i. lifestyle, innovation and the future of work

I. LIFESTYLE, INNOVATION AND THE FUTURE OF WORKAuthor(s): J. I. GERSHUNYSource: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 135, No. 5371 (JUNE 1987), pp. 492-502Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41374340 .

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RE-INVENTING THE PLACE OF WORK

Three Lectures

I. LIFESTYLE, INNOVATION AND THE

FUTURE OF WORK1

by PROFESSOR J. I. GERSHUNY

School of Humanities and Social Sciences , University of Bath, delivered to the Society on Monday 9th February 1987 '

with Stephen O'Brien , CBEy Chief Executive, Business in the Community, and a Member of the Society's Council, in the Chair

the CHAIRMAN: 'Re-inventing the Place of Work' is a suitably ambivalent title for this special series of lectures. This is deliberate so that our lecturers can cover a broad variety of themes. These will range from the position of work and the work ethic in contem- porary society to the changing nature of the physical place of work. Jonathan Gershuny is Professor of Sociology at

Bath University. One of our leading thinkers about the future of work, he has recently concentrated on in- vestigating the consequences of technological change and he has contributed enormously to the academic debate on the development of the informal economy and on the socio-economic implications of the information technology revolution. I know that you will find him extremely stimulating and provocative.

The following lecture was then delivered.

'We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some of you may not have heard the name, but of which you will will hear a great deal in the years to come - namely technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.'2

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audience may not - in 1928 - have heard the name of the disease before, but we have certainly heard a lot about it since. 492

There are in fact similarities between our present fears of the effect of new technologies and those of the 1930s. Then as now, societies were faced with powerful new technologies which, if they were applied straightforwardly to the current systems of production, might displace a large proportion of the workforce. Then as now, some argued that the labour-displacing potentials of the new technology could only be absorbed if societies achieved a truly radical change in the rôle that work played in the society.

Keynes himself argued that his audience's grandchildren's generation - that is, us, here in this lecture theatre - would, as a result of technological progress, have all their material wants satisfied by a fifteen-hour working week. He



JUNE 1987 LIFESTYLE, INNOVATION AND THE FUTURE OF WORK

suggested that, basic material needs being satisfied, work would simply cease to be a central social issue. Our major social problem would then be, not poverty or unemployment, but filling leisure time in a satisfactory manner.

This is the idea that I shall be concerned with this evening: that, as a consequence of new technologies, the meaning of work in our society must necessarily undergo a radical change. It is suggested that full employment, in the the 40 hours per week, 48 weeks per year sense, is now, as a result of technological change, unachievable, and that societies must therefore look for other ways for people to make their economic contri- bution - that we need, in the words of the title of this seminar, to 're-invent the place of work'. I shall argue that this view is, quite simply, wrong.

A MECHANISM FOR GROWTH The main reason that Keynes - and our con- temporaries - have for expecting a really substantial change in the rôle of work, is the extreme difficulty of imagining how we might carry on as usual. It is a curious paradox: the extra-ordinary economics is somehow easier to envisage than the ordinary.

'Carrying on', in this context, means continu- ing to seek full employment through economic growth. Keynes found it difficult, in the years prior to the writing of the General Theory, to imagine what the substance of this growth might be. Unemployment was of course a quite unacceptable waste of human resources, and the familiar Keynesian demand stimulation was the short-term mechanism for dealing with this. But in the slightly longer term, wants would be satiated, so demand could not be stimulated. Hence the requirement for the radical change in hours of paid employment.

This was Keynes' problem of imagination: what could we possibly consume more of, to provide more jobs? What could we want more of?

Consider how growth actually proceeded in the years which followed Keynes' talk. I do not want to get involved in the question of the rôle of the World War in disposing of the Depression. Undoubtably defence expenditure and wartime destruction serve to stimulate demand. But the post-war economics of Europe contrived to provide full employment with economic growth fuelled by the demands of consumers rather

than soldiers. So let us for the moment ignore the war years and the immediate post-war recon- struction, and consider economic growth through the 1950s and 1960s.

Consider, for example, the national resources devoted to the provision and care of housing and shelter and clothing. I find that, counting together all the paid work in all the primary and manufacturing and service industries, there were in the UK in 1 96 1 a total of about six and a quarter million jobs that went to satisfy these sorts of needs.3 Over the following 25 years, there was a very substantial growth in productivity in manufacturing - output per worker rose by a factor of three, output per hour of work rose even faster. What happened to employment related to these needs? Did employment fall as a result of this productivity growth?

