Changing Contours of Work. Stephen Sweet
and other skilled professionals, no hospital can function without a significant number of orderlies, maintenance workers, aides, technicians, and clerks. Nor are the trends for the professional STEM workforce uniformly positive. For example, STEM salary growth has not outpaced salary growth in other occupations, suggesting that the demand for STEM professionals is not as great as had been anticipated (Hira 2010, Teitelbaum 2014).
In addition, the independent, creative, entrepreneurial STEM career exemplified by Steve Jobs of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is not the reality experienced by many employees in this sector. While earlier predictions (e.g., Kraft 1984) that high-technology work would be simplified and routinized in much the same way as manufacturing have proven exaggerated, STEM professionals work in jobs affected by a number of dynamics reminiscent of the old economy. For example, STEM employers in industries such as information technology (IT) can reduce the upward pressure on salaries produced by the shortage of well-trained workers by importing qualified employees from overseas. Much like manufacturing employers in the past, who encouraged and even sponsored immigration to keep labor costs down, contemporary IT employers look to countries such as India for sources of affordable labor. There is a growing controversy over the H1-B visa program that facilitates the import of technical professionals from overseas, as some claim that employers use this not because there is a shortage, but as a source of less expensive labor (Salzman et al. 2013, Teitelbaum 2014). Moreover, the new economy offers novel opportunities to take advantage of the availability of lower-cost labor overseas. Many analysts have noted how the electronics revolution has made it possible to digitize steps in the work process and locate them offshore, retaining only portions of the work to be performed in the United States (Aspray 2010, Blinder 2006). Interestingly, the import of technical professionals and the outsourcing of jobs may be directly linked; among the largest users of the H1-B visa program are Indian technology companies, who sponsor technical professionals coming to the United States to work for a time, then return them to India where they become key components of the growing Indian high-technology workforce (Teitelbaum 2014).
The actual work performed by STEM professionals generally requires considerable skill and expertise. However, it is not uniformly creative or autonomous in the way suggested by the more euphoric visions of the contemporary, high-technology workplace. Not all computer programming work, for example, is fully creative. Some computer professionals are engaged in the design of new systems and products and apply genuine creative autonomy as they enjoy the freedom to play with new ideas and concepts in their work. However, much computer programming (while it can be technically demanding) also can be relatively routine, formulaic work. For example, composing the well-understood computer code that forms the core of even new programs, or checking and debugging programs, can be (and often is) performed by lower-paid and sometimes less-qualified employees. This type of work is most likely to be outsourced to countries such as India (Aspray 2010, Parthasarathy 2004). There is also evidence of the emergence of what one observer called “pink-collar ghettoes” in coding, with women concentrated in the less challenging, lower-paid front-end coding jobs, while men gravitate to more challenging and more financially rewarding work in the back end—working on servers, security protocols, Blockchain, and the like (Thompson 2019).
Finally, even the more creative kinds of programming work are often managed in ways familiar to the old economy. Rather than being given a free hand to design and create whatever and however they please, computer professionals typically must design programs on schedules set for them by managers or external customers (in the case of suppliers and subcontractors to larger firms). They also often are required to incorporate user suggestions into their designs, and their compliance with these and other expectations is closely monitored (Barrett 2004). The jobs of software developers are a long way from being the routinized work of mass production workers—they enjoy much more autonomy and have more creative decision-making ability than does anyone working on an assembly line. At the same time, as in the old economy, employers tend to seek ways to limit the cost of labor and attempt to manage and control it. In sum, there has been a growth in high-skill work in the new economy and some of this work is performed in new ways with new intents. Nevertheless, high-skill work has not replaced low-skill work, and even high-skilled workers have been subject to controls established in the old economy.
New Cultures of Control?
Some observers of the new economy have argued that changes in technology, organization, and markets are transforming jobs, including manufacturing jobs, into more highly skilled jobs in small, high-tech, “flexibly specialized” enterprises (Piore and Sabel 1984). The workforce envisioned for this new kind of workplace will be highly educated, multitalented, as well as exercise creativity and decision making on the job. In this vision of the new economy, managers are cautioned against “micromanaging” and are advised to form workers into teams with their own team leaders. Even low-level employees are hired as “associates,” implying that their input will be valued. Others are not convinced. They point to the experiences of low-level service sector workers and agree with the critical philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who once quipped, “The employee of the month shows that one can be a winner and a loser at the same time.” And, though acknowledging that new methods of organizing work are more common, these skeptics suggest that the reorganization of work is not just about introducing new markets or technologies, but also about developing sophisticated new methods to control workers and undermine their power in the workplace (Curry 1993, Parker 1985, Parker and Slaughter 1988). Still others question whether even well-meaning managers attempting to create more creative, flexible work arrangements have the freedom, in the context of stockholder, financial, and other pressures, to create the workplaces they would like (Stuart et al. 2013, Thompson 2003). Thus, we must also ask, are new technologies and organizational designs increasing worker autonomy, creativity, and control?
Some of the most carefully conducted studies of this question have been performed by Steven Vallas, who has examined the introduction of computer technology and worker teams in the pulp and paper industry. His findings are important because they both support and refute core predictions regarding what happens to workers in organizations that use new technologies and managerial strategies. First, consider teamwork. Some analysts see worker teams as an ideological trick, a way of getting workers to believe that they have control when they do not. Vallas found that, rather than hoodwinking workers, work teams shared grievances, developed a heightened distrust of management, and developed class solidarities. And, by virtue of being a team, they expressed complaints to management with less fear of personal reprisal (Vallas 2003a). However, Vallas also found that the expectation for shared decision-making responsibilities between workers and managers has been exaggerated. In fact, the introduction of computer-regulating systems in the paper industry tended to increase the distinction between those who had the authority to make decisions and those who did not. Older workers interpreted the new technology as an affront to the craft skills they had developed through years of experience on the job, and they expressed dismay at the new reliance on meters and printouts that provided information they already possessed (Vallas and Beck 1996).
One of the important insights from Vallas’s studies is that the new economy seems to be marked less by fundamental shifts in the amount of control workers have and more by modifications to systems of accountability. In the old economy, the assumption was that workers should have no control and that jobs and machines should be rigidly designed and managed from above. In the new economy, where commitments to Total Quality Management foster a drive to work with exacting perfection, and where the responsibility for creating this outcome is placed on the shoulders of worker teams, a new dynamic of collective pressure is introduced. Workers now have increased responsibility for production but not control over many of the decisions that shape it. These findings correspond with a number of other analyses that show that workplaces in the new economy do not operate on trust and cooperation and that workers and managers remain skeptical of each other’s intentions and motivations.
Another supposedly new dynamic is the re-creation of craft communities, which some believe are reshaping the ways work is understood and performed. For example, the success of Silicon Valley enterprises has been attributed to their operating in a regional community of similar companies that specialize in computer work (Pietrykowski 1999). In some ways, these regional centers operate in a manner similar to the craft communities of bygone