It captures the continual interplay of people and systems at work. In examining this interplay in the office environment of the 1990s, one sees that cross performance is in the corporate air as well as in the office chair. It's no secret that the 1990s have imposed different work requirements on the people who still have jobs. As everyone recognizes, these changes have been brought about by the need to compete in a global economy, coupled with the tools corporations now have for competing. The new mother of all tools is the computer, and workers are still discovering what it can give birth to.
Companies are still in the midst of the Technological Revolution.
In the next century, doctoral dissertations may well compare the late 1800s with the late 1900s to determine whether the Industrial Revolution or the Technological Revolution made the greatest impact on the world as it was known. Just as the Industrial Revolution took the wool spinner out of the cottage and into the mill, the Technological Revolution is changing forever the way we process work and create products. And just as the earlier revolution gave rise to the middle class, the Technological Revolution is democratizing the workplace. It is blurring or leveling many of the status distinctions that formerly stratified the office, turning things that used to signify status into symbols of the past. The difference between typewriters and computers is an obvious example.