In a previous blog, we discussed how technological developments right from the beginning of the first World War, made remote work what it is today.
Now that telecom and technology are covered, let’s look at the consortium of inventions, economic and culture shifts that brought the inevitable dawn of remote work.
Knowledge-Based Work
By 1920, electricity gained common usage and factories started utilizing it as a cheap and efficient source of power.
This invention enabled faster mass production and in more ways than one, contributed heavily to the beginning of automation in factories.
During the period between 1930 and 40, feedback controllers were applied to manufacturing processes and automation became a new reality – production with minimal need for human touch.
Taking up factory jobs, at this time, was almost common. Manufacturing jobs were almost 26 per cent of the United States employment.
But come 1950, the way information was exchanged started shifting rapidly. This was because of inventions like the hard disk, photocopier, optical disks, mobile communication, cloud computing and hypertext software.
Naturally, the need for roles that use and manage the technology increased. This led to a decline in factory workers and the rise of the ‘while-collar worker’ (a term coined by Upton Sinclair way back in 1920).
In 1960, Fritz Machlup, an Austrian-American economist confirmed that the period was marked by a sharp drop in factory workers and employees and knowledge-based workers increased.
By the 1970s, the personal computer had entered the workplace and offices had started in full swing.
After 1970, workplace technology and knowledge-based jobs only advanced and accommodated each other.
It was not that land and physical labour lost their importance but knowledge and information became key drivers.
In 1992, Peter Drucker wrote about knowledge jobs again and explained them very simply, “.…specialized knowledge by itself produces nothing. It can become productive only when it is integrated into a task. And that is why the knowledge society is also a society of organizations: the purpose and function of every organization, business and non-business alike, is the integration of specialized knowledge into a common task.” In the article, he also said that knowledge will now remain the primary resource for individuals and entire economies (one more example of his prescience)
Consumer Culture
Even though there was a short-lived wave of intensifying consumption patterns, consumer culture took off properly after World War II. People were still reeling from the deprivation and lack the Great Depression had subjected them to.
Radio and television became the main mediums of advertisements for products, and corporates and companies utilized them strategically.
As time progressed, consumerism became an important motivator for people to take up jobs and earn not just a living, but a living that satisfies their desires and makes room for more. This inevitably led to chasing education and Knowledge-based work.
Capitalism
Consumer culture cannot be discussed completely without the mention of capitalism, or more particularly consumer capitalism.
Although debatable, the theory claims an intricate connection between a capitalist society and its consumer culture. It establishes a complex cycle between capitalism pushing people to buy more by telling them what they need and consumers driving themselves to earn more to achieve the standard of living capitalism tells them is suitable. The ways and means to achieve these often passed through Knowledge-Based work.
Population, Healthcare and Cost-of-Living
From 1950 to 2020, the world population grew by three times. It was 2.5 million in 1950 and 7.7 billion in 2020.
Healthcare had a major role to play here. Expansion in healthcare and advancements in public health (control of infectious diseases, cleaner water, and safer foods etc) increased life expectancy.
The world population kept growing and other improvements (social, medical and economic) made it become more and more urbanized.
Urbanization, after all, is the only way most of us can afford the lifestyles we do. Imagine the cost of setting up a self-sufficient facility with electricity, water, sanitation, services and access to goods and medical care in the wild. With larger urban settlements comes a larger consumer base which attracts more and more goods and service providers, making the gap between what is available in urban areas vs rural areas increasingly wider and making it a self-feeding loop.
But with urbanization came the pain of higher costs of living as well as the higher costs of commuting to and from the office for the employees in the urban areas. At the same time, for most companies, property was the second biggest expense line item. Glued together with the adjacent rise in costs of properties and talent in the same areas, the spurt of remote work was inevitable but the risk of shifting to it kept people away until the pandemic, when there was no choice left.
Waiting in the wings was the technological boom and developments that we covered in the previous blog without which these would have remained problems without solutions.
That’s how the future of work came to be .
The Problem: The change is upon us but the ability to risk-manage the change hasn’t developed as quickly as needed. Till risk-management is taken up in a more scientific manner, overly simplistic approaches will continue to trip up effectiveness and cause the friction we see today even as large-scale adoption and acceptance continue.
P.S.: Dogs have remained steady companions all through. However, the advent of remote work and the ability to spend more time with their masters seems to have been an impactful side-effect on the plus side. So Happier Dogs are yet another benefit of the future of work – who would have ‘thunk it 🙂
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(s)
A senior banker from the complex global markets space, Mr. Nishant Shah has worked for more than two decades across Citibank, Standard Chartered and JPMorgan Chase before taking over as our Managing Partner. Passionate with word and pen about finance, technology, macro-economics and future trends, he is a Chartered Accountant by education and the winner of various prestigious awards during his career, including the ‘India Awards for Excellence’.
