Bjorn (and others),
Thanks for those cites. In your recollection which of these texts (or others if they come to mind) best detail what sectors of the labor force find their jobs more interesting as a result of the so-called computer revolution and what sectors find them less interesting?
To this concern, in The Glass Cage Nicholas Carr suggests that some jobs, like being an airline pilot or a health worker, have been cognitively degraded by the introduction of automation. And he worries that this is just a harbinger of more degradation to come. Barbara Garson, in The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming The Office of the Future Into the Factory of the Past made similar observations in 1988, and Matthew Crawford in Shop Craft as Soul Craft (2009) argues (in passages that footnote Braverman and Garson) that the degradation that blue collar workers experienced with the advent of the assembly line and automation are now also being experienced by white collar workers. In a similar vein, Ben Sand, Paul Beaudry and David Green argue in _The great reversal in the demand for skill and
cognitive tasks_ that the cognitive challenges that college graduates face in their jobs have been declining significantly since the year 2000:
“high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers. This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing lowskilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force all together.” [
http://www.economics.ubc.ca/files/2013/05/pdf_paper_paul-beaudry-great-reversal.pdf]
On the other hand I would guess that most of the people who subscribe to this listserv feel that their jobs are becoming more cognitively demanding rather than less. So what's going on? Does automation mean that (as Matthew Crawford argues) "genuine knowledge work comes to be concentrated in an ever smaller elite" while the rest of white collar workers become subject to a "rising sea of clerkdom?" Or is the story more complicated than the one Crawford and Carr recount? What texts should I read to better answer the question in my first paragraph?
Sincerely,
Luke