The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age - Hardcover

Head, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195166019 ISBN 13: 9780195166019

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2003

Synopsis

In the great boom of the 1990's, top management's compensation soared, but the wages of most Americans barely grew at all. This wages stagnation has baffled experts, but in The New Ruthless Economy, Simon Head points to information technology as the prime cause of this growing wage disparity.
Many economists, technologists and business consultants have predicted that IT would liberate the work force, bringing self-managed work teams and decentralized decision making. Head argues that the opposite has happened. Reengineering, a prime example of how business processes have been computerized, has instead simplified the work of middle and lower level employees, fenced them in with elaborate rules, and set up digital monitoring to make sure that the rules are obeyed. This is true even in such high-skill professions as medicine, where decision-making software in the hands of HMO's decides the length of a patient's stay in hospital and determines the treatments patients will or will not receive.
In lower-skill jobs, such as in the call center industry, workers are subject to the indignity of scripting software that lays out the exact conversation, line by line, which agents must follow when speaking with customers. Head argues that these computer systems devalue a worker's experience and skill, and subject employees to a degree of supervision which is excessive and demeaning. The harsh and often unstable work regime of reengineering also undermines the security of employees and so weakens their bargaining power in the workplace.
Drawing upon ten years of research visiting work places across America, ranging from medical offices to machine tool plants, Head offers dramatic insight into the impact of information technology on the quality of working life in the United States.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Head is Director of the Project on Technology and the Workplace at the Century Foundation. He has been a correspondent for the Financial Times and the New Statesman, and his writings have also appeared in The New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

This is a provocative call for the rehumanization of business and society, revolting against the impact of reengineering and massive information technology systems. Journalist Head rationally gathers the evidence and presents the case against mass production: from 1990 to 2003, inflation-adjusted wages and benefits of American workers stagnated, rising less than 1 percent yearly on average. It all started, Head claims, with Frederick Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management (1911), which advocated use of engineering methods to improve productivity. Change continued with Michael Hammer's promotion of streamlining the way service industries (e.g., call centers and modern medicine) do business, accompanied by the installation of huge enterprise resource planning systems. The results? Poor to nonexistent, as the doctor-patient consultation relationship fades, as supervisors micromanage every minute of employees' work, and as once-valued workplace skills and specialties are lost. A dramatic presentation that, unfortunately, includes few specific recommendations for change. Barbara Jacobs
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Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195166019
• ISBN 13: 9780195166019
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240