‘Plus ca change, plus la meme chose?'—researching and theorising the ‘new’ new technologies

• Published date: 01 March 2014
• Author: Phil Taylor,Debra Howcroft
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12026
• Date: 01 March 2014

‘Plus ca change, plus la meme

chose?’—researching and theorising the

‘new’ new technologies

Debra Howcroft and Phil Taylor

Waves of ‘new technology’ have typically been accompanied by widespread specu-

lation regarding their economic and social impacts. Most notably, in the late 1970s

and early 1980s, computerisation and the microchip prompted cataclysmic predic-

tions regarding their effects for employment. For example, the World Centre for

Computer Sciences and Human Resources estimated that, by the end of the 1980s, as

many as 50 million people would be displaced by new information and communi-

cation technologies (ICTs) (Braham, 1985, cited in Boreham et al., 2007: 3). In the

aftermath of speculation on the ‘Information Revolution’, whether dystopian (Jenkins

and Sherman, 1979) or utopian (Toffler, 1970), New Technology, Work and Employment

was established as corrective and as a forum for theoretically informed, empirically

grounded research on the impact of technological developments on work, employ-

ment and workplace social relations. In place of grand theorising, then, the journal

set itself the more prosaic but robust social scientific objective of describing, mapping

and analysing emerging realities.

A subsequent ‘wave’ of ICTs was associated with the Internet—or ‘the network’—

and once again gave rise to unsubstantiated conjecture regarding societal effects. A

populist account by Rifkin (2000) prophesised that market capitalism would be trans-

cended by the rapid and thoroughgoing changes that would ensue. It was Castells

(1996), though, who provided the most serious articulation of the transformational

power of ICTs, his informationalmode of development hearkening back to, and drawing

upon, earlier formulations of the information society. The Rise of the Network Society can

be critiqued on the grounds that its defining essence, informational capitalism, defaults in

the final analysisto the familiar flaw of technological determinism. Castells attributedto

this new generation of ICTs, sui generis, the ability to transform society. In so doing, the

concept of technology as a social product, whose applicationto work and employment

reflects the priorities of the holders of social and economic power, wasdiminished. This

critical understanding has been core to this journal since inception (Baldry, 2011).

The problem of treating technology as a deus ex machine, which can transcend soc-

iety’s relations of production, has been starkly revealed in recent times. The optimistic

march of the network society was stalled by the dot.com crash (1999–2001), and then

halted by the GreatCrisis of 2008 and its recessionary aftermath. The very technological

interconnectedness that hitherto had been hailed as positively transformational was

now seen to contribute to the contagion of global crisis, as toxic debt flowed across the

globe just as knowledge had done so previously. Self-evidently, then, global digital

networks had proved incapable of overcoming the crisis-generating contradictions of

capitalist political economy.

The new new technologies

A new wave of digital technology now promises to reconfigure work, employment and

the relations of production in the workplace and beyond. Commentators self-

consciously try to avoidthe optimistic–pessimistic manicheism of previous waves. Yet,

despite ritualistic deference to the argument that technological innovation increases

New Technology, Work and Employment 29:1

ISSN 0268-1072

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Editorial 1