In fact, consumption related to these basic sorts of needs also rose about three-fold. There was a vast increase in demand for a new category of consumer product, the 'self-servicing' domestic equipment - washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and other innovative labour-saving devices. Employment in 'shelter- related' activities in 1985 amounted to about 5.6 million workers; a fall of only about two-thirds of a million from the original six and a quarter million. Over this period, British manufacturing industry lost its hold over its domestic market; had imports of manufactures not risen faster than the general rate of growth of consumption, the number of UK jobs associated with shelter-type needs would actually have risen.

So, new markets, for innovative manufactured products, directly compensating for the general growth of productivity in manufacturing. This is not a particularly surprising or unfamiliar observation. But the rest of the mechanism may not be quite so familiar.

The diffusion of these new manufactured products has a strikingly clear effect on the pattern of life outside the realm of paid work. Consider for a moment the average adult in the UK; that adult has 24 hours, 1440 minutes in his or her day. In 1961, 93 minutes of the average day for the average adult was taken up in unpaid domestic work, providing for the basic 'shelter' services, and 68 minutes was spent in preparing food and associated tasks. A total of 1 6 1 minutes per average adult per day, devoted to unpaid housework.4

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS PROCEEDINGS

FIGURE 1

By 1985, this total was reduced to 136 minutes - a reduction of 25 minutes, or 16 per cent. Now, women provide three-quarters or more of all unpaid domestic labour; you might suspect that the reduction relates entirely to the increase in the number of women going into paid employment. In fact this is not so. If you look separately at women in full-time jobs, in part-time jobs and at non-employed women, you find in each case just the same reduction in time devoted to domestic work. And indeed, evidence on time-use patterns from different countries shows the same trend. Figure 1 shows time- use patterns from six countries, calculated in a way that excludes the effects of women's increasing participation in the waged labour force: each shows the same pattern of decline in unpaid work time.

You might also say that this 25 minute reduction, out of the total of 1440 minutes, is quite tri- vial. But consider: in 1961 the average adult spent just about 45 minutes in 'out-of-home' types of leisure activities - that is, time at pubs or restaurants, or watching or playing sports. The 25 minutes reduction in domestic work represents about 55 per cent of the 1961 total of out-of-home leisure. And not entirely by coinci- 494

dence, in 1985 we find people spending about 70 minutes per average day - 25 minutes more than in 1961 - in out-of-home leisure activities.

A 25-minute reduction in domestic work; a 25-minute increase in out-of-home leisure. In fact the arithmetic is a bit more complex than this. As well as the reduction in domestic work, there was also a quite substantial decline in time devoted to paid work. Of course, this was nothing like the reduction that Keynes envisaged. Time spent by the average adult in paid work declined by about 43 minutes per average day - about 18 per cent of the 1961 total of paid work - over the period. Part of this decline is explained by the increase in unemployment. But overall, two-thirds of this comes from a general reduction in the length of the working week of the average full-time employee.

Around 35 minutes of this time was taken up with other domestic tasks such as shopping and domestic travel - I'll come back to this in a moment. But overall, the adult population had more than 45 minutes extra free time. This con- stitutes an extraordinary shift in lifestyle. Three- quarters of an hour, in the average day of the average adult, five or so hours per week, moved out of 'the realm of necessity'.

How is this extra time spent? There was a small increase in time spent in home-based leisure activities: five minutes more spent watching TV, ten minutes more spent talking to other members of the household. And time devoted to the consumption of other out-of-home services, such as education and medicine, also increased! Overall, between 1961 and 1985, time spent by the average adult in the UK in the consumption of services outside the home - that is all recreational, medical and educational services - rose from from just over 60 minutes per average day, to just over 90 minutes - an increase of 50 per cent.

So more time spent in the consumption of services; this must have implications for employment. In 1961 there were just under four million people employed in producing out-of-home services; in 1985 there were about 5.7 million workers providing for these sorts of needs.

Thirty extra minutes service consumption time per average adult in Britain produced 1.7 million extra jobs. Fifty-seven thousand extra jobs per minute of extra service consumption time.

Of course this is a simplification. Most of the growth in employment has been in the education

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and medicine sector. Many of the new jobs are not full time. There is labour-displacing productivity growth even in the out-of-home recreational sector - a restaurant meal employs fewer people at Macdonalds than at your favourite bistro.

But the essential arithmetic still holds. Growth in productivity in manufacturing processes was at least partially compensated for by growth of new markets for innovative manufactured goods and associated services. And the diffusion of these products brought about a reduction in domestic work time, and in turn led to more free time. More free time meant more time for service consumption; more service consumption meant more service jobs.

