Every
now and then in my everyday life, I’ve had the sudden feeling that I was being
granted a flash of insight into the future. In the late 1960s I had access to
the writings of Americans such as Donald
Schon and Warren
Bennis who were beginning to sketch the flexible organization of the future - the title of Alvin Toffler’s 1971 book caught the spirit of the age to come – “Future Shock”.
Personally
I was rather excited by the new organizational possibilities - exemplified in Charles
Handy’s 1978 book Gods
of Management which contrasted the familiar hierarchic or “Zeus” (club)
culture with the Appollonian (role), Athenian (task/matrixh) and Dionysian
(existential) ones.
Roger
Harrison was a great organizational consultant who actually beat Handy to the
idea of organizational cultures but Handy packaged it better. Harrison left us
a superb
set of “parting thoughts”
I
had established a pioneer matrix structure a few years earlier in a very large organization
-. Strathclyde Region – and our Member-officer
groups broke from the conventions of municipal decision-making in various
ways -
· its members (middle-level officials and councillors) were equal in status
· noone was assumed to have a monopoly of truth - by virtue of ideological or professional status
· the officers nominated to the groups were generally not from Headquarters - but from the field
· evidence was invited from staff and the outside world, in many cases from clients themselves
· they represented a political statement that certain issues had been neglected in the past
· the process invited external bodies (eg voluntary organisations) to give evidence
· the reports were written in frank terms : and concerned more with how existing resources were being used than with demands for more money.
· the reports were seen as the start of a process - rather than the end - with monitoring groups established once decisions had been made.I had another flash of insight when I read an article in the early 1980s from an American economist(Alan Schick?) about the prospects for the privatization of the National Health Service – so much so that I sent the opposition spokesman for Health a warning note……..And it was Charles Handy’s 1984 book “The Future of Work” which convinced me that the familiar contours of our world were moving under our feet – it was this book which warned us that the notion of life-long jobs was gone for ever and which introduced us to the term “portfolio life”…
There’s
a nice little video here of Handy presenting
his (more recent) idea of the “second curve” during
which he reminds us of the discussions he had in the 1970s about the purpose of
the company - and the casual way people such as Milton Friedmann and his
acolytes then introduced the idea of senior managers being given “share
options” as incentives. Handy regrets the failure of people to challenge what
has now become the biggest element of the scandal of the gross inequalities
which disfigure our societies…..
A
few years after Handy’s Future of Work, I vividly remember the impact on me of Zuboff’s In
the Age of the Smart Machine (1988) - which drew on the evidence of the new
information technology industries to underline the threat the future held to
our notion of a normal working life….(she’s just producing another fascinating
book on Surveillance
Capitalism)
We
have all subsequently taken advantage of the speed, choice and capacity with
which we have been richly endowed by the new information facilities - but
perhaps been a bit slow to recognize the scale of its consequences. Google's driver-less car and the speed with which companies such as Uber and Airbnb have
scaled up brought it all home to us….But people like Frithjof
Bergmann and Jeremy Rifkin – the latter with his “the End
of Work (1995) were amongst a few at the time who appreciated what Handy
was onto……Since then there have been quite a few books with the title “The
Future of Work” – Thomas
Malone (2004), David
Bollier (2011), Jacob
Morgan (2014) to which I should have been paying more attention…..
But,
very suddenly it seems, the scale of the
impact of IT and robots on jobs previously thought safe from automation has
hit people and the prospect of the majority of people living
without paid work is now beginning to both excite and frighten….Race against the machine (2011) is perhaps the most famous of the books about this....
The
air is thick with talk, for example, of the necessity of a Basic Income; and of
the writings of both Keynes and Marx on this subject…..
Inventing the Future –
Postcapitalism and a world without work is typical of the titles
which are now appearing. You can read
it for yourself in full here
It’s
a book which has attracted a lot of attention and I shall give some excerpts
and comments in future posts….
Update; a nice overview here of what modern work now offers far too many people......
Update; a nice overview here of what modern work now offers far too many people......
A great
diagram – as well as content from an important Conference on the Digital
Revolution
and an important ILO report I missed in 2015
and an important ILO report I missed in 2015