Some Neglected Areas of Research on the Effects of Automation and Other Technological Change on Workers

Abstract

IN RECENT years the term has gained a prominent place in the national vocabulary. The effects of automation have been the subject of extensive congressional hearings, and almost every executive department of the federal government has groups concerned with investigation of the subject. State and local governments have established commissions to anticipate its benefits and problems. It is becoming an increasingly prominent issue in labormanagement relations. Faculty members of universities throughout the country are engaged in studying its many aspects. Conferences and symposiums concerned with its social and economic effects have been sponsored by many prominent national and international agencies. Foundations have granted increasingly large sums of money for investigation of the subject. The literature has achieved that stage in which standard works now include bibliographies of the numerous bibliographies.' Despite the volume of recent writings on automation and other technological change, the number of persons actively contributing to the literature, and the importance of the problems addressed, relatively little has been added to our systematic understanding of the phenomena studied by comparison with other social problems of similar magnitude and importance. Those with responsibility for developing and administering programs for anticipating the rate and direction of technological changes and the social and economic effects of these changes find in the literature little to assist them. The purpose of this paper is to suggest some areas of investigation in which the current state of knowledge seems to be particularly deficient. A number of research possibilities are enumerated and discussed which, it is hoped, will suggest profitable areas of activity to research personnel, graduate