[Review of the book 'The Shopfloor Politics of New Technology']

Abstract

[Excerpt] The results of the study provide support for Wilkinson's primary contention that neither the adoption of particular technologies nor the organization of work based upon those technologies is objectively determined. Instead, both are the result of informal political negotiations between management and workers. Much of the previous work on the impact of technology on organizations has assumed, at least implicitly, that the adoption of technical innovations is determined by the pressures of competitive survival, and that the requirements of particular technologies largely dictate the form of work arrangements. Wilkinson is critical of such assumptions, and his research clearly supports these criticisms. It also addresses the problems of radical analyses of the Taylorization of work in capitalist societies, in which the role of workers as active negotiators in the determination of work relations is downplayed.