WAVES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH This is, as far as it goes, a cosy story. But, of course, it doesn't really take us very far in answering our own problems. We can see how consumption of goods and services was expanded at a rate which matched productivity growth in the economy during the 1950s and 1960s. But why did this virtuous mechanism not continue during the later 1970s and 1980s? And how could it be restarted in the 1990s?

The beginnings of an answer to these questions may be found in the work of a group of economists writing about the so called 'long waves' or 'long cycles' - or, after the originator of the lines of theorizing, cKondratiev waves' - of economic development. These writers provide an explanation for the present world depression, ih terms of the state of technological progress in the world. Their argument rests on three central propositions: first, major global economic depressions seem to occur about every 50 years; second, though basic inventions seem to be ran- domly dispersed through history, nevertheless key commercial innovations seem to cluster dis- proportionately around the depths of the global depressions; and third, these clusters of key innovations play a major rôle in the recovery from the depressions.

I cannot hope to do any sort of justice to these arguments within this talk. But the conclusion of the debate, or rather the current point at which the argument rests, is really of great significance to the subject matter of this lecture - and indeed for the other lectures in this series. The central question is why commercial exploita- tions of the inventions should cluster together at particular historical junctures .

Professor Christopher Freeman, of Sussex University, provides an answer. He points out that innovative products do not typically rely on just one new technological advance, but rather on a bundle, or cluster, of mutually potentiating new technologies, and also associated infrastructural provisions.5 Thus, for example, the diffusion of the domestic washing machine to a mass market required the development of small and cheap electric motors, new materials for insula- tion and isolating the water from the electric heating elements, simple electro-mechanical control mechanisms - and that the household be connected to mains electricity and have ade- quate water supply and drainage. The development of a large market for this new product required the simultaneous availability of various new technologies and infrastructural provisions, which went together to enable a new way of satisfying the desire for clean clothes.

The various inventions and mechanical developments and household requirements must all be present; singly, any one of them is commercially impotent. So a sequence of random inventions and technical developments from industrial research laboratories will lie fallow until such time as the full 'set' necessary for the new product has been collected - hence the contrast between the continuous flow of scientific discovery and invention, and the discontinuous pattern of emergence of commercially signifi- cant innovations.

Freeman argues that the same collection or set of basic inventions and social circumstances - he calls these 'new technological paradigms' -

may give rise to a range of related but distinct products. Take one such new technological paradigm: the combination of the mass-produced fractional horsepower electric motor, with valve and later semiconductor devices, and robust and durable plastics, emerging at a point in time at which the majority of houses were being connected to electricity and water mains.

This set of inventions and developments enabled a wave of new mass market products -

washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, electric cookers and mixing machines, electric space heaters, radios, televisions, record players . . . and so on. A collection of disparate technological and social developments, combined together in different ways, to produce a range of different products, all of which started to diffuse widely to mass European markets in the early

495



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS 1950s. And the emergence of the new markets for this particular range of products was of course an enormöusly important motor of development over the following decades.

So far, we have reasons for expecting innovations to emerge in historical 'clusters' or 'swarms'. But to produce the great fifty-year successions of troughs and peaks in the development of the world economy, we must add an additional, macro-economic, dimension to the argument.

The conventional, popular-Keynesian macro- economics ascribes a pivotal rôle to public expenditure on infrastructure. It is the chief means that the government has for directly stimulating demand in the economy: public authorities spend on, say, the development of a national electricity distribution grid; the money circulates from construction worker to shop- keeper to manufacturer, raising the aggregate level of demand in the economy. In this account the exact nature of the infrastructural provision is irrelevant. The point is simply demand stimulation - exactly how the money gets into circula- tion is pretty much irrelevant. Infrastructural investment is, in this model, really just a respect- able version of Keynes' irreverent proposal to bury pound notes in milk bottles in worked-out coal mines, to be dug up and spent by unem- ployed miners. Demand is as effectively stimulated whether we build a national Grid or a National Theatre, or indeed if we pay people to dig a very large hole and then fill it in again.

But remember that infrastructural investment played a quite different rôle in the techno- economics we were discussing a moment ago. In the context, the precise nature of the infrastructure was critical. It is the particular performance characteristics of the new infrastructure that combine with new technologies to enable the diffusion of the mass consumption goods. Spend money on the National Grid, and we complete a technological paradigm that leads to the vast new markets for domestic electrical equipment; dig a very large hole in the ground, and we have the new electrical and materials technologies still lying economically fallow. Thus, quite distinct from the rôle of infrastructure investment in the operation of the Keynesian multiplier, is its rôle in a sort of super-multiplier, the stimulation, or enabling , of specific new markets for innovative household electrical products.

