An empirical assessment of the informational society: Employment and occupational structures of G‐7 countries, 1920–2000

The 1990s marked a turning point in the evolution of employment and occupational structures in the G-7 economies: the advent of the informational society. Drawing on a comparative analysis of employment data up to 2000, this article gives empirical support to the authors' theory - introduced in Vol. 133 (1994), No.1 of the Review - that informationalism offers a better explanation for the pattern of structural change observed in those countries than does the theory of post-industrialism with its focus on service-sector employment. The analytical focus, they argue, now needs to shift from services to information-processing as the dominant activity in advanced economies.