businesscrat

English

Etymology 1

Blend of business +‎ bureaucrat

Noun

businesscrat (plural businesscrats)

1. A corporate bureaucrat.
   • 1991 April 29, Joseph Maglitta, “How can you make your boss happy?”, in Computerworld:

     The ideal CIO must be both "a technocrat and a businesscrat at the same time," says Jerre Stead, chief executive officer at Square D Co., an electronics manufacturer in Palatine, Ill.

   • 1997, James Garnett, Handbook of Administrative Communication, →ISBN, page 208:

     Citizens are just as frustrated by corporate bureaucrats — or "businesscrats" — in their daily dealings with banks, department stores, and credit card companies.

   • 2000, Stephen B. Adams, Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur, →ISBN:

     In the 1930s, the government and the private sector had switched stereotypical roles, with the entrepreneurial impulse coming from the executive branch and resistance to change coming from Main Street “businesscrats.”

   • 2015, David Kynaston, The City Of London - Volume 4, →ISBN, page 429:

     James Scrimgeour, whose family firm resigned in protest as brokers to MEPC, warned in a letter to The Times that the City's separate and individual activities would be submerged in vast corporations generally controlled at the top by a diminishing number of "businesscrats".

Etymology 2

Blend of business +‎ Democrat coined by Gerald D. Nash and popularized by Louis Galambos in Competition and Cooperation: The Emergence of a National Trade Association (1966)

Noun

businesscrat (plural businesscrats)

1. (US) A person whose career includes acting both as a business executive and a government bureaucrat in the Democratic Party in the United States.
   • 1986, Frank Dobbin, The institutionalization of the state:

     "Businesscrats" had staffed the war agencies and they returned to private life at the end of the conflict.

   • 1995, Kenneth Finegold, Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America's New Deal, →ISBN, page 55:

     Existing federal bureaucracies were not prepared to mobilize human resources and coordinate the industrial economy for war, so emergency agencies were thrown together for the occasion, mostly staffed by professional experts and "businesscrats" temporarily recruited from the corporate capitalist sector.

   • 1996, Lee Walczak, Gail DeGeorge, “PRATFALLS DREAM CANDIDATES' RUDE AWAKENING”, in Business Week:

     Put a business executive up for senator as a Democrat, and you've got a Businesscrat. Maybe also an endangered species.

   • 2013 July, Maria N Ivanova, “The Great Recession and the state of American Capitalism”, in Science & Society, volume 77, number 3:

     Second, multiple variants of a “businesscrat” — “a twentieth- century breed of businessman who spends a significant part of his life working as a government bureaucrat (Galambos, 1966, 205, fn 3)”