Consider what this dual rôle means for the longer term development of the economy. In 496

PROCEEDINGS

1950, each new power station, each new mile of motor road, meant at once more money in cir- culation to be spent, and also , because of the significance of these particular sorts of infrastructural provision in the new technological paradigms, an increase in the number of people with the material circumstances - the connec- tions to the mains electricity supply, and the road network - necessary for the consumption of the new electrical goods and motor cars, and the materials and services associated with them.

But at other points in historical time, the super-multiplier does not work. In 1975, demand for the domestic electrical goods that stem from the by-now old technology paradigm, was virtually saturated. We still had to build power stations and roads, because the old ones had become overcrowded, or simply worn out. And when we spent public money to build new ones we still stimulated demand through the Keynesian multiplier. But now this infrastructure investment does not generate or enable new markets for innovative products. Now, the new roads do not mean more motor cars, the additional generating capacity does not mean more refrigerators - since everyone already has a motor car and a refrigerator. We have to keep spending public money to maintain the old infrastructure - even though this does not open up new markets.

Any technological paradigm has a strictly finite range of applications. There is a limited set of things you can do with little electric motors and semiconductors and 240 volts AC. As the range of potential applications of the current technological paradigm is exhausted, we can no longer rely on the emergence of new markets for innovative consumer products to generate growth. Of course, new inventions are now lying fallow waiting for the emergence of a new paradigm. We have the new Information Tech- nologies: microchips and cheap data storage media. But these for the present are finding their major applications in the automation of production processes or in the simplification of the design of existing consumer products - both of which lead to job losses. These new technologies as yet lead only to the occasional new mass- market product, because, as I shall suggest in a moment, the next 'new technological paradigm' is not yet complete.

This rôle of infrastructural investment as an enabling factor in the diffusion of bundles of




product innovations may go some way towards explaining the extended periods separating the emergence of successive new technological paradigms. Infrastructural provisions are - in the economists' term - 4 lumpy'. They involve the whole society. They take a long time to develop, and once developed, they are costly to maintain. And the expense of maintaining existing infrastructure may delay investment in new forms of infrastructure appropriate to the next new technological paradigm. A really major new class of infrastructure, such as an electricity generation and distribution system, may involve investment over a period of two or three or four decades. In the early years of its development, public expenditure on infrastructure stimulates growth, both through the multiplier, and through what I have called the supermultiplier. In the later years, it may delay the emergence of the new technological paradigm.

THE NEXT WAVE So far, in this talk, I've tried to do two things. I have outlined a model of socio-economic change, in which important new technologies enable new styles of life - new ways of doing domestic work, new patterns of leisure - which in turn mean new sorts of consumption and hence new sorts of employment.

And I have also tried to explain why the emergence of such very influential new technologies might be discontinuous in historical time. I've suggested that new employment-creating mass markets may depend, in part at least, on the development of Freeman's 'new technological paradigm'. At some historical juncture this may create a substantial group of technically inter-related new consumer products. And at a later point in history, as its potentials are exhausted, it may actually serve to retard the emergence of further employment-creating mass markets.

So here we are, like Keynes and his audience in 1928. We see new technologies, which are leading to job losses in production for existing markets, but which have not yet found their applications in the development of major new markets for innovative products. I said at the beginning of the talk, that what informed Keynes' prediction of a 1 5-hour working week was an inability to visualize the major lifestyle changes which might be enabled by an emerging new technological paradigm.

FIGURE 2

Can we, in 1987, do any better? What I've said so far does in fact provide some clues about what future lifestyle changes may be in pro- spect. Let me take just one example of a possible future application of Information Technology - to shopping. Remember that I mentioned that part of the

time freed by the reduction in work in the UK through the 1960s and 1970s, was taken up by extra time spent in shopping and related domestic travel. In fact the increase was very consider- able - from about 40 minutes per average adult per day in 1961, to about 70 minutes per day in the mid 1980s. In fact the British data are slightly more pronounced, but still quite representative of Europe as a whole. Figure 2 might b>e inter- preted as European shopping and travel time tending upwards towards the North American level.

There are of course various possible explana- tions for this but a large part of the change must result from, in economists' jargon, 'externaliza- tion of costs'. Retail industry reduces its costs and increases its profits by seeking economies of scale. Larger supermarkets mean more time walking up and down the aisles, and probably more time queuing to pay for the goods. The

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS

larger the store, the more customers, and hence on average, the further the customer has to travel. Lower costs for the retail industry; more time from the consumer.

But shopping need not necessarily take up an average of an hour of each adult's time each day. We can now see how Information Technology might substantially reduce this, through the introduction of home or tele-shopping.

