Invited Commentary

New technologies: the future and the present of work in information

and communication technology

Ursula Holt grew

 

This paper outlines a selection of technological and organizational developments in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector and analyses their likely challenges for workers and trade unions around the globe. It addresses the convergence of telecommunications and information technol- fogy, the related developments of ubiquitous computing, ‘clouds’ and ‘big data’, and the possibilities of crowdsourcing and relates these technologies to the last decades’ patterns of value chain restructuring. The paper is based on desk research of European and international sources, on sector analyses and technology forecasts by, for instance, the European Union and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and some national actors. These prognoses are analyzed through the lens of recent research into ICT working environ- mints and ICT value chains, identifying upcoming and ongoing challenges for both workers and unions, and outlining possible research perspectives.

Keywords: ICT, virtual work, restructuring, globalization, technology, unions.

 

 

Introduction

The information and communication technology (ICT) sector is probably the sector that is most emblematic of society-wide progress and innovation, both technologically and economically. Indeed, practices of technology use, employment and work organization in the sector often pioneer developments in other sectors. The obvious reason is that this sector develops a large proportion of the technologies that visibly change work and life throughout societies and economies. It builds its practices on the self-applications of its own inventions. Simultaneously, these technologies diffuse into other sectors and spheres of society, both changing these contexts and being adapted to them.

For these reasons of sheer pervasiveness, dynamism and impact, ICT, like space travel in the 1960s, has come to comprehensively represent images and expectations of ‘the future’, and in particular, the ‘future of work’. Hopes of ongoing progress, economic

 

Ursula Holt grew (holtgrewe@forba.at) is the scientific director of Firsching’s- und Beret unstilled Arbeit welt, Vienna. Her research interests include service work and organization, ICT and job quality.

growth, skill upgrading and possibly also democratization are attached to new ICTs as well as fears of totalitarian control, alienation, job loss and insecurity. Often, hopes and fears are interrelated: the hopes imply an underlying fear of getting disconnected and being left behind, and the fears carry a bleak relish of submission to overwhelming external forces. Either way, in many policy-oriented or more general accounts of the ‘future of work’, with either a critical or an affirmative outlook, this future appears to be determined by technology-driven trends that converge upon a blueprint designed by the advanced actors of the ICT industry. The implication is that other parts of society are lagging behind and needing to adapt to that future.

This paper aims to go beyond an overly linear view of ‘the future’. It provides a commentary on a selection of technological, economic and organizational develop- mints in the ICT sector and analyses their opportunities and challenges for workers and trade unions around the globe. To do this, it combines a range of different research perspectives and levels of analysis: the basis is desk research of European and inter- national sources, on sector analyses and technology forecasts by, for instance, the European Union (EU) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (European Commission 2012a; 2012b, OECD, 2012), and some national actors that take technology developments, business and innovation activity into account. These prognoses have a somewhat descriptive angle and a tendency to extrapolate current developments into the near future, emphasizing labor markets, skill levels and competitiveness. In contrast, accounts in a more popular genre of literature that accentuate the ‘newness’ of new technologies (e.g. Mayer-Schonberger and Cuvier, 2013) reach farther into the future and focus on dramatic change and new qualities of either innovation or surveillance. The commentary provided here considers both genres through the lens of recent research into ICT working environments, which increasingly takes transnational restructuring of ICT value chains and production networks into account. Two theoretical angles provide insight: recent labor process theory addresses the adaptability and ever-changing capacities of contemporary, financialized capitalism to both access new sources of value and externalize cost (e.g. Boreham et al., 2007; Taylor, 2010; Thompson, 2013), and more relational approaches investigate the organic- national and societal contextuality of new technology use (Touma, 2002; Garston and Wulff, 2003; Orlowski, 2007; Holt grew, 2008) with a focus on its ironies, obstacles and limitations. This admittedly eclectic exploration aims to do both: on the one hand, recognize the speed and impact of ICTs and the power of particular actors in the field (namely the large ICT multinationals) to shape large parts of societies’ technology use according to their needs and strategies. On the other hand, assess the ways in which technologies are shaped through their uses and also the ways in which stakeholders and collective actors, labor market, education and training institutions, social and cultural life and workers’ and consumers’ experiences, and occupational identities shape the context in which ICT actors operate. Unions and civil society actors can and need to influence their use in the interest of workers, citizens and society at large. The paper thus does not present first-hand research results as such—which in many new and dynamic areas do not exist yet. It uses existing research and knowledge of these mechanisms to identify current and upcoming challenges and generate hypotheses on likely developments. The overall assumption is that new technologies and develop- mints that converge in ICT and expand its possibilities into further reaches of work and society are likely to unfold their impacts along similar lines as previous develop- mints and that from current research into work and restructuring, we can risk some forecasts.

 

Trends in the ICT industry

Restructuring and relocation of work

Restructuring, outsourcing and offshoring have been characteristics of the ICT sector for years. Because ICT overall has been enhancing the integration and expansion of value chains and workflows beyond organizational boundaries, it is not surprising that

such restructuring is applied to the technology itself (Castells, 1996; Huws et al., 2009; Hopcroft and Richardson, 2012). The digitalization of information, its increasingly rapid transfer and the potentially global distribution of programming and ICT skills, practices and standards made outsourcing of software development and ICT services easier and more attractive for companies.

