iPad, Work-​​Discipline and Post Industrial Capitalism

• In: Blog
• By:John
• March 30, 2010

When Apple finally revealed the world’s sec­ond worst kept secret (Ricky Martin today revealed the other one — good for you Ricky), I pub­licly and pri­vately expressed, along with many oth­ers, my ini­tial, if not dis­ap­point­ment, at least state of being under­whelmed. Whatever it was, it wasn’t rev­o­lu­tion­ary (and let’s face it, we’ve come to expect rev­o­lu­tion from Apple).

I’ve think I might have changed my tune. Not because of the tech­nol­ogy, which always seemed pretty cool (Apple designed their own cus­tom chip, the form fac­tor, built the OS, and the core soft­ware —  come on that’s impres­sive in anyone’s lan­guage). But because of the real impact on the way we work, the places we work, the way we col­lab­o­rate I think it will have. In short, it might just rev­o­lu­tion­ize the con­cept of work.

200 years ago, toward the end of the Napoleonic wars, most of the world, even in its most devel­oped parts, worked with their hands, in pre, or at most proto indus­trial occu­pa­tions. Farming, weav­ing, shoe­mak­ing and so on. Those who worked in cler­i­cal roles rep­re­sented a tiny frac­tion of the world’s population.

In the ground­break­ing and highly read­able Time, Work-​​Discipline and Industrial Capitalism [PDF], English Historian E.P.Thompson asked “If the tran­si­tion to mature indus­trial soci­ety entailed a severe restruc­tur­ing of work­ing habits — news dis­ci­plines, new incen­tives, and a new human nature on which these ini­tia­tives could effec­tively bite — how far is this related to changes in the inward nota­tion of time.”

The indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion essen­tially invented the vast major­ity of the roles we occupy at work today, in man­u­fac­tur­ing, admin­is­tra­tion, sales, and so on. And the nature of these roles is in many respects largely unchanged since their inven­tion in the 19th cen­tury. They were (and remain) highly reg­u­lated (then because coor­di­nat­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion and coop­er­a­tion between indi­vid­u­als was most read­ily done by bring­ing them all together at the same time in the same place). But long after the need for such reg­i­men­ta­tion has passed, out work­ing remain similar.

Let’s focus on the sort of per­son for whom using a com­puter is cen­tral to their work, a per­son whose edu­ca­tion, work related tasks, and indeed phi­los­o­phy of work was com­pletely unknown prior to the Industrial Revolution. I’ll exclude the tiny minor­ity of those who work free­lance, or in work­places that work hard to make their employee’s expe­ri­ence more than the mun­dane (that is most of you read­ing this post I’d guess).

• We travel to places of work (at our expense, and on our own time, it’s worth not­ing) at des­ig­nated times and on des­ig­nated days
• We largely occupy util­i­tar­ian spaces, “cubi­cle farms” and the like, designed for max­i­mum real estate effi­ciency, and mod­elled often on the panop­ti­con — every­one is essen­tially pub­licly vis­i­ble, so they can be con­tin­u­ally mon­i­tored to ensure they are per­form­ing their tasks.
• Our work is mea­sured largely in time — we clock on and off (often quite lit­er­ally still 100 or more years after the inven­tion of the punchclock).
• Of course, our use of that most pre­cious of employer resources (our own time) is mea­sured, and rationed — with our use of the web, and other online resources blocked or monitored.
• And our own work is often locked away on care­fully con­trolled desk­top com­put­ers, and all our work needs to be done in the work­place (I know fast grow­ing suc­cess­ful star­tups with these sorts of poli­cies, it isn’t just banks and governments)

But what does all this have to do with iPads?

The tech­nol­ogy of work (both indus­trial and admin­is­tra­tive) dri­ves the shape of the work­place, which in turn shapes work­place poli­cies and prac­tices. Which is very much the tail of process wag­ging the dog of outcomes.