Let me be clear what I'm not saying. First, I'm not talking science fiction, in the sense of a spe- culation about some future technical possibility. The technology necessary for a very effective home-based system for purchase of the great majority of consumer goods and services, already exists. With current technology computer terminals in our homes we could make orders from remote warehouses, which would be collected into batches using automatic ware- housing techniques, and delivered within a few hours to our doors. The same systems could have, in addition to the basic retail services, additional sophisticated ancillary services, advising consumers on prices and quality and the location of 'best buys'. These sorts of services are now possible, in the sense that all the basic technological components of such a system exist, at affordable prices.

The second thing I'm not saying, is that this means that we could all have tele-shopping tomorrow. The basic technologies are all in exis- tence, but they do not yet constitute a 'new technological paradigm'. There is crucial infrastructure missing. Most obvious is the lack of appropriate telecommunications infrastructure. Of course there are already several remote shopping systems based on Prestei, catering for a few hun- dred strongly motivated individuals. But those of you who use Prestei will realize that the slow speed of information transmission down the conventional telephone system is quite insuffi- cient to support the sort of attractive mass- market system I'm talking about. Much more information needs to come to screens much faster. To provide mass tele-shopping, our current telephone systems would have to be replaced by new telecommunications systems capable of transmitting information at perhaps a thousand (or even ten thousand) times the rate of the current British Telecom system. This is technically feasible - indeed the Japanese PTT is currently engaged in installing just such a 'broadband' capacity to their domestic telephone system - 498

PROCEEDINGS

but it is very expensive. It amounts to the development of a whole new category of material infrastructure.

Of course it's not just an appropriate material infrastructure that prevents the immediate introduction of tele-shopping. We are also short of the technical skills, and most important, the forms, of organizational know-how and the appropriate social institutions for such a development. A new technological paradigm needs in addition to the material infrastructure, a new cultural infrastructure to support the new forms of production and consumption.

But assume for a moment that the infrastructure was somehow provided, the Information Technology 'paradigm' is completed with appropriate material and cultural infrastructure. What then happens to employment?

The most immediate effect must be some job losses in the traditional retail sector. Fewer jobs running checkouts, stacking shelves and so on. But partially compensating for these losses is new employment writing software and operat- ing the computer systems that manage the Elec- tronic Funds Transfer and the automatic ware- housing. Still, in relation to the existing pattern of activities of the retail sector, unquestionably, job losses. But remember, the system I have described provides a number of additional services, over and above the services currently provided by the retail sector. More, cheaper, easily acces- sible consumer advice and guidance. Home delivery services. There is scope here for quite substantial new job creation. We could quite easily imagine the overall employment level being maintained over a long period, with continuous reduction in the number of employees in traditional retail occupations, and a compensating continuous increase in skilled IT and transport professions contributing to retail sales.

Now of course the way employment is maintained is by providing more, and higher quality, services to the consumer. The consumer experiences this productivity growth in a quite con- crete form: less time spent shopping.

Suppose shopping time falls by 30 minutes per average adult day - this is after all no more dramatic than the increase related to the super- market over the 1960s and 1970s. The experi- ence in the 1960s and 1970s was that one extra minute of free time across the adult population produced 50,000 new out-of-home service jobs. So in addition to maintaining direct employment



JUNE 1987 LIFESTYLE, INNOVATION AND THE FUTURE OF WORK in retail services, thirty minutes time freed from shopping might lead to one-and-a-half million extra jobs in cultural, educational, catering, sports and similar services.

There is no sense in which a return to full employment is guaranteed. But if we adopt appropriate policies, the new technologies of the 1980s need not be job displacing, any more than those of the 1930s were. What are these appropriate policies? Two things follow from my line of argument.

First is investment in those particular sorts of infrastructure which will serve to promote the development of new service products related to Information Technology. I have concentrated on shopping, but there is a host of other applications, to social care and medical provision, as well as to entertainment, educational and medical services. These may not necessarily directly generate very many new jobs in net terms - but, as in my shopping example, there is no reason why they should lead to any overall job loss, and they offer very substantial improve- ments in the welfare of the society.

The net job creation may well be indirect. As people's more basic needs are more efficiently met through these high technology means, so they may have time - and the inclination and resources - to consume more traditional luxury services. As we have seen, some of this extra free time may emerge as a direct spin-off from the technical innovation in the basic services. But this is not the only source of extra free time.

