Managing Operations And Supply Chain: Technological Unemployment

Concept of Technological Unemployment

Discuss About The Managing Operations And The Supply Chain.

The future perception of the current jobs within the organization is usually determined by the probability of automation of the current jobs within the organization without leading to the full loss of employment among the existing staff. The research aims to encourage technological innovation which has been receiving resistance from many people over the years. In my report I am going to use the learning institutions and my case study is the university called Murang’a University of Technology founded in 2016which was formerly Murang’a university college and it was a constituent college for Jommo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. It has an administrative staff of three hundred employees and has around 4000 students due to a variety of courses offered. It is a public university established under the ministry of education sector. The university offers various courses such as human resource management, engineering, law, mathematics and computer science, Criminology, procurement, hospitality and tourism management, Information Technology, Bachelor of commerce, Bachelor of education, Bachelor of business information technology and many other courses in various levels starting from certificate, diploma, degree and masters. Murang’a University of Technology main customers are the students from various counties in Kenya who are the regular students placed by the Kenya Universities and colleges placement board and the self-sponsored students who join the university at their own expenses

The researcher conducted a thorough literature review in the area which facilitated the findings as shown below:

According to Collins, J.C. and Collet-Klingenberg, L., 2017, technological unemployment is where people lose their jobs as a result of introduction of the new technology which substitutes their labor. Unemployment might be as a result of invention of machines that substitute the human labor rendering them jobless. Technological unemployment has been evolving in phases as follows:

Pre 16^th Century

Varabyova, Y., Blankart, C.R., Greer, A.L. and Schreyögg, J., 2017 states that the concept of technological unemployment existed since the invention of the wheel during the agrarian revolution era. Raju, P.J., Mamatha, D.M. and Seshagiri, S.V., 2017, states that during the olden days in Greece, majority of people were unemployed due to the implications of the labor-saving technology which was use of slaves to accomplish free labor who were referred to as machines of flesh and blood. Aristotle speculated in one of his political books that as a result of continuous advancement of machines which were meant to make work easier, with passage of time there would be no more need for human labor. Frank, I.U., Rong, D.U., Hira, B., Paul, I.I. and Tungom, C.E., 2017say that in 15^th century there was a massive unemployment rate due to population growth and changes in the availability of land for subsistence farming due to increased settlement schemes and as a result the European authorities banned the new technologies since it posed a threat for rendering people jobless and sometimes even people were executed when they tried to introduce a new technology.

Pre 16th Century

16^th to 18^th century

De Vries, H., Bekkers, V. and Tummers, L., 2016 outline that during this period the ruling elites appreciated innovation to some extend which resulted in industrial revolution and the concern on the influence of innovation on employment remained powerful in the 16^th and the early 17^th century. A common scenario of rejection of the new technology during this time was when Queen Elizabeth rejected the operation of the knitting machine which was invented by William Lee claiming that it would have rendered many of the people who were knitting specialists jobless (Acemoglu, D., Robinson, J., 2012). In 18^th century workers had to fight for themselves whenever there was an invention of the new machine that posed a risk of unemployment and they no longer relied on the governmental support.

19^th century
According to Llorente, A., Garcia-Herranz, M., Cebrian, M. and Moro, E., 2015, during this period debates regarding technological unemployment increased especially in the Great Britain where many smart thinkers who were economists dwelt. Some people supported technological innovation but great political economists such as Ricardo, Malthus and Sismondi were against the idea claiming that innovation could result to long term unemployment. Some like Jean -Baptiste Say claimed that no one was to introduce a machine if he or she was going to reduce the amount of product, this means that a machine was used to achieve more. In the late 1870 the issue of preventing innovations due to technological unemployment faded. This was because innovation had started to increase prosperity for the sections of the British society.

20^th century

According to Walsh, E., Holloway, J., McCoy, A. and Lydon, H., 2017, during the first two decades of the 20century many people were employed hence the issue to do with massive unemployment seldomly existed. Technological unemployment never attracted attention until the mid to late 1920s. Hessel, P., Christiansen, S. and Skirbekk, V., 2017state that due to increased technological advancements in USA, it was generally a more prosperous nation. They started to experience urban unemployment from 1927.Rural American workers who had been suffering unemployment improved agricultural technology which was the use of tractors which made their life easier. The debates arose between 1930s concerning the influence of innovation on the high rates of unemployment but this was curdled by the outbreak of the world war 11 from 1939-1945.Another debate rose in 1960s by the great economists but this was shut down by the outbreak of the Vietnam war (Fowler, L.A., Holt, S.L. and Joshi, D., 2016). This gave a chance for the rise in technological inventions with minimal resistance which played a major role in bringing about change in the society that existed during that time

