Statistics Canada. Japan data for year 2007: Japan Labour Force Survey. Denmark,
Norway data for the period 1981-2004: ILO Labour Statistics Database and for year 2004:
OECD (2002-2004).
We see from Table 3 that two groups of countries may be distinguished. In the
first group, managerial occupations represent between 10 to 14% of total employe-
ment: US, UK, Canada are representative countries of this group1 .Suchcountries
have a relatively large proportion of managers in percentage of the workforce and can
be considered as more managerial or “bureaucratic” than the second group of coun-
tries (Norway, France, Denmark, Germany, Japan), for which managers represent a
much lower fraction of the workforce (between 2 to 7% of total employment).
Interestingly, the management ratio has started to decrease in both groups of
countries in the beginning of 2000s. Since this period corresponds to the wide-scale
diffusion of computer usage and multi-tasking, the restructuration process accompa-
nying organizational changes and multi-tasking might be affecting human resources
departments as well. This observation is consistent with the recent literature em-
phasizing that firms tend to be delayering and hierarchies are becoming flatter. In
particular, advances in information technology may expand the effective span of
control of top managers (Rajan and Wulf, 2006) and recent organizational changes
tend to rely on the decentralization of authority, delayering of managerial functions
and increased multi-tasking (Caroli and Van Reenen, 2001).
In the light of all these data, the evolution of skills, job content and work organi-
zation observed in many OECD countries over the past decades can be summarized
in the following three main characteristics:
• increase in the proportion of workers employed in managerial occupations,
together with a recent decrease since the ICT revolution
• diffusion of innovative workplace practices based on multi-tasking and com-
puter use
• increase in skills requirements
The fact that the development of multi-tasking seems to be accompanied by an
increase and then a decrease in the management ratios could suggest that coordi-
nating workers and tasks should become more complex in the new economy. Becker
and Murphy (1992) already argued that unlike Adam Smith’s argument, specializa-
tion and the optimal division of labour would be determined more by the cost of
combining specialized workers - i.e. coordination costs - than by the extent of the
market. In particular, two types of coordination costs matter: the costs incurred
by firms when coordinating workers’ effort across various tasks and the costs of ver-
satility incurred by workers subject to increased pressure and work rhythms. This
contribution is only concerned with the former type of costs.
1 This group also comprises Australia, Sweden, Hong-Kong, India and the Netherlands.