Consolidation and concentration as social and economic phenomena can have wildly diverging effects, depending on where those phenomena emanate from. As a form of collective rationalization, the aim is to systematize and centralize resources, and thus cut down on the time and energy expended on dispersed utilities. For example, a group of laborers establishing a central location of communal tools, so that members can quickly and easily locate the tools and not travel so far, or waste so much time to pick out and find them. And such a project can be undertaken with consent of the group, and a vigor and enthusiasm for the labor remains.
However, take a number of aggressive consolidating and concentrating economic powers, which are engaging in hostile takeovers of smaller units and competing entities, and imposing their own systems of rationalization and automation on the conquered parties. In this activity there develops a growing resistance to the conquering party's "way of being" and a deadening of vigor and enthusiasm for the work.
Difficult forces to quantify with modern economics, certainly, but they are forces that have real and powerful accumulating effects.
