ABSTRACT
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the vast majority of management training and theory was focused on the big-company model, and more specifically on big manufacturing companies. However, in the last two decades of the century a social change started – often described as the post-modernist movement – when the society formerly dominated by institutionalized systems and governments and large organizational employers began to be replaced with a more personalized culture – ‘the empowerment of the individual’. It is no accident that this evolution followed the post-war increase in materialism and increased consumer spending power and personal mobility, and that it coincided with major changes in telecommunications and information technology. At the time, the pundits were all forecasting shorter working hours and increased leisure time for the working population; however, the biggest impact of high-powered technology was on manufacturing industry, where expensive skilled manual labour was rapidly replaced by automated and computerized manufacturing systems. As a result, the pundits were proven wrong, with a large part of the working population becoming unemployed whilst others were working increasingly long hours in the hope of maintaining their employability. The same process was going on in the public sector, with downsized levels of operation due to the cost savings arising from new technology, and the enforcement of competitive tendering in local authorities and the National Health Service.
