1.2 Technology Acceptance and the Establishment of the Technoclass

In March 2001, John Manley, the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister, noted:

Right now, half the world have yet to make even their first telephone call, while the other half are conducting Internet stock trades through their cell phones. There are more telephones in New York City than on the entire continent of Africa. And while e-commerce amounts to a C$200-billion-plus industry in the West, less than one percent of the developing world’s population has access to the Internet.^[21]

World leaders are growing increasingly concerned with the ever-widening digital divide between the wired and the non-wired nations of the world, moving this issue onto national agendas.

Surprisingly, the state of being connected to the Internet has risen to become an issue of international importance, spawning organizations such as the non-profit group Digital Divide Network (sponsored by the Benton Foundation) which provides a network of information and resources to narrow the gap.^[22] It is interesting to note that world leaders are evaluating the potential of the Internet as a means to distribute education without placing the use of the technology into the larger context of applied use. The inequality of nation states and more specifically people within those states is growing seemingly larger due to three distinct factors: the availability of technology; the overall affordability of technological components; and the rate at which technology can be adopted by each social group. Obviously, members of the upper third of the economic spectrum in all countries have the opportunity to acquire and utilize technology in both business and personal pursuits. Politicians and anti-globalization advocates have expressed concerns over the role of technology in widening the gap between rich and poor. This gap is now being expressed in technological terms as the increasing digital divide between nations and cultural subgroups within each nation. Ingrid Burkett argues that the awareness of the impact of technology is merely being used as a distraction from more pragmatic underlying global issues, such as economic, social and cultural inequalities.^[23] The deeper understanding of the issues under the surface of a broader social agenda are also reflected in Micklethwait and Wooldridge’s A Future Perfect, in which the authors brilliantly dispel the five myths of globalization (see section 3.3 for more on this).^[24]

The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the dawn of the information society, in which data and the technologies associated with its dissemination have become a highly valued commodity. In some cases, the value of information is greater than the physical asset which it represents or describes. For example, the up-to-the-minute information regarding the price and direction of an individual financial instrument – such as an equity trading on the stock market – is sometimes more valuable than owning the shares themselves. Day traders demonstrate the overall value of this information by using market trend information to buy and sell shares, irrespective of the underlying value of the individual company. In effect, these traders assess the value of pricing trend, develop a sense of direction and speculate on the momentum of the trading activity. In this case, the trend data and movement information are a product of analysis of the stock’s trading data, and have achieved a relative value greater than the data about the equity it represents. Taking the basic trading data and assessing an upward or downward trend and subsequently executing trading orders to anticipate predicted movements elevates the value (or relative worth) of the data in many cases beyond the value of investing in the equity itself. Therefore, one could accept the axiom that technology’s real value is directly proportional to the information or capability it provides and the application of the user employing it. This relativity is at the heart of the issue surrounding the proliferation of technology across the globe and the backlash towards it by special interest groups under the general category of anti-technology or anti-globalization.

In a global context, technologies such as the Internet – and the information that it distributes – do not have an expressed intent of creating a homogeneous global culture. They merely amplify the pre-existing socio-economic inequality between rich and poor (inside the same country), and between more developed and less developed countries. Technology did not create the gap between the social classes; it brought it to our attention due to the pervasiveness of our mass media culture. Plainly, technology in and of itself does not keep the social classes in place or act as a mechanism to sustain the gap; it simply makes us more acutely aware of the growing disparity and its increasing rate. Conversely, one could argue that technology presents a compelling opportunity for individuals to bridge that gap and use it as a vehicle for movement between social classes. To address this issue from a technologically neutral perspective, one can postulate that two groups of people within a social class or from disparate classes, if given exactly the same technology and associated infrastructure, will use technology in different ways to the exclusive ends of their varying individual agendas. Therefore, just shipping technology to the less wired peoples of the world does not resolve the economic gap; it only masks the underlying problems. Technology does not expand or contract the economic gap between the wired and non-wired peoples of the world; it does however highlight the pre-existing issues surrounding the distribution of wealth. As Stanovnik put it:

The major global problems of the present age have emerged as a consequence of the socio-economic, political and power relationships within which science and technology have developed. The advanced stage our civilization has reached has often been called ‘technotronic’, ‘post-industrial’, ‘technological’ or even ‘scientific’. But science has never been just a factor of its own, obeying autonomous laws of dynamics. Just as the emergence of global problems is not simply the result of the application of science and technology, so the solution of world problems cannot be achieved by the simple application of science and technology as the ‘problem solvers’.^[25]

Technology does not accentuate the gap, and access to technology by itself cannot narrow the gap. Society must not rely on the application of technology alone as a means to improve life quality and change existing socio-economic circumstances. However, once there is a clear project to deal with the existing problems, technology can and should be employed as part of the solution. With regard to developing countries, the problem of the adoption of technology brings up another problem, that of technological dependence. As Stanovnik put it:

