This study assesses the consequences of the continuing and rapid introduction of information and telecommunications technologies in offices. The report of the study contains 12 chapters. After a brief look at the context of office automation from the perspective of history, the first chapter highlights some expectations about the technologies and their development over the next 15 years. It also introduces a framework that guides the assessment, summarizes the findings, and identifies policy issues for the next decade. Chapters 2 through 6 discuss the possible effects of office automation in more detail. They deal with potential effects on employment levels; the kind of training and education needed for office work; changes in work content, jobs, occupations, and organizations; the quality of work life, the office environment and labor management relations; and the security and confidentiality of information. Chapters 7 and 8 consider two alternatives to conventional offices, made feasible by office automation: home-based work and performance of data-entry operations in countries with lower paid workers. Chapter 9 and 10 look at office automation in the public sector, while Chapter 11 deals with office automation and small businesses. The final chapter considers the implications of office automation for two groups: working women and minorities. Appendix A describes office automation technology as it is now and as it is likely to develop between 1985 and 2000, while Appendix B summarizes case studies of the automation of several offices. (KC)

Every pioneer takes large risks, hoping that the new frontier he seeks will provide the benefits of independence and good fortune. Don Tapscott is such a pioneer in the area of office automation. He has been a true pioneer, having entered the field in its early days and taken the risk of working not in technol ogy, which was fashionable, but in the field of the problems of organizations, which was less fashionable, but in many ways more important. The utilization of computers for data processing, accounting, inventory, and other "bread and butter" applications is now well entrenched in our society and culture. The process of designing such systems tends to focus on the needs of the company and the constraints of the equipment, leading to efficient systems with little tolerance for the variety of people who must use or interface with them. Within the office automation area, these methods do not work nearly as well. The frequency and amount of human interaction in the office environment, and the wide variety of situations and reactions there in, demands a different design methodology.

This book traces the gendering of women's work and technology from its historical roots in factories, offices, IT companies, and hospitals to contemporary workplaces including platform- and AI-based work. It adopts a feminist/intersectional perspective on design with a focus on norm-critical, social justice-oriented, and decolonizing approaches.

A new book offering a broad overview of the debates about technologies and gender relations at work in a range of occupational areas. Innovative in its approach it deals with gender relations in terms of the ways in which they influence the design and development of technologies, and how gender relations are themselves shaped by technologies. The book will draw heavily on the theoretical perspective looking at the ways in which sexual divisions of labour and gender relations in the workplace profoundly affect the direction and pace of technological change, and tracks the development of certain technologies showing how, through their evolution, they embody these social relations.