Initially, from the 1990s onwards, simple processes or pieces of the product were outsourced or offshored such as data maintenance or coding tasks. India, with its relatively cheap, qualified labor force, emerged as a prime location, followed soon by other emerging economies such as Russia, Vietnam and the Central and Eastern Euro- pean countries (Huws and Flicker, 2004; Taylor and Bain, 2005; Holt grew and Meli, 2008). However, offshoring took on a dynamic of its own. Larger and larger parts of the software development process began to be outsourced or offshored as companies developed the expertise to manage distributed work processes and developed new functions and work roles for liaison and coordination between organizations (Marchington et al., 2005; Holt grew, 2012).

These decisions were not always economically motivated. Companies felt also press- surged to ‘jump on the bandwagon’ and participate in offshoring even without a real strategic plan for the use of remote sites. In such decisions, pressure by financial markets, the examples of competitors and management fashions played a part. Another factor was, occasionally, the availability of expatriate engineers and managers who were interested in moving back to their home countries (Lynn and Salzman, 2007). On the other end of the emerging value chains, both independent and captive subcontractors and subsidiaries aim to expand their services, their customer base and generally to ‘move up the value chain’ (Dasani and Kenney, 2003)—up to the emergence of the large information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing multinationals based in India or elsewhere (Taylor and Bain, 2005). Increasingly, these subcontractors do their own offshoring and in recent years have even been back shoring work to Europe or the United States to be closer to their clients (Holt grew, 2009).

Nevertheless, observers and policymakers in Europe in particular apparently still focus on the familiar pattern in which manufacturing and the lower-skilled tasks and functions in software development and IT services are being relocated, whereas Indus- tribalized countries retain the higher value-added functions such as architecture and research and development (R&D) (European Commission, 2012a; 2012b). However, there is evidence that the pattern of relocating work is shifting further. The top-of-the- value chain functions of R&D, innovation and systems integration that were tradition- ally assumed to be core competencies remaining in the originating countries of multinationals are no longer immune to offshoring. Especially for new recruitment in these functions, companies appear to turn to the newer and cheaper locations. It is possible that the location of these functions in the traditional innovation clusters of the Americas, Europe or Eastern Asia is no longer a given.

 

New and evolving players

During the financial crises since 2008, the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) have gained some attention with their robust growth, large internal markets and increasing roles as producers of ICT goods and services. Brazil, India and China were analyzed by the EU’s Institute for Prospective Technology (Simon, 2011). These count- tries have quite distinct profiles in ICT. In Brazil, the sector is dominated by foreign companies and its main segments are telecom and IT services. In telecommunications, Mexican Telex is prominent, owning 75.16 per cent of Embratel in the fixed market, 100 per cent of America Moil in the mobile market, and the large Southern EU companies Telefonica, Portugal Telecom, Telecom Italia have also invested (Simon, 2011: 8). China and India are the fastest-growing mobile markets in the world. China is also the largest one with its 853 million subscribers in 2011. China is the world’s largest producer of ICT products, dominated by manufacturing. India is predominantly driven by software services. Both countries now have their ‘own’ large multinationals such as

Huawei Technologies, Lenovo, and ZTE in China and Tata, Wipro and Infosys in India. In China, large national Internet providers also are among the top Internet companies. These large companies lag somewhat behind their Western and East Asian counterparts in R&D investment, but China in particular is expanding ICT R&D activities consider- ably, both by national and foreign companies. The country has become the world’s largest recipient of foreign direct investment in R&D in both ICT and non-ICT sectors and the third most important offshore R&D location after the United States and the UK. India ranks sixth in this list (ibid., 8ff.).

For policymakers and IT professionals and companies in the United States, Europe and Japan, R&D offshoring can become a cause of some concern even though we do not yet observe massive job losses from established locations on national levels. New recruitment into the innovative and higher-value added parts of the sector may increase- ingle occur in lower cost locations with possible consequences for the career and employment perspectives of potential employees and for investment into nationally based innovation and educations systems. This is not to suggest a protectionist stance to unions in the developed world, but it requires them to systematically take the globalization or transnationalities of ICT work into account, from both the side of migration and relocation, and to explore ways of connecting with increasingly disturb- used and diverse workforces.

 

Technological change

While far-reaching technological forecasting is outside of the scope of this paper, some observations of patterns of change can be made. They are the outcome of the last years’ company strategies, business models, divisions of labor and modes of technology use. Technological trends of particular interest to unions and workers in the near future appear to be:

•        the convergence of telecommunications and IT;

•        the increasing omnipresence not just of ‘chips’ but of Internet connectivity and consequently, the diffusion of web-based services and functionalities into increase- ingle diverse spaces and spheres of activity;

•        the increasing independence of computing capacity from local hardware equip- mint and software (‘cloud computing’);

•        the utilization of the resulting amounts of data and meta-data for various comer- coal and public purposes and business models (‘big data’).

All of these are obviously interrelated because ubiquitous connectivity enables remote access to data and computing capacity, and the data flows from all kinds of sources centrally feed into the large data sets of ‘big data’.

 

The convergence of telecommunications and IT

The convergence of the historically and technologically distinct networks of computing and telecommunications has been discussed for decades and become possible with the digitalization of all kinds of media content and the development of broadband tech- neologies and ever-increasing processing power. Currently and in the next few years, it is happening on the network side. The Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard marks the transition of mobile telecommunications from the mixed circuit- and packet-switched Universal Mobile Telecommunications System to packet-switched, Internet Protocol- based networks.

This is likely to change the structure of the ICT sector and its industries substantially. Traditional telecommunications equipment consisted of dedicated, vendor-specific combinations of hardware and software. The Advanced Telecom Computing Architect- true (ATCA) standard took some steps in taking apart network hardware and software, allowing the integration of multivendor hardware systems running software provided by network specialists. This was adopted partly upon pressure by large mobile network