The Economic And Technological Context
Over the last two decades, the world economy has been rapidly shifting from a structure in which a few geographic centers dominated world trade to a more complex, multicentered structure. The rapid expansion of world trade has been accompanied by the emergence of new industrial powers and the erosion of dominance of older centers (National Research Council, 1990).
Industrial technology is viewed by many as critical for success in this environment of intensified competition, and a backwardness in utilizing advanced technologies in manufacturing has been identified as one cause of the earlier U.S. decline (Jaikumar, 1986; National Academy of Engineering, 1988; Adler, 1991). Out of these concerns came several policy recommendations for U.S. firms: among these were that U.S. firms make changes in traditional product development processes, accelerate the implementation of new technologies, adopt strategies of continuous improvement, and embrace practices that encourage employee involvement. More recently, the federal government has embraced total quality management (TQM), not only as a strategy for itself but also as a requirement for its industrial suppliers.
THE CHANGING GOALS OF JOB DESIGN
Early in this century Frederick Taylor (1911) and the Gilbreths ([1917] 1973) were the first to argue that job design should be undertaken in a systematic manner, drawing upon scientific knowledge of human motor and cognitive capacities, of fatigue, and of attention span. Later, the sociotechnical systems perspective added the idea that effective work design must take into account the interactions among individuals in the workplace as well as the interplay of human and machine.
- There was a separation of ''indirect labor" (planning, preparation, maintenance, quality control) from direct labor.
- Jobs were subdivided as far as possible, so that each job encompassed a narrow range of repetitive tasks. This was intended to enhance work speed and reduce the time needed to learn the job.
- Worker discretion was as far as possible eliminated in favor of "one best way" (the designer's way) to accomplish the tasks (Knights et al., 1985).
Quality
The growth of the total quality management movement has resulted in an increased respect for the intellectual contributions of shop-floor and office workers. In many workplaces they are encouraged to join quality circles to look for ways to improve production processes and to save resources. They may also be trained in group problem-solving techniques and in teamwork more generally.
Workplace Health and Safety
Another equally important goal of work design, made more prominent by recent technological developments, is the maintenance and improvement of workplace health and safety. Recent concerns over workplace safety and occupational health reflect Occupational Safety and Health Administration legislation in the United States and, in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe, the influence of trade unions, which have targeted workplace health as a major issue (Butera and Thurman, 1990). Employees are demanding safer workplaces; legislation has declared that to be their right and has placed an obligation upon employers to provide safe jobs. In the United States, burgeoning health insurance and disability costs related to workplace illnesses provide an additional powerful impetus for employers to attend to these problems; this will ultimately result in demands for safer, healthier workplaces via better-engineered and designed work.
