Keith Jayden Obsequio

Automation and the future of work: A social shaping of technology approach

Debra Howcroft, Phil Taylor

Recent years have seen enormous attention

paid to automation and its potential
Paragraph 1 implications for the future of work. This study
rejects unhelpful speculation and, instead,
poses the question ‘what is shaping
automation and its predicted effects

this study utilises the social shaping of technology (SST) approach, a theoretically informed
body of research largely overlooked by sociology of work scholars. Compared with
mainstream commentary, which treats technology as separate from the social world, SST

Paragraph 1 facilitates examination of how the development and use of technology are shaped by
broader socioeconomic concerns and politics. The analysis presented is based on an
understanding of how technology is shaped by existing technology, economics, social
relations, gender and the state.

Much commentary is devoted to the inexorable ‘rise of the robots’ (Ford,

Paragraph 2 2015) and the inescapable effects of automation on the future of work
(Susskind, 2020), a discourse of ‘the inevitable’ (Kelly, 2016). The
contemporary zeitgeist is dominated by images of anthropomorphised
robots executing complex tasks and eliminating the need for human labour.

Paragraph Considerations of automation during the 1930s, 1960s and 1980s were each
accompanied by predictions of a fundamental transformation of work
(Cherry, 2020), ranging from an optimistic alleviation of mundane and
3&4 strenuous labour to pessimistic expectations of wholesale unemployment.

Over recent decades, increasing numbers of analysts have engaged in

projections regarding information technology's consequences, many of which
turned out to be mistaken (Pollock & Williams, 2015). For example, the dot.com
Paragraph 3 bubble of the late 1990s engendered ‘speculation contagion’, in which media
commentary, consulting organisations, think tanks and economic modellers
made inflated claims regarding inevitable expansion of the technologically
driven ‘new economy’.

This study intervenes in the future of work debate, offering a corrective to resurgent and

Paragraph dominant technological determinism by considering ‘what is shaping automation and its
predicted effects?’ Adopting the theoretical framing of SST illuminates the tensions within
the debate by revealing the nuances of technological development, which challenges the
7&8 dominant meta-narrative that assumes the capacity of new technology to transform
cannot be contested and is independent of human actors.