Stephen R. Barley - Work and Technological Change

I was and remain honored to have been selected to deliver the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University in 2016. Looking over the list of those who gave these lectures before me was humbling, and I still wonder if someone did not make a mistake. Regardless, I am grateful to the Oxford University Press and to the Sad School of Business for deeming me worthy of the honor.

For my lectures, I chose to write three essays () was written after delivering the lectures. I intend the essays and this book to bring closure to my career to date. I am not sure whether I will continue to study technology and work in the future, but if I do, I suspect that whatever I write will stand on the thoughts and conclusions found among these pages. It is hard to teach old dogs new tricks, and with each passing day I become an older dog.

The first essayWhat Is a Technological Revolution?presents the fruits of my struggle to come to terms with the broad history of technological change and with where current developments fit into the scheme by which I have come to make sense of the First, the Second, and what I will call the Control Revolution. The last involves computers, microprocessors, robotics, sensors, machine learning, and algorithms, which are again making technology and work a topic of current concern. The level of analysis here is far more sweeping than the level of analysis for which my work is known, since I am primarily an ethnographer and not a historian or a theorist. The essay is rooted in lectures that I developed for my undergraduate students at Stanford with the hope that they might be better able to put the era in which they live into perspective by linking the past to the present. If nothing else, the essay gave me the opportunity to retell Pertti Peltos (1973) story of The Snowmobile Revolution: Technology and Social Change in the Artic. Peltos book influenced me strongly when I was a graduate student, and to this day I count it as one of the best ethnographies ever written on the social consequences of technological change. The essay also allows me to acquaint or reacquaint scholars with the work of William Faunce and to initiate a discussion of intelligent technologies and the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution which the third essay pursues in greater depth.

The second essayHow Do Technologies Change Organizations?brings me back to my comfort zone. The essay recounts what I think I have learned about how technologies change work and about when those changes will and will not result in organizational change. Specifically, I propose a role-based theory of technologically occasioned organizational change that I began to develop in my earliest work on radiology and that I have continued to elaborate since then. Unsurprisingly, for those who have read some of my work, my view is rooted in Industrial Sociology and, in particular, the studies of work done by Chicago School Sociologists of the 1940s and 1950s, long my heroes. Among them I count Everett C. Hughes, Howard Becker, and Anselm Strauss, all of whom I was fortunate enough to meet in my lifetime.

I wrote the third essayHow Should We Study Intelligent Technologies Implications for Work and Employment?with my colleague at UCSB, Matt Beane, who knows more about intelligent technologies and how they operate than I do. The essay lays out our notions of how researchers can better investigate the ramifications of intelligent technologies to answer the question How are intelligent technologies likely to change the nature of work and employment? This question is currently a topic of great discussion, debate, consternation, and fear as we head deeper into the twenty-first century. The essay draws on ideas discussed in the first and second essays. It identifies and discusses two reasons why we see the current state of research and speculation on intelligent technologies in the workplace as inadequate. The essay also provides pointers to the kinds of research that would be useful for assessing more clearly what intelligent technologies, especially artificial intelligence, may do to work and employment. Unless we produce not only more but better empirical studies, we are likely to stumble our way into a future that the majority of us may or may not want. I do not believe that sociotechnical trajectories are foreordained, either for reasons of progress or a technologys inevitable unfolding. We always have a choice if we (or, more accurately, powerful people) can muster the data and the will to make a informed choices for the benefit of the majority.