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August 2004 |
WINDOWS ON THE WORKPLACETechnology, Jobs, and the Organization of Office Work by Joan Greenbaum Preface In 1966 I moved to New York and landed a job as a programmer at IBM. Getting a job as a programmer at that time generally required some college (I had a bachelor's degree in economics), some luck with a thing called the Programmer Aptitude Test (I worked with a placement agency that taught me how to take the test) and what someone called “passing the mirror test” (if they held a mirror to your nose and it fogged up, you were hired). This situation was quite different from that of the 1970s through the 1990s when programming jobs and competition for the jobs were growing. And it is markedly different from the situation today as programming work has begun to follow the path of so many other jobs that are being out-sourced from the countries that used to do them. I worked as a programmer, analyst, project manager, and consultant up through the early 1970s, when, in an attempt to figure out how computers were being used to affect jobs, I went to graduate school to study political economy. Then, as now, popular accounts of technology surrounded us with the belief that computers would bring more highly skilled and better jobs. The myth was in the making that a high-tech world would create highly skilled work. I itched to use my knowledge about how computer systems were designed to peel away the high-tech glitter surrounding such critical issues. Today we are constantly told a continuation of this tale which takes the form that the Internet will generate new high-tech jobs by creating new services in a new economy. But as the stories, examples, and data in this book will show, white-collar jobs—the backbone of the so-called information society or new economy, and a key pillar of what popular media call the “knowledge economy”—are not showing any strong growth trends, certainly not enough to absorb those workers “displaced” from other jobs. At least not workers displaced within their own countries. And job growth, such as it is, seems to be not so much rooted in the traditional notion of a job, but in the flexibility of a worker to find what the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “alternative work arrangements.” This situation is not without historical precedent. In the second half of the nineteenth century, work and workers were moved from small farms and shops and placed in increasingly large and centralized factories that were owned not by individuals but by corporations. Steam-powered factories and railroads and steamships and telegraphs were introduced into this pressure cooker of emerging industrial capitalism in order to speed up work, cut time, and increase productivity. Technology was held up as a model of “progress and advancement,” and icons like drawings of smoke-stacks and telegraph machines appeared in everything from American art and literature to newspapers and trade exhibitions. This grandiose faith in technology and its forward advance toward a better society was even more pronounced in the United States than in other industrialized nations, taking on what some thought of as almost religious significance.1 As we stand in the twenty-first century being bombarded with phrases like “thanks to advances in technology…” or “with the advent of computers…,” it is almost as if we are expected to believe that technology comes along with an inevitable force—a sort of technological leap of faith. Instead, we need to reshape the debate in order to have a clear picture of the world around us. Young people who are entering the job market and more experienced workers trying to find new jobs and careers too often find themselves surrounded by an older generation telling them things like “Technology is the wave of the future,” often urging them to go to school to learn “computers” or some such simple solution. Such advice, while generally offered with concern, unfortunately is still stuck in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century myths that surround the design and use of technology. This book tackles these myths and lays out a more complex and interactive picture—putting people back into the driver's seat of change by telling stories about what is happening to jobs and what is happening when technologies are designed, produced, and then used in real work situations. Optimistic and shortsighted views about technology driving workplace change lead to wrong-headed solutions. For example, while mainstream popular attention is directed toward high-tech/high-skill scenarios, such a focus leads to policies that encourage narrowly defined job training or training in so-called computer literacy skills. Nothing could be further from what is actually needed. To debunk the myth of technological determinism we need to look more closely at work and the organization and meaning of work and jobs. For most of the twentieth century, office work and workplace social activities have carried meanings beyond the obvious need for income. Particularly in America, the work ethic drives the culture so completely that “What do you do?” is a form of social greeting. Work means a place to go. It may also mean a social group, a clique of friends or colleagues to talk to. Many people identify to some degree with their work; they want to do a good job and feel good about it. By taking pride in work, they come away with a sense of self- respect. And many people, in trying to work to their potential, have invested something of themselves in education, training, and on-the-job experience. The social and financial importance of work remains the same for people, but jobs are changing. There is less security in having a job now than there was a decade ago. More and more jobs are temporary or contracted out for short periods of time. Competition for jobs increases as more and more people complete more years of schooling and the number of full-time jobs that match their specific qualifications decreases. And for so many people, particularly younger workers, the number of hours they work has increased so much that the line between work life and home life has become blurred. Many people think it is only happening to them. At kitchen tables, in living rooms, or out at social gatherings, they talk tentatively about how they seem to be having trouble finding a good job-one like the job they used to have or want to get. There is much talk about how