The way people work today is changing at a rate not experienced since the rise of the factory system in the Industrial Revolution.
Even those in traditional full-time jobs and conventional careers are facing the need to adapt to demands for new products and services in response to a combination of technological innovation and changing social and living patterns.
A desire for more flexible working, both among employers and employees, has led to an erosion of demarcation lines, formal working hours and the gradual disappearance of once-familiar practices such as tea breaks and overtime, much of which has been consolidated within managerial expectations.
Depending on the nature of the business, workplaces today are experiencing a diverse migration of work behaviours, including: industry to knowledge services, office to homeworking, process to project, formal hours to discretionary time, and working across boundaries. Most working people today will have felt the impact of at least one of these trends.
In what amounts to a watershed in working practices, changes have been felt progressively since the 1990s when employers began to experiment with flatter organisations and flexible working. But the pace of change has been accelerated by the internet revolution that has consolidated its impact through the ubiquity of the search engine.
An emerging, communications-led society is likely to overlap and integrate with the factory system in the way that 19th century industry influenced changes in agriculture rather than simply replacing agrarian society.
The Guardian