Windows on the Workplace

As we stand in the twenty-first century being bombarded with phrases like “thanks to advances in technology” or “with the advent of computers” it is almost as if we are expected to believe that technology comes along with an inevitable force. Windows on the Workplace takes us behind the news stories of the highly efficient, high-tech workplace and shows us the ways in which technologies such as computers, mobile phones, and the internet have been adapted by management to reshape the way work is done. In tracing the introduction of new technologies, organizations use them to benefit from both increased profits and more intense control over the workforce. Windows on the Workplace takes as its starting-point the experience of office workers and their own accounts of work. This also includes interviews with a wide range of workers, including young people entering workplaces in which the expectation of stable, long-term employment is no longer the norm. The purpose is to locate their experiences and expectations within broader social and economic patterns, and to show how these patterns are constantly changing. The ways that freelance, part-time, and temporary work is created, and the form it takes as management outsources jobs around the world. Technology alone also determines the way work is organized and outsourced. In exposing the myths about how technologies are really created, she gives readers some insight into alternatives. This updated edition offers ample evidence about how internet related jobs, skills and pay scales are not increasing as the media claims, as well as how work-time has expanded to fill work and home life.