Devil's Advocate: IT, culture and change

Some basic assumptions about the ways we organise out businesses and society are being challenged right now. And that can make us uncomfortable, says Martin Brampton.

It was C P Snow who coined the phrase 'Two Cultures' in relation to science and the arts. But I'm interested in the notion that culture is what opposes technological progress. The biggest challenges to IT development, we are told, are cultural rather than technical. How can this be?

The argument arises in the context of changes such as moving call centre jobs to low wage locations. We are told that this is inevitable and there is no point resisting it. Our job is merely to adapt to the changes that are coming and let go our cultural inhibitions.

Now one might decide to welcome the export of call centre jobs. In many ways they are the modern equivalent of the soulless, inhuman production line. And whereas on the old-fashioned manufacturing production line the worker was free to let his mind wander, in the call centre the worker has to engage mentally with artificial and alienating interactions.

The call centre worker does not speak as a person but as a machine that represents a corporate policy. So the person wanting a loan is recommended to buy protection insurance, by someone who may well know that for every £10 paid in premiums, a mere £1.33 is actually paid out. The person wanting to cancel a subscription to an unsatisfactory service is given a battery of questionable reasons for continuing.

That the individual worker is alienated is made obvious by those overseas call centres that give the staff spurious English sounding names. They brush up their accents, so that they can play a part that is quite unlike their real selves. And unlike actors, there is little scope for creativity or interpretation. Indeed, a good reason for resisting the exportation of call centre jobs might be that it is a cruel practice to inflict on people in other countries.

It may not happen yet awhile but we should also bear in mind that these jobs will, in the end, go the same way as the old manufacturing production line jobs. Robots now steadily reduce the number of people needed to build cars. Given time, computers will surely take over the job of manning call centres. An interesting question will be whether or not that counts as passing Turing's famous test.

But what of our cultural hang-ups? Terry Eagleton points out that 'culture' is one of the two or three most complex words in the English language and wrote a whole book 'The Idea of Culture' to prove the point. When you think about the word, it is obvious that it has connections with what is natural, as when we cultivate crops.

Yet cultivation hints at the complexities, as we think about how it is both a natural process and the bending of nature to our ends. And so one aspect of culture becomes the idea of how we would like the world to be, as opposed to harsh reality. People who stand in the way of economic forces are accused of a hopeless attachment to a traditional way of life that is bound to be swept away in the end.

Something is wrong with this argument, though. It seems to equate economic forces with natural forces. This analysis is itself culturally specific because so much of what counts as the economy is shaped by our own creations and the assumptions of our particular culture. People talk as if the limited liability joint stock company were something natural. In fact, it is obviously a product of the laws we have chosen to enact for ourselves.

So if the next few years are, as it is claimed, going to challenge our fundamental assumptions about life and work, we should carefully consider our response. There is no good reason to assume that it is those assumptions that must go. The economic forces that are creating the challenge are just as much based on assumptions and we are entitled to question any of them. Will we, though?