The second sort of policy implication from my line of argument, is simply public policy towards free time. Free time is not just hours of work per week. It is also weeks' work per year. And it is years' work in a working life. British governments are very influential in determining the points at which people enter and leave the paid workforce through mechanisms such as statutory school-leaving ages and levels of educational provision, statutory retirement ages, maternity provisions and the structure of social security payments. In other European countries, governments are also actively involved in provision of extended maternity and paternity leave, of mid-career training or academic sabbatical breaks, and statutory

annual holidays. All of these forms of public policy, which influence the amount of non-work time in the society, also indirectly influence the amount of work. People's free time is spent in activities which consume the work of other people. So, the more free time, the more work.

But the crux of what I have to say concerns not policies for growth, but the broader question of the possibility of future growth, in consumption and in employment. Keynes saw technological change as leading to productivity growth, which would reduce the amount of paid employment, and necessitate the 're-invention of the place of work'. I have suggested a much more complex pattern; new technologies leading to new markets for innovative goods; new technologies freeing time (and other resources) for the increased consumption of more traditional types of services. The 1930s' concerns about the long- term employment consequences of- -technological change mirror the worries of the 1980s. We can at least imagine quite plausible patterns of economic development in the 1990s that cor- respond to the benign impacts of technical change in the 1950s and 1960s.

This is not to say that we will necessarily return to full employment. We have to adopt the appropriate policies. But at least we might sens- ibly try to bring them about. We may not have to re-invent the place of work. We may want to do so - but that's another matter.

NOTES 1 . The research described in this paper has been funded by the

Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust, as part of a programme on 'The Future of Work'.

2. The quotation comes from a talk first presented by Keynes in Cambridge in 1928, and first published in 1930; I have used the version of the text in Essays in Persuasion, Royal Economic Society, 1972.

3. A general description of the calculations underlying the employment estimates used in this talk will be found in J. I. Gershuny 'Time Use and the Dynamics of the Service Sector', in Service Industries' Quarterly, Vol. 7, 3, forthcoming October 1987.

4. The British time use data are described in J. I. Gershuny and S. E. Jones, 'The Work/Leisure Balance', Sociological Review Monographs 13, January 1987. The European material used later in the paper is discussed more extensively in 'Time Use, Tech- nology, and the Future of Work', Journal of the Market Research Society, 28, 4, 1986.

5. This view is discussed at length in C. Freeman, J. Clark and L. Soete, Unemployment and Technical Innovation, London, Frances Pinter, 1982.

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MR COLIN COULSON-THOMAS, MSc(Econ), MA, AM, dpa, FCA: (Chief Executive, Adaptation Ltd, and Corporate Affairs Counsel, Rank Xerox (UK) Ltd.): I see a direct analogy with the development of office work-station technology, where there is a whole cluster of advances. These include capability of the technology, falling costs and greater user-friendliness. A growing number of people will install work stations at home as business organizations become aware of the benefits of home working. Do you see a direct analogy? Has your research revealed how much time the average person spends travelling to and from work? If the place of work moves from the office to the home, I would have thought an enormous amount of time could become free.

the lecturer: That is quite right. Here is a new technology, not directly work-displacing or necessarily employment-enhancing, but indirectly, in so far as it frees time, job-generating. People who are not travelling to work have more time to be doing things that must be providing employment for some other people. It is another of the processes that are involved in the line of argument that I was developing.

SIR PHILIP GOODHART, MP (Beckenham, Con- servative): In 1928 I lived with my parents in Cam- bridge very close to Professor Keynes and at that time my mother could lift up the telephone, ring through to the fishmonger, discuss whether the herrings were fresh and have them delivered to our home. You cannot do that in Cambridge any more, not because information technology has failed but because the whole nature of shopping has changed. I doubt whether we are going to get back to the level of service that we had in 1928. 1 represent an affluent suburb of London and in the last census before the First World War there were over 2,000 full-time domestic servants in private homes; now, I think, there are none. Now more beds are made, more rooms are cleaned, more dishes are washed and more meals are cooked, and domestic work has become a capital-intensive operation. But the number of jobs involved in producing those dishwashers and vacuum cleaners is much less than the number of domestic jobs that have been destroyed in my own constituency. It has been replaced by an awful lot of people doing fifteen hours, just as Keynes suggested, part-time work around the house. I suggest that you are over-optimistic about the number of jobs that are going to be created by the new technologies.