Science and technology cannot be just ‘transferred’ from the more developed into the developing countries. There is, indeed, an inherent contradiction in placing too great insistence on the ‘transfer’ of technology. To realize their objectives of greater economic independence and equality the developing countries must strive also towards greater technological independence.^[26]

From a business perspective, the continued decrease in the cost of technology is closing the two other gaps: firstly, the insulated commerce gap between multinational corporations and traditionally domestic companies operating as global trading organizations; and secondly, the competitive gap between large corporations and the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The common element in each of these gaps is an organization’s ability to establish a channel to global markets. For example, traditional domestic firms can now use the Internet to fulfil orders from customers in any geography due to the greater reliability of logistic services and the individuals’ increased propensity to absorb shipping costs. Additionally, smaller firms can use the combination of the Internet, outsourcing and white labelling to compete head-to-head with their larger rivals within a domestic marketplace and in the international trading arena. In both cases, firms are leveraging technology to create value by exploiting opportunities that are a direct result of new technology and the inability of larger, more established firms to move quickly to fulfil the new expectations of customers.

Here again one could debate that firms of equal size armed with the same technologies will yield dissimilar results, due to each organization’s ability to apply technology to a basic value proposition. The wide variability in results can be attributed to the company’s understanding of how to apply the technology, its ability to innovate, the skills of the employees, the receptivity of technology by their customers and the availability of funding. The funding of technology projects has risen steadily over the past 20 years as a percentage of the total operating cost. Organizations using technology as their primary market differentiator must rethink the way in which technology is justified, by taking into account two diametrically opposed factors: a total dependency on technology and a questioning of technology’s effectivness. Firstly, technology is now so integral to business that firms can no longer function manually and should view the acquisition of technology as a continual process, not a periodic capital expense. Secondly, the laissez-faire approach towards purchasing technology during the dot-com boom has left many top management teams and investors with a new-found scepticism on spending additional resources without short-term results. This paradox between the need to acquire additional technology to remain competitive and the new requirement of hyper-justification artificially creates the same set of conditions commonly found in social hierarchies, reflected by the haves and have-nots.

Increasingly, the cost of technology is creating a line of demarcation between companies which can afford large investments in technology and those struggling to justify the continual demands for additional technological interoperability. Technology – regardless of the purpose – must generate a measurable payback to the process of business, considering that the relationship between the payback to the investment made is relative to the firm’s overall aspirations and goals. For example, investments in technological infrastructure are often difficult to justify because they cannot be attributed to the delivery of a single product line or operating department. Infrastructure which is shared by all, providing a platform of capability, should be the easiest set of technologies to justify because it provides a mechanism that enables all products and departments to participate in the overall process of the firm’s business.

The Latency of Technology

Technology must be continually incorporated into the fabric of firms’ business processes so that they remain competitive and drive down long-term operating cost. Business units that develop a wait and see attitude towards technology spending are placing themselves at risk and creating a condition which could be labelled the ‘dos’ and ‘do-nots’. The post-dot-com retreat on technology spending in many corporations is artificially amplifying the tendency of firms to hesitate when making technology decisions and can be called ‘organizational latency’. Typically expressed as managed risk, this latency is often representative of an organization’s inability to take rapid action because of an overarching bureaucratic structure. One could argue that business has reached a temporary technology saturation point, where, although it is desirable to continually apply technology to the process of business, rising scepticism is retarding their drive to continue at the pace dictated by the previous generation of technological innovation. Moreover, consideration of the applied value of technology may not have the same sense of urgency as the dot-com fervour of the 1990s, but permeates a sense of a qualitative approach to the application of technology to business. It is premature to predict if businesses are moving from a quantitative approach to technology, where the more technology one purchases the more successful one will become, to a qualitative approach, which asks ‘what are the right technologies to add value?’ However, organizations must be aware that in a shift of this kind any increase in organizational latency presents new opportunities for competitors to rapidly service niche demands from customers.

Technology latency can also be attributed to the behaviours of the technoclass within the organization. The technoclass is categorized by technology literacy combined with an individual’s behavioural approach to technology. People within a firm have varying degrees of technology literacy; the familiarity with individual technological components influences their approach to applying technology to add value to the business processes and, more importantly, to the value proposition presented to the customers. Regardless of their level of technology literacy, individuals develop strong attitudes towards the technological components of hardware devices of software programs. This can be seen in the relationship between Apple MacIntosh users and Microsoft Windows advocates. Firms dominated by a single class or a majority within two closely associated classes take on the collective behaviour of the dominant group. Often, the behavioural traits permeate from the leadership of the firm to every level in the organizational structure.

