Technology

The Impact of Technology on Work

Work scholars have long debated the impact of technological development on work organization and workers’ well-being. In one popular narrative—the alienation narrative—technology's impact on workers is largely negative. To increase productivity and profits, managements use technology to reduce the complexity of tasks, to remove worker discretion from task performance, and to deskill workers. As technology becomes more developed, these tendencies only intensify. Thus, technology's development leads increasingly to lower levels of job satisfaction and to higher levels of alienation. However, in another popular narrative—the empowerment narrative—technology's impact on workers is largely positive. In this narrative, advanced technology frees workers from task repetition, adds an analytic component to workers’ skill sets, blurs the distinction between blue- and white-collar work, grants workers considerable autonomy and discretion over tasks, and produces high levels of job satisfaction and well-being. These conflicting narratives have generated debate for decades.

In Alienation and Freedom, Robert Blauner attempted to reconcile these conflicting narratives through an intensive cross-industry examination. Blauner studied work outcomes in industries that represented different levels of technological development: printing for handicraft technology, textile for machine-tending technology, automotive for the assembly line, and chemical for continuous process. From his case studies, Blauner developed what has become known as the “inverted-U thesis.” The inverted-U thesis argues that the impact of technological development in the workplace is curvilinear, rather than linear. As technology moves from handicraft to more mechanized levels, machines become increasingly dominant in structuring work tasks and in controlling the work pace. At these levels, workers experience increasing repetition, speedup, and alienation, as depicted in the alienation narrative. However, this trajectory reverses itself with the advent of continuous process technology—that is, fully automated work processes. At this advanced level of technological development, the human body is removed from processes involved in actually making products. Workers do not directly experience repetition, speedup, or isolation; rather, they become the “supervisors” of the machines performing tasks. Human work, in such automated systems, becomes more analytic, responsible, and team based, as depicted in the empowerment narrative. The historic distinction between blue- and white-collar workers dissolves. Blauner's study has become a classic in the sociology of work. His inverted-U thesis has provided a framework for integrating both the alienation and empowerment narratives into a consistent account of development. Blauner's imagery of an automated workplace that liberates workers from the alienation experienced in the past has continued to stimulate interest and debate among work scholars.

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