The Age of Flexibility – Managing Organisations and Technology

Citation

Yakhlef, A. (2003), "The Age of Flexibility – Managing Organisations and Technology", Information Technology & People, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 115-121. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2003.16.1.115.2

Although IT has today become ubiquitous and a household term, scholarly work on its effects on various organisational aspects are still far from being exhausted. Most often scholarly and popular literature is long on the instrumental, pragmatic effects of IT but short on its non‐instrumental, cognitive outcomes on organisations and their incumbents. Hence many of the accounts of the effects of IT on organisations are couched in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and business transformation. The effects of the recent advances in IT raise issues the import of which extends beyond the realm of technology, economy or instrumental behaviour. Rather than adding to the lengthy list of performance‐enhancing effects of IT on organisations Jannis Kallinikos’ Age of Flexibility – Managing Organisations and Technology is concerned with treating the complex interplay among technology, social institutions and organisational forms. The evolving technology provides the means for redefining individuality, identity, established social, cultural, economic and organisational practices and basic values and institutions.

The purpose of the book is to draw a multidisciplinary, conceptual framework for understanding how the current technological changes are affecting, and being affected by, aspects of economic life and the structure and functioning of contemporary work in organisations. More specifically the book addresses the following issues:

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  define the particular features of computers and information technologies and highlight the overall role they have come to play in an organisational context;

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  analyse how computers and technologies shape internal organisational operations and processes;

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  depict the changing economic context featuring the importance of information and knowledge and how computer and information technologies shape and are shaped by these trends;

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  explore the rise of new forms of organising which inherit features from computers and information technologies;

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  discuss the demands for new skills and competencies on organisational incumbents.

The primary target of the book is not managers in search of recipes of how to improve the use of computers and information technologies, but it is intended as a textbook for students at advanced levels and various economic and social decision makers and planners. The orientation of the book is not a technical one, rather, the focus is on the impact of IT on the way people relate to themselves, and interact with one another and work together.

The book encompasses ten chapters and is divided into two parts. The first part (including the first six chapters) pertains to the origins of information technologies and their implications for organisations. The second part (Chapters 7 through to 10) treats the emerging organisational and economic context of information technologies. After setting the stage in the first chapter, Chapter 2 proceeds to make an outline of the antecedents of computer and information technologies. In order to understand the distinctive features of computer and information technologies, Kallinikos embarks upon a brief history of human communication. Processes of information processing and transmission are central components in everyday life. Humans produce, interpret and react to various stimuli. In processing and transmitting information about their world and themselves and their environment, humans use various devices, artefacts and signalling systems: smoke signals, light flashing, drum beating, the semaphore, and so forth. The system of writing and the relevant practices such as recording, listing, classifying, and transmitting information are the forerunners of the present information technologies. Computer and information technologies involve an inscription form that is similar to writing, yet electronic writing, over and above recording and transmitting information, allows the processing and handling of information in a dynamic way. The ability of IT to automate information processing sets it apart from other means of recording and transmitting information.

Chapter 3 is devoted more specifically to the distinctive features of information technologies. In contrast to paper‐based information, information encoded in an electronic form is in a constant flux. A computer does not only gather and process information, but also acts upon the results by means of simple instructions. It can evaluate requests, place orders, execute and understand human voice‐based instructions. More recently, efforts have been directed towards developing machines with human‐like skills such as expert systems or knowledge‐based systems featuring problem‐solving abilities and connectivist methods geared towards developing programs that learn from experience. The recent emergence of ERP systems extends firms’ ability to integrate, visualise and monitor all their activities. However, the project of automating human expertise has so far achieved some limited success in some specific areas. Unstructured fields such as strategy development, medicine, and law remain unravelled by IT.

Chapter 4 turns to the effects of IT on administrative processes. In this connection, it is suggested that computer‐based information systems constitute powerful devices for planning and carrying out the various operations relevant to contemporary organisations. However, the effective use of computer technologies presupposes and precipitates the process of standardisation and modularisation of the tasks performed as well as the procedures to execute such tasks. Computerisation is leading to an increased degree of complexity and cognitivisation of organisational activities, whereby work is transformed into a complex, mental enterprise. In such contexts, work amounts to the manipulation and interpretation of data, placing new demands on employees to learn new skills. By the same token, increased computerisation of administrative work may be complicit with increased management control. Finally the chapter focuses more narrowly onto the on‐going process whereby computation, imaging and communication are merging, forming what can be called a “digital stew”.