Interestingly, the composition of the techno-social classes is reminiscent of the social classes that existed in the Middle Ages. A more whimsical perspective would be to associate the new form of technoclasses with their medieval counterparts in the social hierarchy (see Table 1.1).

One might assume that the technology elite are merely the captains of the technology-producing companies, such as Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. They are, however, a more pragmatic group of individuals who embraced technology in the 1980s and 90s. Most of this group, seduced by the siren song of Internet start-ups, enjoy not only an in-depth knowledge of information technology, but also possess a familiarity with the national application of technology. More precisely, the generation of technologists and people closely associated with technology have developed a relationship with technological advancement that will allow them to see how to apply technology to a firm’s value proposition.

Traditionally, the external consultant was the bridge between technology and its applied value. These individuals provide a valuable perspective on how to integrate technology into a value proposition because they have incorporated the use of technology into their own everyday lives.

Table 1.1: Comparison of medieval social classes and modern technology classes
Medieval classes	Contemporary classes
Royals: responsible for shaping the direction of the nation state.	Technodeterminists: shaping the output of the industry.
Nobility: warriors who guard the kingdom against its enemies.	Technoelitists: members of the technology bureaucracy, guardians of the legacy of technology.
Clergy: keepers of the faith, the practitioners in the bureaucracy of central administrative functions.	Technologists: practitioners of the craft of technology, the humanistic oil on the cog of mechanized advancement.
Merchants: responsible for the trade of goods.	Technocrats: businesspeople who have mastered the use of technology to facilitate commerce.
High nobility: warriors who exhibit fancy weaponry rather than defend the kingdom.	Technophiles: individuals who acquire technology simply for the joy of ownership; they revel in gadgetry.
Peasantry: those who fear losing their jobs in agriculture.	Technophobes: individuals who are slow to adopt technology and fear its repercussions.
Foreigners: those who did not quite manage to incorporate themselves into the social group.	Luddites: individuals who loath technology and reject its adoption.
	Techless: people in disparate geographies who do not plan to participate in the technology society.
	Anti-techiles: individuals who take action against the continued spread of technology and its influence on the spread of capitalism.

Nonetheless, consultants now play a more comprehensive role in the aggregation of cross-company functions to internal and external sources. This change in role can be attributed to the broader range of experiences that consultants bring to a firm, often cross-pollinating industry knowledge and best practices.

That said, there is a small percentage of this group who are, as Micklethwait and Wooldridge put it, ‘technodeterminists’, those ‘who think that it is merely enough to be universal’.^[27] These individuals are shaping the technology industry as a whole, and although they have an agenda to sell more technology, they provide the catalyst for technology innovation by investing in research and the development of new ideas.

In short, similar to customer segmentation, organizational categorization between technology literacy and attitude can be associated qualitatively to a firm’s technology latency. Although it would be difficult to measure quantitatively, nonetheless its influence is demonstrable in the speed of reaction to changes in business conditions. The behavioural aspect of the workforce is often discounted by management groups as trivial; however, its effects on productivity are measurable. For example, organizations implementing Microsoft Windows PCs whose computing base originally was Apple MacIntosh, experienced significant short-term reductions in productivity not just because of the unfamiliarity of the software, but, more surprisingly, a perceived sense of loss by the users. In most cases, the underlying application software was the same suite of Microsoft Office automation applications, such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel, which represented the bulk of the time spent using the computer. Nevertheless, users were dismayed by management’s decision to switch, irrespective of their individual feelings. Users’ attachment to one or the other dominant variations of PC technology can almost be likened to that of a religious preference. In any case, the attitude of users reflected the paradox of PCs in the business environment, the struggle between corporations applying the PC to specific, discrete functions which depersonalized the device, and the users’ regard for the machine, specifically the choice of applications to run and the available space on the disk drive as personalized for their productivity.

^[21]Speech given to the Royal Institute for Foreign Affairs. London, March 20, 2001.

^[22]See Digital Divide Network. Available at http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/sections/index.cfm, April 2002.

^[23]I. Burkett, ‘Beyond the Information Rich and Poor; Future’s Understanding of Inequalities in Globalising Information Economies’. Futures, Vol. 32, Number 7, (2000) p. 679.

^[24]J. Micklethwait and A. Wooldridge, A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization (London: William Heinemann, 2000) p. 325.

^[25]J. Stanovnik, ‘Global Problems and the Role of Science and Technology in their Solution’. In J. Gvishiani (ed.) Science, Technology and Global Problems (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979) p. 42.

^[26]Ibid., p. 43.

^[27]J. Micklethwait and A. Wooldridge, A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization (London: William Heinemann, 2000) p. 32.