The Co-Evolution of Technology and Work-Organization

Abstract

According to Benjamin Franklin, “Man is a tool-making animal.” Had he lived today, Franklin might have said that man is a technology maker, and that he is very successful at that. Skeptics, on the other end, think that this success has generated over-industrialization, over-technologication, and man has become a technology taker╌;nolens volens.

This paper argues that the market process seems not to follow the skeptic’s value judgment. Instead, the market forces react to the fact of over-supply of some types of technology with even stronger demand for technology; for different technologies, though. Inter-industrial, inter-regional, and inter-national competition propels the re-direction and acceleration of technological change, and in the future as in the past, the individual and organized human capabilities for technology making and technology taking will determine the course of events in the co-evolution of technology and society.

In discussing the universal tendencies and the temporal deviations from this development, a distinction between different types of technological innovation is in place. As these different sub-trends in the rate and direction of product and process innovations are pre-programmed by developments in the life styles and work organizations of the population, they in turn impact upon the way of life and the development of new forms of work organization.