the lecturer: Two very good points. Both of them rest on propositions about the relative amounts of employment that could in principle be generated by alternative ways of providing essentially equivalent services. About your mother's shopping in Cambridge, 500

although she was able to get services of that sort, not many people could; just as, while some people were able to get their domestic services through the medium of servants, the great majority of people were not able to do so. In both cases the question is, to what extent could employment conceivably have been stimulated in order to provide services? Obviously not everyone can have a servant because someone has to be a servant. It is not conceivable you could have many more than the fifteen to twenty per cent of the population who had bought domestic services in the 1930s. Looking at the provision of services, I was trying to

calculate the balance of job losses and gains and the conclusion I reached is that when you look at all the current goods and services that are consumed to support the kind of things that servants used to provide, if Britain had not lost its share of the manufacturing market, there would actually have been more full-time equivalent jobs now in providing those shelter services than there were jobs in the 1930s. Now of course they are manufacturing and sophisticated intermediate service jobs, rather than traditional domestic servants who would have been providing the equivalent service in the 1930s. But the essential arithmetic seems to be that, forgetting about import imbalances, there are more jobs now associated with the provision of these services than there were in the 1930s. Not only are there more jobs overall, everyone is much better served. Most people now actually enjoy the standards of domestic comfort that were only available to the fifteen per cent of the population that had domestic servants in the 1930s. They are on average spending less time achieving that level of comfort. Everyone has a higher level of comfort, there is the

same amount of employment, time is freed in order to consume other services as well. This is in fact precisely the mechanism that I am talking about and the same mechanism is going to work for shopping. A minority of people shared the level of service that your mother had in 1 930; we could in 1 999 imagine as many people employed broadly in the retail sector as now, but with everyone getting better levels of retail services and everyone spending less time getting those retail services, freeing them for consuming other sorts of recreational and leisure services.

MR DOUGLAS GARDINER (Associate PA Tech- nology): I should like to congratulate the speaker on his vigorous and interesting argument that as leisure time increases the demand of the person who has the leisure creates more employment, but I have heard it argued that this demand for leisure goods will not benefit our level of unemployment, because the BMW motor cars we buy come from Germany, the aero- planes we fly are made in America and the television sets we watch come from Japan. All those nations will



JUNE 1987 LIFESTYLE, INNOVATION AND THE FUTURE OF WORK have their unemployment reduced by the increase in our leisure. Do you have an answer to this argument?

THE LECTURER: Most of it has to be accepted. Remember, there are two mechanisms, employment maintenance in relation to the particular service that is being improved on, and then employment generation with the free time devoted to leisure consumption outside the home. I was going to say that people are not going to be importing their restaurant services, but of course that contradicts almost all my most pleasurable gustatory experiences! But the principle is essentially there, that the indirect part of my argument generates service employment in this country whatever its ultimate country of origin may be. The direct part of this argument is very much

threatened in the UK's case by its poor export/import performance. The reason I have been using data from other countries is that I think Britain is going to be an aberrant lagging case. The arguments I have been putting forward are a general picture of the so-called post-industrial society for the developed world, with Britain performing, for the reasons you state, as a laggard in that particular pack.

IRENE WHITTY (Registrar, John Lewis Partner- ship): I was very interested in your comments about information technology and shopping from home. People in retailing have been engaged on this subject for some time. But of course shopping is a leisure activity. A lot of people hate shopping but we in retailing are sometimes amazed at the relish and time which some people devote to it. An awful lot of people enjoy shopping and we hope that the time that they save by shopping from home will be spent in shopping of a different kind, shopping for the things they enjoy or that are visually enhancing. We see the development of longer trading hours to accommodate the wishes of people who want to shop at different times of the day, and we also see the growth of leisure departments, such as DIY, gardening and motor accessories.

the LECTURER: I have been trying to understand why, in Europe, time spent on shopping has been increasing. I have a number of reasons for believing that this increase relates to changes in the organization of shopping rather than to people just spending more time in pleasure shopping. Maybe two-thirds of the rise is in fact rise in travel time associated with shopping, to do presumably with the increased distance of the average store. Element two is that ninety to ninety- five per cent of all time spent shopping is spent on weekly marketing rather than general John Lewis-type shopping. Evidence number three is that the increase in shop-

ping time seems to have been about as big for very busy people as it has been for those not so busy. People who work long hours for money have had the same

sort of increase in shopping time as people who spend much less time working. Other sorts of analyses arrive at the same conclusion. So the very substantial increase in shopping time

does not seem to be the result of choice of shopping as a leisure activity, and that is the basis for thinking that shopping time in general is going to fall. Of course that does not contradict your basic proposition, which is that another sort of shopping, recreational shopping, may actually emerge to take up part of the time freed by the reduction in this weekly marketing chore. I cannot argue with that but I would class that among my category of traditional recreational services. It is not just a matter of John Lewis-type shopping;

there are other sorts that are likely to develop, specialty shopping where not just the sights but also the smells of the product may be the thing you are pursuing. Those sorts of recreational shopping, for which you will pay of course, will certainly increase, but I would see that as a subrecreational trend going in the opposite direction from the general trend that I was talking about.