Chapter 5 is concerned with the effects of industrial technology on the organisation of production processes. Computer‐aided manufacturing (CAM) and computer‐aided design (CAD) are by now classic examples of the application of the computer in the industrial realm. In dealing with this issue, Kallinikos takes us on a walk through the history of techniques and the associated organisational forms, stressing the importance of how industrial technology changed the pre‐industrial world of craftsmanship and small‐scale production. This is so because some thinkers posit that post‐industrial developments in production and organisational relationships bear many of the features associated with pre‐industrial contexts. One of the suggestions made in this chapter is that industrial organisations owe much of their features and forms – such as large‐scale production, division of labour, mechanisation of work and centralisation of decision‐making – to advances in industrial technology. Craft work was displaced into multi‐purpose tools, single‐purpose machines and finally abstract, cybernetic devices which may require minimum human intervention and hardly any human energy for their operation.

Chapter 6 examines the effects of IT on the very operational core of manufacturing firms where the transformation of materials and/or components into finished products takes place. A salient effect in this context is the streamlining and automation of the production and labour processes. By providing flexible manufacturing systems, computer technologies have removed major constraints imposed by scale economies and mass production. They have allowed the production of small and customised batches, high product variety and low unit costs, thereby increasing organisational prospects to respond in a timely fashion to the changing demands of customers.

Part two entitled “Beyond production: the decline of the industrial model” begins with Chapter 7, which introduces the advent of the post‐industrial society and the decline of the industrial model. Kallinikos explores three clusters of trends that have led to the decline of the industrial model and the rise of the post‐industrial order as characterised by the predominance of services, control of technology, formal knowledge, knowledge‐intensive occupations and the development of intellectual technology. The second series of developments pertains to the institutional changes in the factory system. The ability of technologies to communicate, integrate and allow intervention at a distance has precipitated the transition to networking as new organisational form, promoting work practices and modes of transacting beyond those conceived of within the factory system. The third vector behind the rise of post‐industrial order is the primacy of consumption over production, which has a significant bearing upon the planning horizons, strategies and courses of action taken by organisations.

Chapter 8 depicts the realm of the virtual. Kallinikos defines the virtual with reference to its contradictory relationship with physical reality. Virtualisation arises from the transformation of physical, manual work into cognitive processes supported by computer and information technologies. Organisations are virtualised in the sense that their physical status is being increasingly replaced by the surrogate versions of symbols, codes and images and made accessible through them. A crucial feature of virtual organizations is their meta‐management orientation, that is, the “management of business relationships” as opposed to the management of the production of goods or services. The chapter sounds a note of concern since the demolition of boundaries, which in the past separated and shielded cities, regions, nations, cultures, local knowledge and identities, may now affect sociality in different ways. The mobility of resources and working practices may reduce loyalty, commitment and platiated attachment to specific loci. The amplification‐reduction structure of all technology (Ihde, 1979) is obvious: on the one hand it extends and amplifies human functions, and it reduces and blocks other dimensions, on the other.

Chapter 9 addresses the attendant implications of social, economic and technological changes for organisations. The decline of the factory system, changing customer needs, globalisation of markets and the emergence of new virtual forms of organising are pressing organisations to become flexible and adaptable. The quest for flexibility – defined as the capacity to constantly respond to the changing demands of the environment – is prompted by the primacy of consumption over production. In contrast to the previous industrial order, where organisational planning and action almost always proceeded from the internal realities of an organisation, today consumer needs are the point of departure, the drivers behind what is produced and how it is produced, and the way it is planned and managed. To the extent that consumer needs are in a rapid change, evolving from socio‐biological to symbolic needs, functional organisation structure, though probably very efficient, has been found lacking in that it is unable to deal with such a turbulent environment. The pressure for flexibility and adaptation to the environment has been midwife to process‐based modules. Organisations are torn apart between the demands of efficiency, which require increased standardisation, on the one hand, and the need to respond flexibly and timely to changing circumstances, on the other. Organisations are undergoing a shift from a focus on a production strategy of output standardisation onto the “standardisation” of skills and processes that are best geared towards addressing change.

Finally, Chapter 10 revolves around the issue of human resources policies and new demands placed on organisational incumbents in terms of skills and their relationship to their organisation. At a premium are abstract thinking, inference drawing and procedural reasoning. The increasing cognitive complexity, knowledge‐intensive tasks, rapid and unexpected changes are characteristic features of the new work setting. One evident trend resulting from this is long‐life learning and permanent re‐education. Individuals are made more responsible for keeping their skills in par with market demands, at the same time as their link to the organisational world has loosened, giving rise to temporary contracts and short‐circuited task‐based assignments. New forms of organisation pose new issues that cannot only be tackled at the corporate level, but at national and regional levels.

