The pressures causing 'boreout' arent just a problem at the employee level.
Pressure to become profitable immediately is blocking a lot of potentially creative businesses from forming, and forcing existing ones out of business..
What are the ways to escape this cycle at the company/management level, one has to wonder also.
This is a short excerpt from an excellent essay by John Reader..
"1.6
THE RISE OF THE NEW ECONOMY
I will now examine the argument that the current context is the result of a series of decisions and
policies that some within the field of politics and sociology term the rise of the New Economy.
In other words, there are clear and identifiable changes within the global economic structure
that derive directly from deliberately pursued political decisions and that reflect the interests
of a certain set of key players. One of the major contributors to this theory is the sociologist
Castells who has written one of the seminal works in recent years on the subject of what he calls
the Network Society (Castells, 2000).
This New Economy has emerged during the last quarter of the twentieth century and
is characterized by three distinctive features. First, it is informational in that the productivity
and competitiveness of all agents in the economy (firms, regions or nations) depend upon their
capacity to generate, process and apply knowledge-based information. Secondly, it is global as
the core activities of production and consumption as well as their components (capital, labour,
technology, markets etc.) are organized on a global scale. Finally, it is networked because it is
through networks that competition is played out on the global stage. The information technology
revolution has been instrumental in creating this new set of conditions and both the constraints
and possibilities that flow from them (Castells, 2000, 77). What are the implications of this for
the ways in which work is now organized?
Castells suggests that companies operating in this new environment have a number of
strategies that they can pursue towards both skilled and unskilled labour (Castells, 2000, 254).
These are as follows:
- Downsize the firm, keeping the indispensable highly skilled labour force in the North
while importing inputs from low-cost areas (very much the Dyson approach to matters). - Subcontract part of the work to their transnational establishments and to auxiliary
networks whose production can still be internalized through the network enterprise
system. - Use temporary labour, part-time workers, or informal firms as suppliers in the home
country. - Automate or relocate tasks for which the standard labour market prices are too high.
- Obtain from the labour force agreement to more stringent conditions of work and pay as
a condition for the continuation of their jobs, thus reversing social contracts established
under more favourable conditions for labour.
It is possible that any combination of these will be encountered in specific situations
depending upon local conditions and decisions. The effect is to draw all countries into this system
though and to create a convergence of labour market conditions across the globe. Furthermore,
as Castells says:
The pressure towards greater flexibility of the labour market and toward the reversal of
the Welfare State in Western Europe come less from the pressures derived from East Asia
than from the comparison with the United States. (Castells, 2000, 254)
Any company wishing to compete on anything like equal terms with a U.S. based business
will have little choice but to follow the same route of creating greater labour flexibility. Hence
“lean production, downsizing, restructuring, consolidation, and flexible management practices
are induced and made possible by the intertwined impact of economic globalization and diffusion
of information technologies” (Castells, 2000, 255).
So although there is not a unified global labour market, similar patterns of labour orga-
nization emerge across national boundaries. Was this inevitable though? Castells suggests not:
This model is not the inevitable consequence of the informational paradigm but the result
of an economic and political choice made by governments and companies selecting the
‘low road’ in the process of the transition to the new, informational economy, mainly using
productivity increases for short-term profitability. These policies contrast sharply, in fact,
with the possibilities of work enhancement and sustained, high productivity opened up
by the transformation of the work process under the informational paradigm. (Castells,
2000, 255)
What begins to emerge from this, assuming Castells is correct, is that the way that
engineering is now being shaped as a result of the forces of globalization, is only one possibility,
albeit the one that leads to short-term gain for some but at the expense of others. Is this good
for engineering or good for engineers? If one contrasts what is occurring with other possibilities,
then one might argue that it is not. What we do have at the moment is a loss of jobs in the North
combined with more stringent working conditions and the general demise of earlier victories
gained by the labour movements. Increasing instability and job insecurity are combined with
the downgrading of newly incorporated urban labour in industrializing countries. This is not
the result of the structural logic of the informational economy which could just as easily have led
to higher levels of secure employment and greater opportunities for investment and innovation.
Instead, the use of networking and the political decision to create a more mobile and volatile
labour market have undermined such possibilities. Now that these processes are ‘locked in’ it is
going to be extremely difficult to reverse them.
Agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and national government organizations have suggested that the problems of rising unemployment, income inequality and social
polarization are the result of a skills mismatch, exacerbated by a lack of flexibility in the labour
market—we have encountered such interpretations already in the area of SET. So there is a
shortage of requisite skills to enable people to take advantage of the New Economy and this is
to be tackled through the educational system. However, some now argue that the evidence for
this is actually extremely thin and that simply increasing the numbers of people in training will
not itself create jobs that have now gone overseas. Castells documents the evidence for what has
been happening in the USA in terms of unemployment and growing inequality (Castells, 2000,
298), but also points out that similar trends are visible elsewhere in the developed world. The
new vulnerability of labour is not confined to low-skilled jobs but is spreading up the labour
market hierarchy and into the ranks of professionals. Political parties of all persuasions on both
sides of the Atlantic are pursuing the same policies with very much the same results.
Membership of corporations, or even countries, ceased to have its privileges because
stepped-up global competition kept redesigning the variable geometry of work and mar-
kets. Never was labour more central to the process of value making. But never were the
workers (regardless of their skills) more vulnerable to the organization, since they had be-
come lean individuals, farmed out in a flexible network whose whereabouts were unknown
to the network itself. (Castells, 2000, 302)
So this is the wider context in which engineering is now operating, one in which instability
and uncertainty have been deliberately built into the system in ways which discourage individuals
from challenging the decisions and policies of their employers and which may also act as a
disincentive for businesses themselves to invest in innovative or high-risk projects. Unless a
project can show a swift profit turnaround for its investors—i.e. within 12 months is the figure
I have heard in some companies where the real lead time for research and development would
expect to be considerably longer—there is no chance of funding. The more ‘competitive’ the
global economy becomes, the less likely it is that smaller companies will survive or that general
deteriorating working conditions will be reversed."[/i]
(Source: Globalization, Engineering, and
Creativity by John Reader
SYNTHESIS LECTURES ON ENGINEERING, TECHNOLOGY AND
SOCIETY #3 Morgan & Claypool Publishers)
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