USA. Study on office automation in the insurance business from 1954 to 1963, and on further developments and their implication for employment opportunities and job requirements. Occupational structure and human resources planning in EDP units. The woman worker in EDP jobs. Shift work. Impact of EDP on employment trends, specifically productivity and selected occupations. Forecast for the next decade. Bibliography pp. 68-71.
To shed more light on the effect of computer technology on jobs in Québec, research was conducted in 2 hospitals, 2 private companies in the financial sector and 2 government agencies. The study measured the severity of certain socio-economic effects, and determined whether there is a link between them and management variables or individual characteristics of the workers, all of whom are women. The study analyzed the workers' perceptions of the positive or negative effects of data entry and word processing computer technology on the characteristics and conditions of their jobs. The data were gathered from 229 women working as data entry operators and 187 working as word processor operators. Social factors measured included variety of tasks and number of jobs, complexity of tasks, autonomy, job mobility, monitoring and supervision, health problems, physical environment, social interactions, attitude toward computer technology, and satisfaction with computer technology and working conditions.
Labor and Politics in the U.S. Postal Service grew out of concern for the way a large public organization does its work. It reflects my effort to link experience working as a letter carrier and mail collector with subsequent years of study in the field of organizational sociology. The final product is an academic book that certainly reveals great distance from experience in the postal workplace, but I must confess that the book still presents more a view from the bottom than a view from the top of the post office. I hope this view proves beneficial. It turns out that studying the post office has become an ongoing project that has outlived several jobs, relationships, and hairlines. What originated as a historical study of the 1970 reorganization became an analysis of the causes and consequences of an ongoing process of re structuring and technological change in the post office. Fortunately for me, similar restructurings have recently occurred in organizations and industries across the nation and around the world. The competitive pressures, new technologies, and political and class-based conflicts dis cussed in this book are perhaps more relevant today than they were in the late 1970s when I began research on the post office.
Addressing the big questions about how technological change is transforming economies and societies Rapid technological change—likely to accelerate as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic—is reshaping economies and how they grow. But change also causes disruption, creates winners and losers, and produces social stress. This book examines the challenges of digital transformation and suggests how creative policies can make it more productive and inclusive. Shifting Paradigms is the second book on technological change produced by a joint research project of the Brookings Institution and the Korea Development Institute. Contributors are experts from the United States, Europe, and Korea. The first volume, Growth in a Time of Change, was published by Brookings in February 2020. The book's underlying thesis is that the future is arriving faster than expected. Long-accepted paradigms about economic growth are changing as digital technologies transform markets and nearly every aspect of business and work. Change will only intensify with advances in artificial intelligence and other innovations. Investors, business leaders, workers, and public officials face many questions. Is rising market concentration inevitable with the new technologies or can their benefits be more widely shared? How can the promise of FinTech be captured while managing risks? Should workers fear the new automation? Are technology-driven shifts in business and work causing income inequality to rise? How should public policy respond? Shifting Paradigms addresses these questions in an engaging manner for anyone interested in understanding how the economic and social agenda is being transformed by today's winds of change.
Originally published in 1989 this title provided a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to the burgeoning discipline of human-computer interaction for students, academics, and those from industry who wished to know more about the subject. Assuming very little knowledge, the book provides an overview of the diverse research areas that were at the time only gradually building into a coherent and well-structured field. It aims to explain the underlying causes of the cognitive, social and organizational problems typically encountered when computer systems are introduced. It is clear and concise, whilst avoiding the oversimplification of important issues and ideas.
The essays in this volume enhance our understanding of Canadians on the job. Focusing on specific industries and kinds of work, from logging and longshoring to restaurant work and the needle trades, the contributors consider such issues as job skill, mass production, and the transformation of resource industries. They raise questions about how particular jobs are structured and changed over time, the role of workers' resistance and trade unions in shaping the lives of workers, and the impact of technology. Together these essays clarify a fundamental characteristic shared by all labour processes: they are shaped and conditioned by the social, economic, and political struggles of labour and capital both inside and outside the workplace. They argue that technological change, as well as all the transformations in the workplace, must become a social process that we all control.
