Brave new world of work

Richard Donkin’s Blood, sweat and tears: the evolution of work is an excellent history.

Bespectacled, brainy and genial, Richard Donkin writes about work for the Financial Times, and his book Blood, Sweat and Tears: the Evolution of Work is published in paperback next month by Texere at £9.99. At 400 pages, it’s for IT people who believe in having fun by doing something virtuous on holiday – like thinking about the future of work from a historical perspective.

Here are people whom IT professionals should know about. There is Boxgrove Man, half a million years old, who has left us 800 butchers’ axes made of flint. That was the work not just of experts, but of that rare thing in IT, apprentices. There is FW Taylor, father of time-and-motion studies, who concealed his stopwatch from the workers so that his all-too-contemporary-sounding surveillance would not be noticed. There is Alexei Stakhanov, the Ukrainian coal miner who became a hero of Soviet industrialisation in the 1930s. Typically enough, Donkin has read the original Stalinist tract in which Stakhanov describes how he cut 102 tons of software – sorry, coal – over a single six-hour night shift.

Stakhanovism was not Taylorism, but something akin to what would come to be known in the trendy personnel management circles of the late 20th century as “empowerment”. To his additional credit, Donkin attacks human resources departments, personality testing and the myth of a job for life (there never was one). He rightly describes political correctness in the office as Puritanism in disguise, and tellingly suggests that Newton’s greatest insights were more the product of reflection in an orchard than brainstorming at Cambridge.

Donkin says the Protestant vernacular Bible has a lot to answer for. It was the Microsoft Windows of its generation, complete with a moral ideology, a dearth of advertisements and a Papal banning order in its original version 1.0. This is fun; but the Protestant work ethic becomes so strong for Donkin, it finds its way into the DNA of 18th and 19th century business leaders and inventors.

Not just pollution and trade imbalances are undermining society, he writes, but imbalances in our approach to work. An unseen Puritan whispering in our heads has removed the intrinsic joy in work.

Relationships, not command-and-control and unpaid hours that are volunteered, are the way forward. Social drag – that majority of society whose attitudes are resistant to change and often imbued with nostalgia – holds back a new work ethic, one to replace the Protestant one. The new ethic? It’s one in which work is fused with leisure, workers own shares in the organisations, organisations are federations of interest bound by common values and a common purpose, and we all concentrate on results.

To this analysis, I prefer Donkin’s scholarly, vivid, impeccably paced vignettes of great technologies, technologists and managers. He protests too much – governments and companies are not, as he says, blinkered about the need for work-life balance and the relevance of IT to it.

Donkin sees the invasion of leisure by work, but underestimates the invasion of work that has already been achieved by play. IT professionals should be worried not by continuing Protestant fanaticism in the office, but rather by continuing loss of direction there. This book, however, raises the whole tone of debate. I recommend it.