Sources used in this document:

Moss Kanter notes that "widespread use of the term 'human resources' did not occur until the early 1980s" suggesting that the term itself is part of a particular historical moment. She also suggests earlier in the interview that the historical moment followed upon the productivity crisis of the 1970s, with the belief on the part of some (including herself) that the "structure of the old industrial bureaucracy might just be a cause of the failure to reach full potential in terms of productivity" (97-8). Moss Kanter sees this as a top-down effect, whereby the homogenized class of white men in managerial positions were neither representative nor sensitive to the integration of women and minorities into the workplace. To a certain extent, all of Moss Kanter's prescriptions have been implemented as a matter of common sense: to use a salient example from the 21st century, although Google employs a standard hierarchical business structure, their institutional ethos deliberately offers flexibility to employees in developing their own creative initiatives without nagging supervision, with Google's famous "70/20/10" rule of what percentage of employee time should be devoted to assigned tasks, new projects, and irrelevant parerga (Manimala and Wasdani, 2013).

Yet we might question the wisdom of permitting nearly a third of employees' time to be devoted to self-generated new ideas when a corporation is not Google, and in a position to recruit employees most likely to come up with valuable ideas. A corporation built on standardization and franchising like McDonald's would be frankly destroyed if employees were given Google-style leeway. The biggest difference between the two is, of course, location: a McDonald's franchise has to be fixed in place to serve a local community, whereas a corporation like Google is only located in northern California for convenience and real estate values. For the services Google provides, the entire corporate structure could be picked up and moved elsewhere at any time with no real damage done to the product -- the only risk would be a public relations backlash, and the possible unwillingness of its most desirable employees to be located in Bangladesh rather than Mountain View. Business culture may have reached a point where, contrary to Moss Kanter's assessment, the desirability of working for Google might trump other desirable employee perks like not living in the third world.

This tension will only grow with the expansion of the silicon-based economy in the 21st century: perhaps the most significant organizational clue would come from PayPal and its visionary founding CEO Peter Thiel. Thiel understood the transnational (indeed revolutionary) nature of PayPal before selling it to eBay in