Chapter 12: Work Design in the 21st Century: A Case of Back to the Future or Forward to the Past?

As the quote above notes, with the accelerated changes we have seen in the twenty-first century in many cases driven by technology, the importance of how work is organised in an increasingly dynamic knowledge and service-based globalised economy is central to the development of effective organisations. On the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution, the existing commentary increasingly reflects divergent views of these changes as both a dystopian and utopian view of the future of work and workplaces in the twenty-first century. We explore the key aspect, the design of work, noting that whilst the fourth industrial revolution (following the mechanisation of production, the massing of production and the automation of production) builds on what has gone before, we note that the increasing move into the digital age of artificial intelligence (AI), robots and big data (Cho & Kim, 2018; Friedman, 2016), has the potential to sideline work or job design in this debate. In particular, the lesson we (should) have learned from the socio-technical era, which focussed on the fusion between humans and technology as the bedrock for ensuring the worst excesses of poor work design are not repeated.