‘The power of technology’ and ‘How long is long in years of service in the same organisation’ are the twin themes of the latest BBC/Open University The Bottom Line programme. Evan Davis's three guests are drawn from General Electric International, SES Global, which brought us the Astra broadcasting satellite system, and Ford Europe.
The central thrust of their argument about the power of technology is that partnerships with the state are crucial in enabling technological change and innovation. The guest from SES Global, echoing the Open University‘s new Vice Chancellor, suggested that technology is not enough in itself: it is about the role of processes and people engaging in entrepreneurial and innovative activity. The rider should have been added to all three guest contributions that the love of the “new” does not preclude the “old”.
That is, many of the technologies their companies deal in are based on “old” technologies, including the internal combustion engine and the aero engine. Indeed, the inspiration for Astra came from the first Soviet Union satellite, Sputnik, launched in the late 1950s.
Rain Rabbit, under CC-BY-NC licence
Display of obsolete technology in Broadcasting House window
The fixation with the new informs every society as the art historian and critic, Robert Hughes, wrote and narrated in his 1980 television series entitled The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change. In the accompanying book, Hughes examined the development of art and culture from the late 19th to the late 20th century: the period of what is known as modernism.
Essentially, modernism is a view of the world that posits the progress of science and technology and its underlying culture as the organising principle of rational modern society. The early proponents of modernism proclaimed that it had dramatically changed the world in a very short period.
The late architectural writer, Reyner Banham, was the author of the book, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. For Banham, the First Machine Age was ushered in by the invention of electricity which created the conditions for innovations like the telephone, the gramophone, the washing machine, etc. The Second Machine Age, starting around the 1960s, is characterised by mass production techniques producing electronic devices, which are consumed universally and symbolised by a single source of mass communication – the television.
The Third Machine Age can be said to have started with the invention of the personal computer and the mobile. Whether the Internet represents a fourth age or a fifth Kondratieff wave (named after the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff, who developed the idea of 50 year cycles of technological innovation) is open to question. But, despite the recent febrile claims that we live in a weightless economy, it is the mass of human interaction with technology that appears to be the central condition of our species.
This truism leads us to the question of employment longevity. There have always been claims that how we organise our economy is a break with the past. Labour market flexibility, portfolio and virtual workers are part of the heady stuff reported by journalists every day as though it was the global reality of the contemporary work environment.
Unfortunately, journalists too frequently psychologically externalise their own experience onto everyone else. My grandfather was a flexible worker: he was part of the casual labour system at Southampton Docks at the start of the 20th century – he worked when he was chosen from the queue of men similarly seeking a day’s pay. My father worked for 30 years for a nationalised industry that, in the 1950s, threatened to sack all the staff at the engineering base on a Friday night and re-employ them on inferior contracts on the following Monday morning: flexibility is nothing new.
The average length of employment in the same company is 5.6 years in the UK, yet there appears to be a cultural aversion to long service in this country as though it was antediluvian. It was heartening to hear that the three guests on The Bottom Line had been with their companies for a long time and that a third of Ford workers had spent twenty-five years there.
In a society in which there are more 60 year olds than 16 year olds, it is doubly curious. Moreover, the loss of corporate and policy memory was shown to almost devastating effect at the onset of the financial crisis. In many important sectors of the economy, experience is at a premium. Yet discrimination in the workplace and too strong an emphasis on the beauties and beatitudes of new technology, sui generis, and every associated ‘nouvellle vague’ blights all our lives. Ageism like any form of short or long discrimination is not rational. More importantly, it is not right.
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