Meeting 1 Notes

Co-ordinator = Eve Mitleton-Kelley

PARTICIPANTS

• Why do we say that ICT is changing the relevance of work?
• I think one of the consequences of ICT is the possibility for people working from home. This is changing the dynamics of home life and the dynamics of how people relate with their colleagues when they do not see them physically.
• One of the issues that certainly interest me is the importance of communication in face-to-face interactions, which is completely changed by ICT.
• On the other hand, it is clear that ICT enables distant people to interact more easily.
• I think that the way people work doesn't seem to have changed too much in the last twenty or more years. During the 1950s there were well-recognised patterns of work but now this is not the case. At that time, for instance, there was a strictly hierarchical way of organisation. Today we have far more flexibility and variety in this pattern of organisation.
• Regarding values I would say that in today organisations there is an assumption that the people who work together as colleagues share a common set of values but this assumption, of course, can be wrong. Nonetheless we can say that despite the differences that we can in values with our colleagues, there is a set of "values in operation", which means the way we do the things we do at work, are similar. I wonder if this is what was implies by the original sentence of this group.
• Notice that our personal values define us as individuals but when we go into an organisation we are constituted as roles. These roles have associated certain values that could be incompatible with the personal values that people have. In this case the organisation constitutes values whose are incompatible with the values that people have.
• In the past we have some standard working patterns; nowadays we are driven by tasks.
• Perhaps today the way we use ICT can help us to constitute different organisational forms. Will these new forms affect our values? Do our own values influence the way we use ICT? People with power can certainly affect the way we use ICT.
• Regarding this relationship we can as how can we design ICT in such a way that it can accommodate different values, in other words, if it is an information system it does not matter who access the information or where s/he comes from they will be able to take something of value from the system. 

CRITICS

• Can we relate the degree of use of ICT with unemployment? And as a consequence of that are we moving toward more informal type of jobs?
• Notice that you may address one of the issues regarding values, organisations and ICT in two different ways. In one way you may want to have an alignment between the values promoted by the organisation through the roles that constitute their members and the personal values of these members. The other way is that you accept this mismatch in values and try to use ICT (via its design) to accommodate as many values as possible.
• Notice that certainty was something that used to be attached to work. Fifty years ago (in most cases at least) you knew that when you join a company (specially bureaucracies) you would be working they're for the next forty years and then you retire. Nowadays what you have mostly is a certain kind of uncertainty.
• Another point that could be of interest refers to our biological structure as human beings. Does this structure require for us to be in physical contact with others? Are we affecting this biological structure if we reduce this physical contact to extremes? Perhaps we are jumping in our evolution as specie in which we do not need this physical contact much. 
• On the other hand, the isolation in working environments that is typical of using ICT (especially computers) may be facilitating more schizophrenia and more neurosis in the working environment. So putting all this together we can ask how the use of ICT in this new way of working is transforming us as individuals.

PARTICIPANTS

• Does our biological makeup determine the way in which we need to interact and work? Could this isolation just described bring some fundamental psychological changes?
• Well, I do not agree with the statement that ICT may produce isolation because what actually ICT does is to connect people, perhaps not yet in ways that are particularly rich at the moment but it connects you anyway with more people than you could do before. Of course you may feel lonely in a crowd.
• Notice that when you use ICT to connect to other people there is this phenomenon of time and space compression that is in a different scale if we use different ways of communication. These differences in the dimensions of time and space may be confusing. What kind of effects can have this to people? 
• When we lose the space dimension in ICT communication, we are losing the body language in that communication as well.
• On the other hand, notice that although there are about 6 billion people who don't use ICT they still may be victims of new organisational forms because they live in an organisational context in which ICT is being used.
• I think that technology has helped to create employment and do not have a major consequence on global unemployment.
• But even in those cases where ICT makes irrelevant some kind of jobs, is that a thread or an opportunity? I think ICT in fact is expanding the space of possibilities for doing things and if this is accompanied by proper training it should not be a direct cause of unemployment.
• The other issue that could be important is that of surveillance through ICT and how this affect work.
• Notice that even the anonymity offers by email can easily be discovered by the use of tracing software.
• It is interesting to realise that nowadays, in a sense, we are coming back full circle with the way people use to work fifty years ago and this is precisely the case with the call centres where people are treated as "work-slaves" even though they are using the most sophisticated technology.