Knowledge work as a return to craft

de Robert D. Austin, Lee Devin, Harvard Business School. Division of Research

Social critics have long complained that industrial revolution management transfers control of a job away from workers, encourages human exploitation in pursuit of cost minimization, alienates workers from their labor, and has other harmful effects on workers. But the arrangements of work that have been so criticized are dynamic and have continued to change with technologies that influence costs of production. The work of a UNIX systems administrator or lab technician in the 21st century differs extravagantly from the work of a factory or slaughterhouse worker 150, 100, or even 20 years earlier. In this paper, we argue that social critiques need to be updated. Technological transformations now underway create the potential for work structures favorable to the conditions of workers. Using a theoretical model that relates work process structure to its determinants, and to its consequent management implications, we demonstrate that future work, if it is well managed, might have a worker-centered structure resembling that of pre-industrial craft work.