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[...]... obtained a final go-ahead from senior management, the team will then incorporate its ideas into workflow software, and thereafter that software will govern the routines of all those engaged in the process These are the assembly lines of the digital age, complete with their own new digital proletariat But this industrialization of white-collar work is not confined to workplaces in which tasks are routine... include sales, marketing, customer relations, accounting, personnel management, and even medicine—"managed care" being essentially the reengineering of health care For the 80 percent of Americans now employed in these service occupations, reengineering in its various forms has become a dominant force in their working lives In the mid- and late 1990s, reengineering evolved into ERP, a form of hyper-reengineering... routine and repetitive The new industrialism is invading the territory of the skilled worker, with the reengineer trying to impose factory discipline on the work of even those classified by economists as "very skilled." With the coming of ERP, managers as well as frontline workers are finding themselves increasingly subject to industrial discipline Another skilled worker who has had to cope with this expanding... when management tries to apply the principles of industrialization to skilled work, whether the skilled work of a high-income worker such as the physician, or the skilled work of a lower-income worker such as the call center agent Within the elite of college-educated workers, "skill debilitation" and "skill complimentarity" are therefore working at cross purposes: One limits skill, while the other enhances... projects But the sponsors of these systems habitually use them to simplify the work of middle- and lower-level workers, surrounding their tasks with elaborate regimes of business rules, and setting up all-seeing systems of digital monitoring to make sure that the rules are being obeyed Per- A NEW ECONOMY? haps the chief error of those who have proclaimed the coming of the autonomous, self-managed workplace... workplace has been their failure to allow for the sheer intrusiveness of the digital workplace and its technologies With the reengineering of health care and the coming of ERP, skilled workers such as physicians and managers are themselves no longer beyond the reach of this all-seeing industrialism The alliance of information technology and the white-collar assembly line raises issues of society and ethics... overwhelmingly a history of U.S manufacturing, since the origins of mass production and scientific management are to be found in the machine shops and along the assembly lines of American manufacturing We will then move forward and trace the influence of mass production and scientific management in our own times Since both practices have their origins in manufacturing, one of the best ways to trace their... onward, the twin phenomena of "reengineering" A NEW ECONOMY? and "enterprise resource planning" (ERP) have been prime examples of workplace practices built around new information technologies Relying on computers and their attendant software, reengineering and ERP automate, simplify, join together, and speed up business processes Reengineering and ERP do this by imposing upon these processes the standardization,... prestige to fight these attempts to industrialize its work, and every day this battle between physicians and MCO administrators is being fought in the medical workplace There are also white-collar workplaces where industrialization undermines the opportunities for middle- and lower-income workers to do skilled work Economists have singled out the "front office" as a place in which less-skilled workers can... hyper-reengineering that brings together single business processes and tries to weld them into giant mega-processes Led by the German software maker SAP, the reengineers of ERP are inspired by a vision in 5 6 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONOMY which business processes great and small—from the ordering of office furniture to the drawing up of strategic plans—all can be made to operate together with the smooth . Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Head, Simon. The new ruthless economy: work and power in the digital age/ Simon Head. p. cm. "A Century Foundation book." Includes bibliographical . done in England, and I would like to thank my brother and sister -in- law, Richard and Alicia Head, and my sister, Tessa Haddon, for their unfailing hospital- ity and encouragement. Like . to understand how technologies are actually being used in the workplace and how they are changing the lives of countless Americans. In my field work I found again and again that information