their company may have “downsized” them, or how a particular manager was too stupid to stop the moves that the company was making, or how their company unfortunately got stuck in a bad market or bad merger. Recent high school and college graduates wonder whether there would be more job opportunities if they had only studied something different or perhaps lived in a different place. These people are not alone. The changes being made to jobs are affecting a wide range of workers, from recent graduates to those being pushed toward early retirement. During the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, we used to say that the “personal is political.” This expression clearly applies to the workforce: what people are experiencing as a personal problem is a deeply rooted and broad-ranging political one. There is a whole lot of blaming-the-victim going on, and this is effective in isolating people rather than allowing them to come forward and find out what they can do together. Even the creation of terms like “computer illiterate” makes people believe that it is somehow their fault that they have been left out of the televised version of a high-tech society. Yet it is no more possible to be computer illiterate than it is to be telephone illiterate, for using computer applications, like using telephones, depends mainly on knowing the task that you are doing. Once you know the task, pushing the right buttons follows. This book is written as a path away from high-tech glitter and toward a place where we can find ways to analyze change in order to make better choices. Since changes in work and new technology are most often lumped under the theme of “technical change,” this book tries to pull that apart by explaining how decisions are made to bring about both technical and organizational restructuring. Here you will find research, stories, examples, statistics, and historical analysis that will help us look more clearly out of windows that are not clouded by overly optimistic and misleading visions. A central theme running though the book is the way that skills get redefined and reshaped, essentially to lower salaries and to cut up work so that pieces of it can be programmed into software and databases. By deconstructing the high-tech myths, I am also setting them within a macro or broader economic understanding of how and why these changes are coming about. Four themes will be developed and illustrated through examples as the chapters of the book unfold: 1. Management reorganizes work before new technology is introduced. This is accomplished, in part, by analyzing work and cutting it up into specific tasks (like repeated scripts in call centers). These smaller units of work then can be more clearly specified and coded into software and databases (rationalization of work). 2. People applying for jobs are expected to have more skills, and more experience; however, these skills (including programming and web design) are often devalued in order to rein in salaries. (lowering wages). 3. Organizations and consultants reorganize work, through both specialization and integration of the work tasks that they divided up in the first place, so that fewer people can do more work (increasing productivity). 4. Companies and government agencies are increasingly carving up services into smaller units (as they do with work tasks) so that these services (such as insurance policies) can be sold as products on the Web, on the phone, and anywhere in the world (commoditization of services). In addition to explaining these changes, this book is also about analysis and taking action. If we use analytical tools to dig more deeply into issues, we will be able to choose alternative courses of action. Looking optimistically toward the future, as proponents of a “high-tech world” would ask us to, doesn't help us learn from the past. And looking pessimistically at the mistakes and misdeeds of large corporations holds us back from taking positive action. If we are going to create paths to alternative futures and shape realistic social and economic choices, we need to move beyond the talk-show version of contemporary life. Social choice, including technological choice, can take many forms. It can come in almost any shape, including community group programs, workplace associations, professional groups, unions, and governmental legislation, as well as direct actions like those occurring around the world when officials of the World Trade Organization (WTO) meet. Whatever we choose to accomplish and change requires more than a technological leap of faith. When I began research on the first edition of this book in 1993, the terms office work and white-collar work were generally used to define jobs that were done inside offices for individual employers like large corporations. Most white-collar work was also to be found inside of occupational groups with job categories such as accountant, bookkeeper, computer programmer, purchasing manager, librarian, and the like. Now, a decade later, workplaces can be found in homes, in cars, on mobile phones, in airport lounges, and in a variety of settings. And most workers are learning that they need to jump from job to job and be prepared to be self-employed. Not insignificantly, while government agencies still keep data on traditional occupational categories, most people entering the labor market are finding out that they should not focus on a set of skills for a specific occupation or career. Workers at all levels and in all types of work arrangements find, sort, arrange, analyze, and use information in similar ways, regardless of their occupational classification. Flexibility—in work, workers, job titles, occupational categories, work arrangements, working time, and workplaces—is the name of the game. The data and examples in the book are largely drawn from U.S. workplaces and statistics. I conducted over fifty in-depth interviews, with the majority situated inside of people's workplaces. Since the focus of the interviews was on what people actually do in their jobs, it was important to situate their activities inside of their working environment.2 This helped me visualize the complexities of their work and let me ask questions about the particular hardware, software, and procedures they used. Of course, when the workers felt that my presence would cause problems, some interviews were done in homes and coffee shops outside of work environments. |
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