This is not to imply that the book is beyond critique. Of course one can take issue with Kallinikos’ view of virtualisation and virtual forms of life as a feature of our present society. The assumption is that electronic writing is different from traditional systems of writing in that it transforms situated, ongoing processes into an electronic text that is unaffected by the vicissitudes of space and time. In its most basic sense, virtuality involves a reordering of space and time. Writing deterritorialises and detemporalises social processes and experiences. However, technology – electronic media – is not the only vector towards virtualisation. Institutions, such as tacitly upheld myths, practised rituals, or more or less explicitly articulated in oral or written forms, stories, law books, codes of behaviour, contracts, or bonds of trust, are prior to the advent of information technologies, but are just as important. For they constitute a device for coordinating human action independently of space‐time constraints. As noted by Cassirer:

Only where we succeed, as it were, in compressing a total phenomenon into one of its factors, in concentrating it symbolically, in “having” it in a state of “pregnancy” in the particular factor – only then do we raise it out of the stream of temporal change; only then does its existence, which had hitherto seemed confined to a single moment in time, gain a kind of permanence: for only then does it become possible to find again in the simple, as it were, punctual “here” and “now” of present experience a “not‐here” and a “not‐now” (Cassirer, 1957, p. 114).

In a similar way, Lévy (1998) sees virtuality as the process through which humans create themselves and their realities by transcending the “here” and “now”. On this view, present developments in electronic writing and IT help quicken the pace of virtualisation, but are not the only driver.

Furthermore, one of the differences that remains unstressed by Kallinikos is the mode of signification (the relationship between symbols and what they are meant to stand for) brought about by the electronic text, as compared to traditional forms of writing. Whereas traditional systems of writing transform the “here” and “now” and on‐going processes into a frozen representational space, electronic writing tends to capture those processes as they happen and when they happen, in a real‐time fashion. Thus meaning encoded in written messages always comes after its underlying events; electronic textualisation, in contrast, tends to present, rather than re‐present, events as they occur (Lash, 2002). With electronic writing, we are not any longer in the realm of the representational. What would be the implications of such a scenario, of such immediacy and simultaneity for organising, labouring and learning? What does a move from a representational to a presentational mode mean for the theory and practice of organising?

Finally, within much of the discourse on new forms of organising, virtuality is conjured up as a royal road to economic profitability and competitive advantage. This understanding presupposes that flexibility is an inherent feature of virtuality, and there virtuality is in complicity with economic profitability. However, how flexibility in the context of virtual structures can be seen as an economic phenomenon is not explicitly accounted for in Kallinikos' book. Regarding the virtual as involving weightless bites, cognitive resources and work processes, raises the question of where all the in‐built places, physical resources, logistics, and transportation systems of goods and humans have gone. Virtuality is not a move from definite places to abstract spaces only, for as Harvey (1992) notices, the move away from a given place to space leads us back to place. Virtualisation is not tantamount to a de‐materialisation, cognitivisation of the organisational world. For virtualisation is only possible through the production of new places (Harvey, 1992) – such as railways, highways, airports, low‐cost locations, niche markets, dynamic and skill‐rich places. Thus the advent of virtual organisation presupposes the existence of suppliers to whom the day‐to‐day tasks are migrated and outsourced, and the existence of a transportation infrastructure that supports just‐in‐time stocking or timely responses to customers. Even though Amazon prides itself on being the largest virtual bookstore in the world, it holds a physical inventory of books for its most impatient customers.

One may question the view that virtual organisation is necessarily conducive to economic profitability or competitive advantage. Rather, economic profitability is a function of the movement itself, of a constant effort at shifting and reordering space and time. As noted by Deleuze, “what is deterritorialised with the left hand is reterritorialised with the right hand” (in Harvey, 1992). The pay‐off lies in the constant exploration and creation of new spaces and times. Geographical mobility of an organisation's production units, capital, offices, etc., and the ease with which they can move from a market segment to another, and back again, are ends in themselves.

Although Kallinikos humbly considers his work as a textbook, The Age of Flexibility will do little harm and much good for scholars and researchers, for it raises a host of challenging questions concerning the implications of the current wave of virtualisation. New information technologies speed up and precipitate the coordination of social activities and processes, affecting our sense of space and time. Shifts in our conceptions of space and time give birth to new social and economic relationships. Temporary contract‐based work arrangements, trust‐based collaboration and like‐mind based communities are manifestations of the rising relational, social nexus, which, in its turn, speeds up or impedes the rhythm of virtualisation.

Although this book may not make it to the top of the bestseller lists (with or without the author's intentions), and in spite of the shortcomings mentioned above, it is an irresistible read for anyone fascinated by/aware of the increasingly significant role played by symbolic, technological and institutional artefacts in enabling humans organise, make sense of, and create themselves and their world. Barring a few mistakes and misspellings scattered through the volume, the style is engaging and passionate, emanating from a man who knows his subject personally, through teaching and researching.