ABSTRACT
In professional-managerial circles around the world, there is little doubt that digital, computer-based technologies have rapidly transformed the ways in which work gets done. From the capacity of word processing programs to allow for the infinite, almost effortless revision, printing, sorting, and storing of texts, to the use of a vast array of software programs to simulate, model, and predict outcomes, to the use of the Internet and World Wide Web as tools for communication and persuasion, these technologies have had a dramatic effect not only on the productivity of businesses, governmental and other organizations, and academia, but on the social relations that bind these organizations and on the ways in which the individuals who use them imagine their own roles as workers. Indeed, it can be argued that for those persons who have fully embraced the use of computers in their lives and work, their very sense of being in the world, the very ontological platform or condition in which all their activity is embedded, has been radically altered, if not shaken loose, from the conditions that came before (Lyotard, 1984).
