Even Dilbert might crack a smile. Half a dozen years after the popular press and academia wrote off Organisation Man and his descendants as an endangered species being replaced by a brave new world of technology and lean organisations, managers are now hot properties in the help-wanted advertisements.

It's as if the companies that the cartoon chronicler of corporate life poked fun at - those that downsized, de-layered and re-engineered themselves to the bone throughout the early 1990s - have found they cannot run their businesses with a few executives at the top, the worker bees at the bottom and nobody in between. So these companies have started rebuilding the middle layers of their organisations.

The result: Managers now are a bigger part of the workforce in the US than they were at the end of the 1980s, before the big management purge earlier this decade, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics.

"Bureaucracy is alive and well in the United States," said Mr D. Quinn Mills, a professor of management at Harvard Business School. "In fact, managers and administrators and executives have been the fastest-growing employment category. It really contradicts what most people think."

Employment recruiters, labour economists and corporate spokesmen confirm the trend but offer varying explanations for what's behind it.

Partly, it is because of a strong US economy that has created record corporate profits and millions of jobs. In some cases, corporations cut too drastically in the early 1990s and are rehiring for positions they once axed to improve their bottom lines.

In other instances, the need for managers has increased with the growing complexity and globalisation of the economy. Even the advent of labour-saving technology has created a need for a new breed of manager whose job is to make the technology work in the business world.

Then there is the cynical explanation that some companies promised Wall Street big lay-offs, watching their stocks rise as a result but never followed through.

"Some companies ended up removing a layer of people who were closer in place to the work than was imagined," said Mr Andrew C. Goresh, managing director of human resources at T. Rowe Price, the mutual fund giant in Baltimore. "A manager is somebody who organises the work for a group, who establishes priorities, who is able to order and execute. The fact is, we still need a lot of managers."

Mr Goresh said the company would add about 500 people this year to its workforce of 3,300 and about half of those would be managers.

Companies in a variety of industries have the welcome mat out for managers.

A recent survey of more than 4,000 companies by employment firm Management Recruiters International found 56 per cent of the firms expected to add to their managerial ranks this year, the highest rate in the 15-year history of the survey. Another 37 per cent expected to maintain managerial staffing levels, leaving only 7 per cent contemplating management layoffs.

"There has never been a greater demand for managerial and professional people, and there has never been fewer qualified candidates to satisfy the demand," said Mr Alan Schonberg, president of the recruiting firm.

Even at companies with names synonymous with downsizing in the early part of the decade are finding they need managers as much as ever.

At AT&T, where the 1990s have been marked by rampant cost-cutting and lay-offs, the percentage of workers classified as managers is the same today as it in 1992.

At Aetna Life & Casualty, where layoffs followed the consolidation of several health care claims centres in the wake of the insurance company's merger with US Healthcare, total employment today is higher than it was in 1996. Aetna, a company that had several restructurings earlier this decade, is also scouting for managers.

These experiences are not isolated. Even though some well-known large companies, such as General Electric and IBM, have thinned their management ranks, other firms must have taken up the slack. The Bureau of Labour Statistics' data shows managers make up 14.2 per cent of the workforce, up from the 12.5 per cent they accounted for in 1989.

Any rise in managerial employment is good news for the economy. Because managers enjoy decent wages, with salaries typically ranging from $40,000 to $500,000, they are the lifeblood of the real-estate and automotive industries. They are more likely than the general population to own personal computers and to take expensive vacations. And they are more likely than non-managerial workers to have four-year college degrees.

When this group of workers received their pink slips in the early 1990s, their plight became the stuff of front-page articles in the national press, even though the fates they suffered were not as statistically severe as the economic hardship that befell the heartland during the 1980s.