretion now reside.

In the premodern world, discretion resides in persons.
In the modern policy–architecture world, discretion resides in roles.
In the software-mediated world, discretion increasingly resides in systems.

Managers increasingly operate inside a world materially shaped by systems that encode most of the logic that earlier regimes left to human judgment. They remain responsible for interpreting intent and ensuring alignment, but they do so within architectures that have already made most of the critical choices.

6. What Remains of Management After Subsumption

The disappearance of management is only apparent if one equates management with the activities that software now performs: adjudicating routine cases, enforcing rules, sequencing workflow, and monitoring compliance. But these tasks—even in Drucker’s era—were never the whole of management. Management was always a composite of several distinct functions, some procedural, some interpretive, some moral, some architectural. What subsumption changes is the distribution of these functions. Software absorbs procedural discretion; architectural design flows upstream into technical systems; temporal coordination becomes automated; protocol execution becomes deterministic. What remains for management is the domain of meaning, purpose, narrative, exception, legitimacy, and the repair of misalignment between encoded logic and human aspiration. Management persists as the custodian of the gap between protocol and world.

The genealogy established so far offers a way to make this claim precise. In the Khaldunian world, management interprets sovereign intent because intent is embodied and contingent. In the print world, management interprets textual intent because texts stabilize meaning but do not enforce it. In the bureaucratic world, management administers policy because policy is general but circumstances are particular. In the modern corporate world, management designs architecture because architecture distributes labor and attention. In the digital epoch, management confronts encoded intent—protocols that execute themselves—but encoded intent cannot erase ambiguity. Every system that claims to eliminate judgment creates new occasions for judgment to reappear in altered form.

The task, then, is to articulate what remains of management after its procedural and architectural powers have been absorbed. Three domains appear again and again across the history reviewed: the articulation of purpose, the governance of exceptions, and the production of legitimacy. Each is reshaped by subsumption, but none is eliminated. Each is difficult to encode because each depends on human faculties that software can neither guarantee nor simulate in full: value judgment, contextual interpretation, and persuasion.

6.1. Purpose and the Irreducibility of Intent

No amount of protocolization can resolve the problem Drucker placed at the center of managerial work: determining “what is right for the enterprise.” Purpose precedes protocol. It is the upstream orientation without which rules, structures, and architectures lose coherence. Even the most fully automated organization—one in which every process is encoded, every workflow deterministic, and every transaction mediated by smart contracts—still faces choices about direction: which markets to enter, which constituencies to serve, which risks to tolerate, which horizons to pursue.

These questions cannot be answered by software because they are prior to the domain software inhabits. Protocols execute intent; they do not generate it. Even in environments structured by algorithmic incentives (as Galloway shows), the question of what incentives ought to be created remains a political and strategic matter. Lessig’s “pathetic dot,” constrained by architecture, still inhabits a normative world. Someone must decide which constraints to value and which freedoms to protect. Someone must decide what success means.

In this sense, purpose-setting becomes more, not less, central as organizations become more computational. When the mechanics of execution are automated, the stakes of orientation rise. Drucker’s “theory of the business” becomes more architectural and less operational, but it does not dissolve. The decisions Porter situates in strategy—about positioning, differentiation, and the configuration of activities—become decisions about the design of architectures that software will later enforce. They remain beyond the reach of software because they concern the selection of one future over another.

Purpose cannot be subsumed because it is not rule-governed. It precedes rules. The manager, stripped of procedural discretion, becomes the custodian of intent.

6.2. Exception, Judgment, and the Repair of Protocol

Software handles routine cases with extraordinary competence. It collapses managerial discretion precisely because it applies rules consistently. But every rule anticipates only a subset of possible states of the world. This is not a failure of programming but a property of formal systems: every attempt to encode behavior produces unanticipated edge cases. Drucker acknowledged this even in non-digital form when he emphasized that executives must “lift their gaze from the immediate” and confront the novel. Software eliminates the immediate; management inherits the novel.

This structural condition is not new. In the premodern world, stewards handled exceptions because customs were underspecified. In the bureaucratic world, managers handled exceptions because policy was too general. In the modern corporate world, exceptions emerged when architecture misaligned with context. In the software-mediated world, exceptions appear when the encoded logic collides with real complexity.

But the nature of exception changes. Managers no longer decide how a process ought to run; they decide what to do when the process cannot run. Their role becomes a form of organizational metaphysics: diagnosing whether a failure is the result of an error in the system, a gap in the encoded protocol, a misalignment between intent and architecture, or a fundamental change in the environment. They must interpret system behavior as though it were a text, a signal, and a symptom all at once.

This work requires human judgment because exception is not reducible to pattern recognition. It requires context, history, tacit knowledge, and political sense. It requires an understanding of what the system is for, not merely what it does. It is a task Drucker described when he distinguished efficiency (doing things right) from effectiveness (doing the right things). Software excels at the former. The latter remains human.

The Lean Startup canon unintentionally reinforces this point: the “pivot” is precisely an exception event, a recognition that the encoded hypothesis no longer aligns with reality. Pivots cannot be automated because they concern the meaning of feedback, not the mechanics of its collection.

The residue of management is thus judgment under conditions where protocol fails.