MR GEOFFREY hubbard (Educational Develop- ment Consultant): In the Thirties it was not quite such a small and privileged part of society that had access to delivered shopping; it was available in working-class areas. For example, Co-operative stores all did a regular weekly delivery. I think the butcher would have done it too if my mother had not preferred to go down and poke the steaks before she bought them! I am quite sure that our existing telecommunications system will cope with shopping at home. There is no real problem about using the slow Prestei rates; I reckoned it put about tenpence on the cost of the shopping bill to pay for the telephone call, because one did it in off-peak times. It will be helpful when we get better telecommunications but those we have are good enough. I would agree with you that there is room for an

almost limitless expansion in the amount of economic activity, provided that economic activity is not all concerned with the production of goods and is largely concerned with the take-up of services. I think the distinction needs to be made, because the services which you have particularly pointed to are those we generate ourselves with human effort, that is education, health care, community care. So there are very clear policy implications. The advent and nature of information technology

does make the rate of advance quite different from the change in the Thirties or earlier times. It is increasingly likely that those who are displaced by information technology will be in a very poor position to take up any of the opportunities which it offers. The danger for society is that we will have, as I think the Duke of Edinburgh said years ago, a lot of one-ulcer men holding down two-ulcer jobs and not very much for

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS the rest. In the long run this may balance out, but I am very concerned about the rate at which the advances are taking place, the rate at which technology is forcing change upon society and the apparent inadequacy of the social mechanisms and political mechanisms to do anything fast enough to mitigate the cost in human terms.

the lecturer: It may be that delivery services in the 1930s were more widely available than I had thought. Maybe the analogy is a bad one, but what is clear is that delivery services are not very freely available now and certainly have not been for the last twenty years. That contrasts with what is likely to be available with the new technology. It is possible for technologically sophisticated people

to do shopping by Prestei but I doubt whether you could use that technology as a basis for a plausible mass market. When you compare the systems that Prestei provides with the systems the Japanese are now experimenting with, you can see the difference between Baird television and the 1 955 BBC. You need a high quality service before it is going to reach the mass market. That is why I adopt the position I do about broad-band telecommunications systems. To come to your most important point, the skill

mismatch and the speed of development of the new technology, remember part of my argument is that you get employment generation in two different ways. One is direct employment generation in the high technology industries where net employment may be maintained even though old skills are displaced and new skills required. Obviously the people who have lost their jobs as a result of the technical changes are not going to get them back in the higher technology modes of provision of these services. You are not going to have a repeat of the processes whereby the people with the training who might have gone into domestic service in 1937 go into the factories in 1953. The other employment generation is the consumption of services. There are an awful lot of service occupations which could actually absorb some of the employment which is displaced here. There are a number of unpleasant arguments about

the quality of the work in the service industries. You could say that what you are producing is a new servant class providing the low technology services directly on a face-to-face basis, but that is essentially a social

PROCEEDINGS choice. You can decide to train people to provide traditional educational and sports and gustatory services to a high level, commanding reasonable wages and providing highly desirable services. There is no reason why people displaced from manufacturing industry should not be retrained to go into the low technology service industry, even if it is difficult to retrain some of those who have been displaced for the new high technology jobs. I agree there is a problem of very rapid displacement

and maybe not the opportunity for direct replacement of labour there was in the 1950s; nevertheless, using my analogy slightly more flexibly and thinking about the emergence of new service industries, there still may be the possibility of employment generation else- where in the economy. That is a defensive argument, but you are right - there is here a serious problem that needs to be tackled. My point, though, is that it does not need to be tackled in the way that might be suggested in terms of re-inventing the place of work, saying that people do not really need jobs.

the CHAIRMAN: I think you would all agree that Professor Gershuny has given the series a marvellous send off. Next week Steve Shirley, under the same title, 'Re-

inventing the Place of Work', will concentrate upon the opportunities presented by new technology for changing the physical work place. I think it may have been coincidence, rather than good management, that she is the second rather than the first speaker in this series. Professor Gershuny having touched upon the impact of women in the work place and the extra leisure available to householders through new technology thus leaves it to the founder and Managing Director of F. International, with a workforce that is 96 per cent composed of those of the femine gender, to develop the theme. I want to thank Professor Gershuny for a marvellous

lecture. He made very complex arguments become alive and intelligible by using examples with which we were all familiar; this is the gift of a good com- municator. His response to the last question gave all the summing up that is needed and I won't attempt to add to it except to say that your conclusion that there is real hope amidst a great deal of distress on the employment front gives us all heart.

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i. lifestyle, innovation and the future of work

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