While writing this article we would be making an attempt to get the exact or get a nearby definition for the term “New Technology”.
What is New Technology
It could be any set of productive techniques that provide a significant improvement (which could be measured or calculated in the terms of an increase in the existing output or savings on the costs, that we are incurring in the current situation, when the new technology is used as a replacement for the established technology in a specific historical context.
Thus defined, what is seen here as new is obviously subject to continual redefinition, as successive changes in technology are applied.
While this was being written, the current new technologies, that gather more attention from sociologists, are the information and (tele)communication technologies, that are based on micro-electronics, usage of which is expected by some to revolutionize the way work is organised or being done in current scenario.
Out of the trends that have been identified as being the suspected results of these technologies are those that work towards:
- Deskilling
- Proletarianization,
- Automation,
- Telecommuting,
- Flexible Employment,
- Just-in-time systems,
- The creation of dual or split labour-markets and
- A new international division of labour
All of them are handled in separate in this dictionary. The expected effects of new technologies, in some cases form the base for apocalyptic accounts of wholesale social change. Like, theories of post-industrial and self-service societies.
Systematic sociological research has always revealed that all of these properties and theories are inflated by their writers and the socio-political impact of new technologies is a complex and unpredictable one, when subjected to variations in:
- Managerial strategies,
- Worker resistance, and
- A host of other cultural and political circumstances
Like : A series of case studies that have been reported in B. Wilkinson’s, published book with the name : The Shop Floor Politics of the New Technology,1983.
