Week 1 - 2

Robert Theobald's question of "mind-quake" - It is better if our shifts in thinking are small and frequent rather than large and catastrophic. All of us must become more competent at managing mind-quakes. The big changes in everiday procedures might bring us to mind-quake if the change has been so fast and enormous that we had no transformation time or means.

First example to come to my mind is the closest to us - the way we work at IMKE. It is not much difference to many of us. But to imagine giving an old-school professor the task to make a lecture so that he has hypertext materials and students should produce a collective conspect. No papers, pens just open laptops, projector etc.

Another mind-quake is the way elderly people must react when have always received their pensions from post office and suddenly have to go and get it from ATM. What does the machine mean to a person who never dealt with one. On the news there was an interview with a bank assistant who was helping people coming to the ATM first time. There was a long queue behind one machine whereas the one next to it was idle. The assistant invited the next lady in line to come to this machine. The lady stood still saying that her money has always come from this certain machine and she will not go the next one.

Charles Handy formulated paradoxes to come in the society. One of those is the paradox of intelligence. Intelligence is the rising form of property; yet such assets never appear on company balance sheets. I imagine it is also a kind of mind-quake to the people who are used to the idea that you must physically work hard to receive your salary and this can be calculated in the work hours. Nowadays companies must take into account their intelligence rate to be competitive. The way I see it, is that companies do profit from their intelligence if it comes to creation of software or any other creative product but the way to write it down still remains the same - working hours of this and that worker. Still the salaries of the workers differ while they are evaluated by their intelligence (and resulting productivity). On the other hand there are companies selling business intelligence as a service. They could name their outcome as intelligence and have it on the balance sheet?

Manuel Castells has described information society also with the transformation of work and employment. There will be a growth of self employment, temporary and part-time work. Particularly for women, he adds. I feel related. Flexi-workers who work without fixed time, place or regulations are certainly emerging phenomenon while professionals feel the earge to be more independent and choose freely their working hours. I share the idea that in future there will be a shift in employer-employee relationship as employers become the clients of those who were employees so far. Castells claims that this shift will procuce more stress and discontent. I do not agree on that while I find that the flexi-worker, temporary or self employed worker needs to have stron self discipline to achieve what he/she has taken as a goal. Without the ability to push yourself to work it is really easy to get stressed. In this case I suppose it is easier to stick to traditional work relationships.