Technological progress, organizational change and the size of the Human Resources Department

A definitely much less stressed aspect of organizational change, which is cen-
tral in this paper, is the impact on human resources departments. In general, one
would expect that the role of such department will be significantly altered in a sit-
uation where flexible forms of work organization are so massively adopted. Indeed,
a quick look at the data confirms this intuition. In particular, the management
ratio increased in many OECD countries during the twentieth century, but started
decreasing in the early 2000s. In France for instance, the percentage of workers em-
ployed in managerial and professional specialty occupations rose from 7.1% in 1982
to 11.1% in 2000 and decreased to 4.8% in 2004. Similarly, this ratio ranges from
10.5% in 1970 to 14.6% in 2000 and 13.9% in 2004 in the United States. Additional
evidence for other OECD countries is reproduced in Table 3. With reference to
other countries, the management ratio (managers as percentage of the workforce) in
2004 amounted to 9.2% in Australia, 10.1% in Sweden, 10.7% in Hong-Kong, 12.5%
in India and 13.2% in the Netherlands (Future Foundation and SHL, 2004).

Table 3: Employment in managerial occupations in selected countries over the twentieth
century (in percentage of total employment)

Sources: UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Japan data for the period 1950-2000: Aoyama
and Castells (2002) and for year 2004: OECD (2002-2004). US data for year 1910: Wyatt
and Hecker (2006). UK data for year 1911: Gallie (2001). Canada data for year 2001:

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