Wired Cities and Changes to Work, Essay Example

There is currently high level of dynamism in the structural, organizational, and demographic characteristics of work and the workplace in the wired city. This has prompted a change in how work is executed in the majority of these cities. We already know that the industrial revolution brought many changes, one of which was to divide the work in two sectors, which are primary and secondary. Primary work involved people whose responsibilities were to extract the resources from the earth. Secondary work involved people whose duties were to use the resource to convert them into useful products. Increasingly throughout the industrial revolution age, tertiary sector has continued to develop. These are service men, in this regard; the service sector has continued to grow over time (Graham and Marvin 140). During the 20th century, the sector was formally subdivided into tertiary, quaternary, and quinary. However, this division never achieved the same acceptance as the three part (primary, secondary, and tertiary) designation. Tertiary workers were those involved in transportation and utilities. Quaternary workers engaged themselves in intellectual activities while quinary workers played an important role in the highest level of decision-making.

All this industrial revolution and post revolution changes were accompanied with many changes with the work itself. There have been changes to the home location of workers, location of jobs, and the nature of work, specialization in work reorganization of production and decline in primary industries and large growth in tertiary industry. Along the prominence of the tertiary sector, many changes have been observed which include a decline in unionization, high proportion of part time workers, higher proportion of self-employed workers, decrease in number of time an employee work for one company growth in multinational business, and increase in foreign investment (Kushner 899). Flexible work options have also been seen. In this regard, there are a number of different alternatives for working. We have had individuals whose offices are essentially their cars. This has expanded to include individuals whose cars have become airplanes. Other flexible work option that has been on the rise includes time shift, compressed workweek, and job sharing. The most popular of this is time shift. Job sharing is particular practiced in firms with longer hours or workweeks. The case of compressed work week is where some people are able to work for long hours 10-12 hours and therefore shorten their work week to three or four days.

The most recent are the changing arrangements for the office itself. Tell work, and expert centers, hot desking, or hotel ling and telecommunication are just a few. Teleworks can be specific to an individual firm where they have alternative location for the employee based on their place of their residence. This is often called satellite office. The satellite offices are less expensive and provide all sort of benefit that we would call life balance (Kushner 895). Hot desking, or hotel ling is the situation in which main location of the firm has an office on some sort of booking arrangement. The employee work out of office for some portion of their week and then when they need to work in the main office, they call and book an office. Hot desking is normally combined with telecommunicating.

Tell work grew substantially in 1990’s with most tell-workers working from home for some portion of the week, perhaps three-day at home, and two days at the office. There is a subset of tell workers who work completely out of office. Tele work started with those who were consultants, who did not need the accouterment of the office or the stimulation of the peers in order to complete their work. Much of these is project-oriented carried out by programmers, writers, and the likes. More recent tell workers hold many different type of jobs, but usually various companies are more supportive of the arrangement with the willing workers.

The impact of this trend to the city could be described as devastating. Thirty years from now big cities may be dying very fast. The downtown office buildings have become dysfunctional since information and ideal have become mobile; the kind of work that does not require contact with customers or other professionals does not have to be done downtown. Downtown is not what it used to be to company, prime location means having satellite office that are convenient to employees, or having additional offices near  to the potential customer, or partners (Graham and Marvin 120). Experts have already predicted boom time ahead of residential agent and hard time for office space brokers, especially in big cities with high population density and huge traffics.

It is pertinent to note that the emergence of new industries like information technology, telecommunication, and aerospace industries among many others, have resulted to the change in the mode of doing many jobs. The technologies introduced in the past decade have resulted to change in jobs. Some examples of the new jobs are cyber managers and bloggers. The examples of the jobs that have changed include the bank tellers and secretariat work.

Education is one qualification to getting jobs in the current world. Studies have shown that higher education is the key to getting higher paying jobs. However, education is not just having a University degree, it is also about having the skill that employers are looking in their employees. Today, job seekers not only need to have certain work-skill but they need to have good general work place skills.

Works Cited

Kushner, James. City Life in the Age of High Technology. Urban Lawyer. (2005): 37. 4, p893-905. 13p.

Graham, Steve and Marvin, Simon. Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Space, Urban Places. Psychology Press, 2006.