TABLE OF CONTENTS By the end of this chapter you should be able to:
understand the nature of technological change and its relationship to people management;
understand the trends in technological developments and use these trends to analyse your strategic environment;
apply the notion of a technological system to your own workplace or one with which you are familiar to analyse its essential components;
distinguish between how technologies are used to empower people at work and to disempower them;
apply the concepts from the chapter to design a system of work and work roles that minimize the negative influences of new technologies on people.
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...
