The Industrial Revolution changed where and how we live. For instance, while the early stages of the Industrial Revolution gave birth to the modern metropolis—huge cities acting as economic and social centers—the later stages of the Industrial Revolution, such as that involving the development of the internal combustion engine, gave rise to suburbs, highways, and dramatically increased personal mobility. Thus, that revolution completely overhauled both the geography of the industrial countries and the way social life was organized. Whole communities were destroyed and built as a direct result of these economic breakthroughs—often in just a matter of decades.
It was unclear just what the overall effects of the Information Revolution would be in changing social relationships and geography. The creation of the information superhighway, for instance, could conceivably have effects on demographics as dramatic as— but very different in character from—those caused by the Industrial Revolution. For instance, with geographic location diminishing in importance to the production process, people may be freer to live in remote locations; at the least, people may be less bound by their work lives to certain locations, potentially leading to vastly new kinds of communities and other social organizations.
In terms of social relationships and relationships to the production process, the Information Revolution has indeed led to radical transformations. The mass-scale, centralized-factory paradigm of the Industrial Revolution featured a production process in which individual workers were relatively "de-skilled" compared to their predecessors, and had only to perform minute functions requiring little training and with little overall understanding of the production process as a whole. As a result, companies were able to produce at vastly accelerated rates while keeping costs down, leading to tremendous profits that, in boom times, afforded them the option of paying higher wages in order to quell labor unrest. On the one hand, this created an economic environment in which centralized, hierarchical managerial bureaucracies were essential to organize production and maintain control over the production process. On the other hand, the centralized factory created an atmosphere in which it was relatively easy for workers to organize themselves for greater remuneration for their labors.
In comparison, the Information Revolution presents something of a paradox. With computers, information technology, and high-tech communication systems dominating the business environment, production can be scattered across diverse locations and coordinated at high speed with great precision. This allows businesses to concentrate their particular production facilities where they are optimally efficient—for example, where labor costs and regulatory red tape are minimal—leading to greater profit margins. Moreover, the movement toward computer controls creates a less egalitarian environment for wage workers than the mass assembly-line model, since it creates a hierarchical advantage for those highly educated workers with technical skills, and thus decision-making could potentially be decentralized and located at the various production facilities. At the same time, however, despite the geographical dispersion of production and the more nuanced worker relationships, information systems give top management greater direct control over the production process. By systematizing facilities via computers that provide reliable information across wide networks, top executives have a diminished need for middle-level managers, leading to the wave of downsizing and restructuring that characterized the 1980s and 1990s.
Moreover, the geographical dispersal of production facilities and the enhanced means of computer controls overhauled the relationships between workers and the nature of work itself. In the information economy, work is much more flexible, favoring more fluid schedules and multitasking, in which workers are expected to perform several jobs more or less simultaneously and respond to immediate demands as they arise rather than coordinate their work solely by the clock. This radical restructuring of work in the late 20th and early 21st centuries had a profound impact on the role of organized labor in society. Flexible schedules and dispersed production facilities render the traditional models of labor organizing extremely difficult, and by the early 21st century no dominant model of labor organization had emerged to suit the information economy.
The transformation of work was potentially even more dramatic than that produced by the Industrial Revolution, given that, in the information economy, nearly every profession was likely to undergo radical alteration as computer systems and the Internet infiltrate the farthest reaches of the economy. In the Industrial Revolution, many knowledge-based occupations, such as accounting, were relatively unaffected qualitatively by the sweeping changes produced by industrial development. The Information Revolution was unlikely to leave many layers of work untouched, as everyone from knowledge-intensive workers to manual laborers to government officials would likely see the routines they came to know swept aside in favor of more computer-intensive processes.
Industrial parts producers, for example, are accustomed to working an assembly line in more or less consistent fashion, building products destined for distribution via long-established logistics partners. With information technology leading to supply chain management, just-in-time manufacturing, and mass customization, production processes were being retooled to facilitate greater flexibility in production scheduling, while distribution and transactions were increasingly channeled through handfuls of industry-specific Internet-based marketplaces. As a result, hiring, training, scheduling, production organization, sales, and marketing were unlikely to closely resemble their traditional Industrial Revolution models.
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