6.3. Legitimacy, Narrative, and the Human Interface of Encoded Systems

A third domain that survives subsumption is legitimacy production: the framing, narrating, and justification of organizational action to its various constituencies. The importance of legitimacy appears in all historical periods surveyed. For Ibn Khaldun, legitimacy is rooted in ‘asabiyyah; for early modern states, in textual standardization and the performance of authority; for bureaucracies, in procedural rationality; for corporations, in strategy and shareholder value. Subsumption does not eliminate the need for legitimacy; it transforms it.

Software executes rules, but software cannot justify rules. Encoded intent might govern behavior, but encoded intent cannot explain itself. When an automated workflow denies access, when an algorithm ranks one person above another, when a smart contract locks funds, these outcomes are not self-legitimating. They are facts. Their legitimacy must be constructed by someone who can speak in human terms.

This is why Lessig’s model—law, norms, market, architecture—remains incomplete without someone able to bridge them. The architectural constraint may be decisive, but legitimacy arises in the narrative domain, where actors interpret why a system behaves as it does and why those behaviors ought to be accepted. Management persists as the interface between encoded systems and the people who experience their consequences.

This domain has only expanded with the rise of software. As organizations become more protocolic, they become less transparent. Their internal logic becomes less inspectable. Their errors become less intuitive. Their decisions become less attributable to individual actors. The opacity of algorithms creates a vacuum into which managerial narrative must flow. Managers explain, defend, contextualize, and sometimes apologize for behaviors they did not choose but must take responsibility for.

This task—persuasion in the face of technical determinism—cannot be encoded. It requires rhetorical skill, moral imagination, and political instinct. It requires the ability to translate between the technical substrate and the lived world. It is an intensification of a task long visible in Drucker’s work: the articulation of mission in a way that binds people to a collective purpose.

6.4. Human Values and the Limits of Encoded Rationality

One final domain survives subsumption because it cannot, by definition, be absorbed: the articulation of values. The organization’s encoded rules express operational priorities, not moral principles. They instantiate trade-offs but do not justify them. They route attention but do not declare what is worth attending to. Even the most rigorous strategy models—Porter’s structural analysis, or Lean Startup’s feedback loops—presuppose values that lie outside the model: what counts as success, which constituencies matter, which risks are unacceptable.

Values govern the selection of protocols; protocols do not generate values. Software can optimize, but optimization requires an objective function, and objective functions are political decisions disguised as technical ones. Someone must confront this fact, and that someone is management.

In this sense, management becomes the guardian of what cannot be computed. The digital organization is powerful but brittle: it accelerates what it encodes and ignores what it cannot represent. Managers attend to the unencoded remainder: the moral, the cultural, the tacit, the emergent. They defend space for human values within architectures that tend toward closure.

Management endures as long as organizations exist in moral and political landscapes that do not yield to formalization.

6.5. The Recomposition of Managerial Identity

What remains of management requires a new image of the manager, distinct from the sovereign steward of Khaldun’s world, the bureaucratic officer of Weber’s, the executive designer of Drucker’s, or the strategic architect of Porter’s. The manager in the computational epoch becomes something like a human API: a boundary surface at which encoded intent meets lived reality. They articulate purpose upstream, handle exceptions midstream, and produce legitimacy downstream. Their domain is not the design of protocol but the interpretation and justification of protocolic worlds.

If earlier management imagined itself as the mind of the organization, post-subsumption management becomes its conscience, its narrator, and its interpreter. It mediates the tensions architecture creates, moderates the consequences of temporal acceleration, and contextualizes information flows that have become too rapid and too dense for unmediated interpretation.

7. Conclusion: Management as the Human Interface of Protocolized Intent

The genealogy traced across these sections reveals a profound transformation in management’s ontological location. Management is relocating itself to the outer edges of protocol: to the places where rules fail, where ambiguity persists, where meaning is contested, and where purpose must be renewed.

In premodern states, management thrived in the gaps between sovereign will and local reality. In bureaucratic regimes, management thrived in the interpretive spaces between policy and circumstance. In modern corporations, management thrived in the architectural choices that shaped how protocols would be executed. In the digital epoch, management thrives in the liminal zone between encoded intent and lived experience—in the calibration of systems, the selection of constraints, and the repair of misalignment.

Contemporary organizations are built increasingly out of protocols: from Lean Startup’s feedback loops to Galloway’s algorithmic incentive structures to cryptographic control systems like multisigs. These protocols assist managerial work and structure the space in which managerial work happens. The operational world executes according to the logic encoded within it, most often without waiting for managerial input. The managerial task is to decide which encoded worlds to inhabit and which to abandon.

It is here that management assumes its final and perhaps most vital role: custodian of encoded worlds. Management becomes the agent that confronts the residual human questions: What is this system for? Does this architecture still match our purpose? What values are we willing to encode, and which must remain unencoded? What failures tell us the system must change? Who is harmed by the rules we have embedded, and who is excluded from shaping them?

As organizational life becomes increasingly computational, human work becomes more architectural, more ethical, and more political. Management persists wherever intent exceeds execution, wherever values resist formalization, and wherever people must live inside systems built by other people. In that gap, management endures as the human interface of protocolized intent.