ABSTRACT
In this chapter I have brought together a wide range of literature and research from different disciplines to help you understand the importance of technological change to the management of people and be able to use these ideas to improve your thinking and performance as a manager. It is clear that the relationship between changing technologies, organizations and people is an extremely important one, as it has been at the heart of nearly all management thinking and a good deal of economic policy in various countries for many years. It is also clear that this is an ever-moving target because, in one key sense, there is nothing new about changing technologies; they are always with us and always presenting managers with new problems as well as new opportunities. These ever-present dynamics have never been more obvious than during recent times. The rate of recent technological progress, the ubiquity of information and communications technologies (ICT) at most workplaces, and the emerging cluster of related technologies to which ICT has helped give birth – biotechnology, nanotechnology, new material science and robotics – promises to transform most economies and businesses (Evans and Wurster, 2000). If we focus on these new technologies, much of the recent work by academics and practitioners is on ICT as a general-purpose technology and its relationship with economic growth, productivity, and the future problems and opportunities at work created by new business models. This interest has been generated by comparisons between the so-called ‘new economy’ and the old economy, as many countries seek to play ‘catch-up’ with the long-standing perceived American advantage in technologically led productivity. We shall return to a definition and discussion of the new economy later in this chapter. But for the moment let’s think about it as synonymous with the knowledge-based economy and the new knowledge-based enterprises discussed in the previous chapter.
