262 RÜDIGER HACHTMANN
further intensifi ed this complexity. Even just a glance at the new leading
sector, the IT “industry,” drives home how diffi cult it can be to try to un-
derstand the intricate constellations that have formed. Since the 1970s,
this booming sector has increasingly blurred the lines between “indus-
try” and “service,” two areas that used to be easy to tell apart.
Just between 1998 and 2001, the number of employees in all the
branches associated with this sector in Germany grew by a good 15 per-
cent, climbing from 710,000 to 819,000. There is, however, a striking
diff erence in the trends in diff erent segments of the IT industry. Soft-
ware development and other IT services, for example, expanded at an
above-average tempo; in this short period alone, the number of employ-
ees in this fi eld increased by almost 45 percent. In contrast, the “classic”
offi ce equipment manufacturers and the producers of other data-process-
ing devices lost considerable ground. Employment in these segments
dropped from 128,000 (1998) to 104,000 (2001), slumping by almost 19
percent. Telecommunications (the manufacturing of intelligence equip-
ment and telecommunication services), however, grew in keeping with
the general trend of the entire industry. The IT sector also became increas-
ingly diversifi ed in terms of business size and employment qualifi cations.
Whereas the software development and IT service sector were dominated
by start-up companies and small businesses for the most part, with a
comparatively high percentage of university graduates (60 to 90 percent),
the three other sectors (intelligence equipment, telecommunications
services, and offi ce and data-processing equipment) were controlled by
large corporations. Moreover, the percentage of highly qualifi ed individ-
uals in these sectors was only about a third, and it was only between 10
and 20 percent in the fi eld of telecommunication services.^53
But, IT did not become the leading industry because it had a higher
percentage of employees (employment was in fact much higher in many
of the more established industries), but rather because the internal struc-
tures of the software development and IT start-ups became the business
model that everyone wanted to follow. Thanks to the often more man-
ageable number of employees in these companies at fi rst, as well as the
specifi c nature of their “products,” these companies could not achieve
their goals using a Taylorist distribution of labor or any Fordist methods.
Rather than adopting such models, many start-up companies focused on
teamwork, project-oriented work, goal-setting, and fl at hierarchies, as
well as a (supposedly) more personal management style when it came
to the relationship between employees and their bosses. A high level of
intrinsic motivation and employee self-motivation were seen as the key
to achieving job goals, and this was often nourished by the illusion of
nonalienating work prevalent among employees. This new corporate cul-