wer opportunities for advancement, decreased job security, decreased remuneration (a pat on the back and a word of praise - legacies of decades of research into reinforcement techniques in psychology - suffice), remuneration packages tied to productivity and performance, incentive and piecework schemes, increased pressure to perform for those still with jobs, harder and longer hours, and an almost Orwellian emphasis on coordinating one's psyche to the organizational mind set and being part of the team. In this new workplace 2000, middle management is gone because the technology performs the functions they used to (collecting, collating and synthesizing information for upper management). Karake (1992) cites a long list of organizations (including Hewlett Packard - famous for its progressive labour policies) using IT to recentralize control. This is specifically pronounced in the widespread use by management personnel of personal computers that can tap into large centralized data bases and that are linked together as part of a larger computer network. The result is a wider span of control, fewer levels in the hierarchy, and lower complexity. Information technology may also lead to less formalization in organizations. The reason is that management information systems can substitute computer rules and decision discretion. Since computer technology can rapidly warn top management of the effects of any decision, however, it enables them to take corrective action if the decision is not to their liking. From the foregoing, we can conclude that even through information technology helps in the decentralization of the decision-making process, it does so with no commensurate loss of control by top management. This is sometimes referred to in the literature as the centralized-decentralized structure (Karake, 1992: 18).At this point you might be asking yourself why any of this is relevant. Its simply to show the dark side of information technology an...