Computers, even “lap­tops”, work best on desks. Connected to power, and often phys­i­cally to net­works (many work­place net­works require fixed con­nec­tions only for “secu­rity” pur­poses). Now, it may come as a sur­prise to all you design­ers and devel­op­ers out there, for whom mul­ti­ple mon­i­tors, and super fast desk­tops and lap­tops, with mul­ti­ple appli­ca­tions open simul­ta­ne­ously are a must, but for many of the roles most peo­ple play at work, the tra­di­tional com­puter at desk with key­board and mouse, run­ning a fully fledged OS like Windows is sim­ply an anachro­nism (and overkill). People work with this tech­nol­ogy because no bet­ter way of work­ing has come along, and it has become embed­ded in (and come to shape) the archi­tec­ture of work. Meanwhile, we’ve seen the Blackberry exploded in pop­u­lar­ity, despite its crammed key­board and ter­ri­ble user expe­ri­ence in rela­tion to a desk­top com­puter for email, due to the pop­u­lar­ity of doing email on the go. So pop­u­lar, that the President of the United States insisted on keep­ing his despite the secret ser­vice con­cerns about security.

What the black­berry did for email, the iPad may well do for many kinds of cler­i­cal work (which for many of those who work in offices is very email dri­ven anyway).

Desktop soft­ware has been, and will only con­tinue mov­ing to “the cloud”. So, IT depart­ments will less and less need to man­age the clients on the net­work the way tra­di­tional net­works need to be man­aged (get­ting IT to cede this con­trol is a sep­a­rate issue).

The unpleas­ant­ness of sit­ting upright 8 or more hours a day in the same seat at the same desk will be replaced by the abil­ity to choose dif­fer­ent work envi­ron­ments based on mood and need. Large scale typ­ing tasks can be done at a desk with a ded­i­cated key­board. Web based research or gen­eral email­ing on a lounge, at a cafe, on the train or bus. Collaboration, par­tic­u­larly the unstruc­tured free flow of brain­storm­ing and idea gen­er­a­tion often takes place best face to face —  the iPad and the types of envi­ron­ments in which it can be com­fort­ably used may well end up con­ducive to a syn­the­sis of the best in online and in per­son collaboration.

It’s not that any of these pos­si­bil­i­ties are entirely new, but the iPhone and other sim­i­lar devices sim­ply aren’t the right form fac­tor for extended work — they merely com­ple­ment desk­top and lap­top com­put­ers in lim­ited cir­cum­stances. Laptops, and even “net­books”, as any­one who’s tried to use theirs on planes, and trains, and in bed, and even on the sofa, really don’t have the flex­i­bil­ity to be pleas­antly used in most non desk-​​like envi­ron­ments for any extended period of time. The iPad may indeed have found the right sweet spot of mobile and more tra­di­tional com­puter like qual­i­ties to lib­er­ate us from the anachro­nis­tic, frankly stul­ti­fy­ing work envi­ron­ments, and prac­tices most “knowl­edge work­ers” are sub­jected to. I’d go so far as pre­dict iPads (and of course the other sim­i­lar form fac­tor devices which will soon fol­low) will replace desk­top and lap­top com­put­ers for most peo­ple. And for those for whom it doesn’t I sus­pect it will replace their lap­tops, with iron­i­cally, the desk­top out­last­ing the lap­top com­puter (which for the last 5 years or so most peo­ple would have pre­dicted as ulti­mately con­sign­ing the desk­top to extinction).

Intelligent com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions, start­ing with indi­vid­ual deci­sion mak­ers, will see the pos­si­bil­i­ties, for empow­er­ing and inspir­ing their work­force, for mak­ing their work­ing envi­ron­ments not sim­ply tol­er­a­ble, but enjoy­able (by grant­ing as much auton­omy as pos­si­ble to those work­ing for them, not by installing foos­ball and pool tables) and ulti­mately for get­ting much more from those who work for them by embrac­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ties that rethink­ing tra­di­tional work­ing envi­ron­ments and asso­ci­ated prac­tices presents.

Such sweep­ing changes in the archi­tec­ture and cul­tural prac­tices of work will take time to come about, and be strongly resisted by many. Many lev­els of man­age­ment exist largely to dream up and main­tain poli­cies, rather than actu­ally enable their teams to achieve their out­comes bet­ter and more effi­ciently (the term “man­age­ment” says it all really). But those deci­sion mak­ers, com­pa­nies and work­places which embrace these oppor­tu­ni­ties will surely see the best and bright­est flock to them. And the value and out­put of those who do work for them soar.

We spend half or more of our wak­ing life in some way con­nected with work — surely to good­ness it should be as pleas­ant an expe­ri­ence as possible?

Your opinion:

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