Changing Organizational Culture: Cultural Information Systems

Introduction

Urban cities are today’s vogue. Every village and town around the world dream to become an urban center with all the amenities that a human would want, since urbanization is a symbol of growth and development. One of the major contributors to the urbanization of the current cities all around the world is the continuous evolvement of technology. The advancement in science and technology lead to a place where almost everything can be done for the humans, from transport using Segway to communication through the various mobile devices. Hence, it is no exaggeration to say that without the various inventions and discoveries man would have been in the early-man age itself.

How Technology Influenced Industrial City

A city would have to grow in three major directions to reach a significant development state namely the economic dimension, socio-political dimension and the physical dimension which would engage four important factors that are needed to develop a city, namely

Transportation technology

It all started with the invention of wheel that man has developed to carry load around. The simple concept of wheel today has come far from its initial development phase. With the ability to move agricultural produce from one place to another through roadways, it had become easier to establish an industry in one place. The produce from here was exported to several countries especially that in Europe through remodeling the classic steam engine and hence coming up with abundant opportunities of imports and exports. Later on the same had rapidly developed through the growth in roadways, railways, canal systems, waterways and the airways reducing the time needed to transport significantly.

Power Technology

Sourcing energy was a major challenge before industrial revolution. The technology to mold earth materials to form energy was one of the major achievements. Initially with the help of the wheel itself, water and wind sources where vaguely used to produce energy. However, the actual increase in power generation was seen after coal could be used to generate energy (Fernihough, 2014). This helped in researching further to find several other materials found in the ground such as the current day petroleum which is a major contributor to several energy sources such as fuel and LPG. Understanding and developing energy from natural resources at a large scale had further quenched the need for energy. Generation of Hydroelectric power from dams, power from wind energy and solar energy have all made the sourcing of energy look infinite.

Communication Technology

Imagine a world without a mobile phone. Today millions of bytes of data travels around the world in split seconds. This has come a long distance from the Morse code that was initially developed for military use. The introduction of telegraph helped in long distance communication which was later replaced by the telephone, where technology allowed voice over distances. Then came the era of radio communication and televisions where information in both audio and video format could be transported in long distance, restricting it to a one way communication (Castells, 2013). These enhanced the concepts of broadcasting allowing cities to communicate to other parts of the world informing what is what. The advent of internet is by far the biggest network through which one can communicate from anywhere to anywhere and the adoption of wireless technology has made communication look seamless.

The concept of urbanization started with the industrial revolution which was majorly dependent on the development of three technologies namely the transportation technology through which moving goods have become extremely easy, power technology through which power was sourced from coal, petroleum and other natural resources producing sufficient energy for the city to rapidly progress and communication technology that has brought down the barriers in global communication.

Over the years of technological advancement, the changes that the world has seen through the industrial revolution and information revolution, influence nature of work significantly. The structure of working, organizational structures that adopted various work environments using models such as the Holarctic model and the flat structure model and importance being placed on human resources are the most common examples to understand that the world has moved far beyond the traditional work structure, where certain people did certain things under certain commands (Alvesson, 2015). The options available to a person has increased significantly and so the major change that has happened in the nature of work is the change in employment.

Employment Changes

The first change that was seen in nature of work was the division of work into three major sectors. The primary sector who worked with the resources, the secondary who were involved in industrialization and the tertiary or the well-known service sector. It is obvious that these changes were however bound to happen. But the actual changes that revolutionized the way one worked is the changes in employment. Change is the concept of doing things in a new or a different way. Change is the only constant is one of the most heard terms and it is obvious given the very curious nature of man to develop and grow.

During the industrial revolution, labor unions were formed through which communication was made to the top management in a company. At the same time, the number of people unemployed were significantly high given that job opportunities were restricted to hard labor rather than skilled labor and innovative ideas have hardly seen light. It was during this time literacy was encouraged to have more educated people working in various budding companies which resulted in overeducated people who were either underpaid or unemployed. This increasing capacity of workforce has brought on several changes to the traditional work system. Instead of working full-time, part time jobs starting popping up given that more number of people could be employed through one organization and work could be done 24x7. Though this helped in a decrease of underemployment that change was insignificant. As technological advanced products where easily available and information technology was seeing a rapid growth and of course the frustration of not being able to earn enough has brought in self-employment where an advocate rather than joining a firm opened their own consultancy (Gindling, 2014).

The above mentioned progress is the most important change in the nature of work as the increase in responsibilities of an individual gradually saw growth at the same time curbed the concept of unemployment. Though structural changes drew a picture of who could work were actual work was achieved through employment changes. People were given a chance to harness their capabilities to achieve far and beyond and this was lacking in the traditional work modes.

In today’s world, people are not restricted to one job. One can do multiple jobs and own several businesses expanding their exposure to the world. Digitization has further changed employment where one could work from the comfort of their home and need not actually go to work (Baptista, 2013). Today, people are employed through Instagram where posting pictures can fetch you considerable amount of money. Change in employment is hence, the most important change as it has directly influenced the lifestyle and living conditions of people

Conclusion

Nature of work has seen several changes over the years. The two major changes that could be easily spotted where dividing work into sectors and changing the way people worked. Though segmentation of work provided a platform to divide human resources and their occupation, it is the continuous and rapid change in employment that have affected the way humans live their life. The declination of labor union, increase in the need for educated resources, increasing literacy rate, increasing unemployment that lead to the concepts of part time employment and self-employment are all major phases of employment changes. Employment has by far seen significant changes that eased the lives of people and made humans the center of work rather than machines, products or services.

References

Alvesson, M., & Sveningsson, S. (2015). Changing organizational culture: Cultural change work in progress. Routledge.

Baptista, J., & Huang, J. (2013). Where Work Happens: Digitization of Work and the Fusion Between Physical and Digital Workspaces. In International Conference on Information Systems.

Gindling, T. H., & Newhouse, D. (2014). Self-employment in the developing world. World Development, 56, 313-331.

Castells, M. (2013). Communication power. OUP Oxford.

Fernihough, A., & O'Rourke, K. H. (2014). Coal and the European industrial revolution (No. w19802). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Narula, R. (2014). Globalization and technology: Interdependence, innovation systems and industrial policy. John Wiley & Sons.