16th to 18th Century

21^st century

According to Galanis, N., Mayol, E., Alier, M. and García-Penal, F.J., 2016,the consensus that technological innovation does not result to unemployment had a strong impact on the first decade of the 21^st century despite of been challenged by popular works such as Robotic Nation by Marshall Brain and the books, the lights in the tunnel, Automation, accelerating technology and the economy of the future by Martin Ford, they all discussed how technological innovation has resulted to unemployment. The concern regarding technological unemployment increased in the year 2013 when tea harvesting machines were to be used to pick tea in Kenya hence there was a huge concern on the rate of unemployment among the locals hence the idea was not implemented (Hessel, P., Christiansen, S. and Skirbekk, V., 2017). The study published in 2013 by oxford Martin school, depicts that automation can affect both the skilled and the unskilled jobs and low paid jobs and high paid jobs but low paid jobs are usually at a greater risk when it comes to technological innovation.

The stages of technological unemployment are as shown in the flow chart below

Pre 16^th century use of slave technology to offer free labor 16^th to 18^th century

Industrial

revolution

19^th century                                             

Innovation resistance due to unemployment                                                 

20^th century   

Technological innovation gain popularity                    

21^st century  continuous technology innovation  Date

This report has found that in the coming years most of the jobs will be automated rendering many of the people jobless. The jobs range in; service delivery, clerical work, records keeping, transportation and logistics management, tutoring and security. In murang’a University of technology there are various jobs which at high risk of automation in the near future and this will result to unemployment of the current employees. The library services have high chances of been computerized where the books will be available online in the portal where the interested person will be able to visit the shelf online and choose the book he or she wants and for that matter there might not be a necessity for the librarian whose task is to issue those books to the students.

Conclusion

According to Jensen, J.B., Kletzer, L.G., 2010, the future of work in the organization is determined by the probability of automation of the available present jobs within the organization.  The impact will not be great because it shall affect 30% of the total jobs within the organization. The automation will bring about some few changes in the normal organizational operations as per the area.

Technology innovation should be enhanced with the impact on employees in question so as facilitate minimum resistance in adoption of the new technology.

References

Collins, J.C. and Collet-Klingenberg, L., 2017. Portable electronic assistive technology to improve vocational task completion in young adults with an intellectual disability: A review of the literature. Journal of Intellectual Disabilities, p.1744629516689336.

Varabyova, Y., Blankart, C.R., Greer, A.L. and Schreyögg, J., 2017. The determinants of medical technology adoption in different decisional systems: a systematic literature review. Health Policy, 121(3), pp.230-242.

Raju, P.J., Mamatha, D.M. and Seshagiri, S.V., 2017. Sericulture Industry: A Bonanza to Strengthen Rural Population in India. In Handbook of Research on Science Education and University Outreach as a Tool for Regional Development (pp. 267-288). IGI Global.

Frank, I.U., Rong, D.U., Hira, B., Paul, I.I. and Tungom, C.E., 2017. Technology Transfer in Construction and Management: A Case for Nigeria Construction and Management Sectors. Management Science and Engineering, 11(2), pp.28-34.

De Vries, H., Bekkers, V. and Tummers, L., 2016. Innovation in the public sector: A systematic review and future research agenda. Public administration, 94(1), pp.146-166.

Llorente, A., Garcia-Herranz, M., Cebrian, M. and Moro, E., 2015. Social media fingerprints of unemployment. PloS one, 10(5), p.e0128692.

Walsh, E., Holloway, J., McCoy, A. and Lydon, H., 2017. Technology-aided interventions for employment skills in adults with autism spectrum disorder: a systematic review. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 4(1), pp.12-25.

Fowler, L.A., Holt, S.L. and Joshi, D., 2016. Mobile technology-based interventions for adult users of alcohol: a systematic review of the literature. Addictive behaviors, 62, pp.25-34.

Hessel, P., Christiansen, S. and Skirbekk, V., 2017. Poor health as a potential risk factor for job loss due to automation: the case of Norway. Occup Environ Med, pp.oemed-2017.

Galanis, N., Mayol, E., Alier, M. and García-Peñalvo, F.J., 2016. Supporting, evaluating and validating informal learning. A social approach. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, pp.596-603.

Acemoglu, D., Robinson, J., 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Random House Digital, Inc

Jensen, J.B., Kletzer, L.G., 2010. Measuring tradable services and the task content of offshorableservicesjobs. LaborintheNewEconomy.UniversityofChicago

Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:

Turnitin Report

Formatting

Title Page

Citation

Outline

Place an Order