This point is particularly salient in relation to digital devices. The mobile phone and the personal computer are inherently more flexible than older, industrial technologies. While the utility of a machine tool is limited, a smartphone, for example, combines a phone, text messaging, e-mail, a web browser, camera, and a video recorder—and, importantly, it is all these things at once. So the device is not just one thing, it is what people make of it and how it connects to the existing social dynamics of work. In other words, we need to examine how users interact with ICTs in particular organizational contexts. So when I talk about how ICTs are changing the temporal rhythms of work, I always mean ICTs as they are embedded in social institutions, with preexisting conventions, cultures, norms, and objectives.
The Networked Worker
There is no denying that computerization has dramatically transformed work, arguably as radically as the industrial revolution did. While the shift to a postindustrial knowledge economy is often overstated, the efect of information technology on the structure of employment and the nature of jobs has been immense. The rise of service and administrative sectors means that our old paradigm of the technology of production, based on an age in which manufacturing dominated, is no longer adequate.
One indicator of this is the spectacular growth of ICT spending in corporate America since the 1970s, which has outpaced other types of equipment expenditures, even after taking into account a growing workforce and the declining price of computer hardware and software. For instance, the nominal annual US corporate IT investment from 1970 to 2008 increased from about \$5 billion to almost \$350 billion. Overall IT investment rose exponentially in the United States, from about \$100 per employee in 1970 to \$3,000 in 2008. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, American industries became 5.5 times more ICT intensive than they had been in 1995.7
Interestingly, economists disagree about the extent to which this vast expenditure has led to productivity growth. Robert Gordon, for example, argues that the inventions of the period 1870–1900, including electricity, running water, and the motor car, resulted in far greater productivity gains than the Internet, the web, and e-commerce combined.8 This issue is dificult to resolve, as it is well nigh impossible to disentangle productivity measures from the massive organizational changes wrought by information technology. As Manuel Castells stresses, new information technology is redefining workers, work processes, employment, and occupational structures, and the forms of this transformation have been the result of the “interaction between technological change, the institutional environment, and the evolution of relationships between capital and labor in each specific social context.”9
Working with Constant Conne c tivity
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