In our reading of the potential evolution of the work transformation, there are some rather compelling but very worrying views on the evolution of knowledge automation, from a variety of sources:
Instead of promoting a more participative and democratic society as hoped for by Castells and others, vertical disintegration and decentralisation allow for what is discussed under the broad term of marketisation. ‘By bringing the competition in product and labour markets to bear on their own internal processes, … [firms] are turning the market into an instrument of control’. [Sauer] therefore sees a ‘market-led decentralisation’. The individual unit although technically more independent is subjected to new and worse constraints through management by objectives including internal and external bidding as well as the application of benchmarks or the imposition of profit targets. Hierarchical control is replaced by sanctions by the ‘market’ and markets are increasingly internalised into business units
In services the ‘opening to the market’ can also take the form of elimination of managerial mediation between workers and customers and the increasingly direct exposure of workers to the changing wishes and requirements of customers. In management literature this is greatly welcomed as ‘advanced customer-orientation’. For workers, advanced customer-orientation can mean even more stress, especially if management at the same time cuts resources in order to save costs.
In essence, the demand for high rates of return on capital drives management to save costs by cutting resources which in turn can undermine the new autonomy workers enjoy in decentralised, digitised workplaces. Rather then dreams of a post-Taylorist workplace emerging, there is increasing evidence that “new forms of bureaucratic control and repetitive tasks have been extended to the information sector”- or Digital Taylorism
Or there is this view – there is a high road and a low road that will be followed:
The high road variant can also be associated with the high-trust, high performance firm. Its main features are: decentralisation, creation of comprehensive tasks, establishment of work groups, promotion of competence development and sharing of knowledge as well as interdepartmental co-operation and integrated product development.
The low road type strive to achieve competitiveness through cost-cutting, which among other things expresses itself in staff reduction or outsourcing. For the internal organisation of work this mode means: organisation of work processes according to value creation aspects, acceleration of the processes through the grouping of individual work tasks and activities into business processes, intensification of work, and a tendency to divide staff into a highly qualified core and a low-qualified periphery that are employed to balance out capacity fluctuations.
In previous cycles, the Low road was usually the preferred option, the high road was the one less taken, and there is no compelling reason to believe anything will be different this time round.
The starkest portrait of Work to Come is this one – that the future of work, for many people, will be them strapped to an automated digital workflow, continuously prodded and monitored while doing the tasks that machines cannot yet do well or cheaply enough.
And there is nothing in the past that gives one comfort these scenarios above won’t play out, apart from maybe in very high value, high creative workspaces where Taylorism never really took hold – but even there, in law, medicine and other professional white collar areas, work is increasingly overwatched by digital monitoring devices. The only hopes from past experience is that where people have been well integrated with the process, and team work has been allowed to work, it has worked better than pure automation. (Cells, Quality Circles, etc) – but it does need careful design, appropriate use of automation, upskilling of the average worker, and flexible organisation structures above and around it.
These are non trivial requirements, needing non trivial design of new ways of working that are demonstrably more productive than those the neo-Taylorists are dreaming up, too often under the disguise of “smart” tools.
It is our view that if we (humans) do not do it this way, especially in the high cost OECD countries, we shall most certainly get Digitised Taylorism in spades. One our prime items in our Manifesto is that work should be about people. So – for anyone interested in the future workplace transformation, our view is that for it to be sustainable for people, somewhere along the line it will be essential to work out how to take the high road
Incidentally, this is also why we have given our support to the hi: project. hi: stands for Human Interface, i.e. creating the tools and techniques that enable work to take the high road noted above (or is that the hi: road 😉 )