Posted by Stephen Wood in School of Business Blog on February 4, 2025
Stephen Wood, Professor of Management, University of Leicester School of Business.
My two edited books, The Transformation of Work? and The Degradation of work?, have been selected for Routledge’s ‘Routledge Revivals’ Series. First published in the 1980s, they deal with perennial problems of work organization, and the effects of management methods and technology on work. Both books include world-renowned authors from a range of disciplines and countries in order to capture the diversity of issues and developments in the area. Their breadth makes the books distinctive, a feat beyond what a sole researcher, or even a single research team, could have achieved.
The books extended the debate well beyond the confines of technology and work organization to include the internationalization and geography of production, structural economic change and skills, gender relations and occupational segregation, developments within the service sector, modern management methods, and variations in autonomy and control across economic regimes. These themes remain central to current concerns.
I was initially apprehensive about the idea, but then was pleasantly surprised to see how relevant the arguments and empirical studies were today and how easy (and enjoyable) it was to write the new Prefaces. Illustrating this, the opening of The Transformation of Work? reads: “If we were writing a similar book today, we might begin with the same first sentence, modified for the date: “A fundamental transformation of work commenced in the 1980s (2020s); this is the memory which many commentators expect, or at least hope, to share as (when) the end of the decade approaches”. The focus then was on flexible production. The focus is now on Artificial Intelligence (AI). More nebulous and intangible than the robotic paint shops we observed in car factories in the 1980s or the word-processing software and PCs we used in our own work, AI’s development may be messier to understand, but many of the principles developed in The Transformation…will be highly relevant as the focus turns to studying its nature, application and impact.”
Typically with each new wave of new wave of technology ‒ most recently information and communication technologies, nanotechnology, and now AI ‒ two narratives polarize the discussion. Versions of a new dawn, in which mental, not manual, labour will predominate in a world of reduced hierarchy and increased choice for all, are countered by dystopian scenarios that envisage the collapse of manufacturing, heralding higher levels of unemployment, insecurity, and divides in and between societies.
The studies in both The Transformation… and The Degradations collectively point to the diversity and multidimensionality of developments – and how both sides of such polarized debates are far too simplistic. The world of work is shaped by the interaction of a multitude of factors, including product and labour markets, technology, gender norms and, not least, the agency and policies of a host of actors and not simply managements. On the major current technological concern, the books expose the dangers of approaching AI without sufficient concern for diversity, or how it will develop in conjunction with other technologies such as nanotechnology.
References
S. Wood (Ed.), The Transformation of Work? London: Unwin Allen, 1989, Routledge Revivals, 2024.
S. Wood (Ed.), The Degradation of Work? Skill, Deskilling and the Labour Process, London: Hutchinson, 1982, Routledge Revivals, 2024.
Posted in Human Resource Management | Tagged employee relations, Industrial Relations, Management, Work |
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