Technological change has produced hopes of growth and expectations of unemployment in the history of capitalism. The introduction of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into production processes in industry and services across the world economy has given this issue renewed urgency today. Certain dominant firms present AI as the necessary instrument for the reorganisation and automation of labour processes and the replacement of unnecessary jobs. Some economic historians predict rapid change and ‘technological traps’ comparable to the 1960s, 1930s, 1880s, and 1830s. Others stress that technological invention is of course not the same as implementation and shocks can be as much ‘of the old’ as of the new. Though researchers remain divided over whether reductions in headcount in certain sectors evidence pending technological obsolescence, cost-cutting, or something else, contemporary debates have significant historical precedents. Mechanisation, electrification, containerisation, computerisation, as well as the introduction of assembly lines, office machinery, industrial robots, and digital platforms and many other productive objects and instruments helped to alter work organisation and structural power, increase productivity, create new occupations, and exacerbate inequalities and equalisations in conditions.
Those who study historical labour have long stressed that technologies are embedded in worlds of work structured by institutions, cultures, and agency. There is a broad consensus that the consequences of technological change depend not only upon the specific characteristics of the productive forces, but also upon divisions of labour, conceptions of skilled and unskilled work, worker and managerial strategies, ownership and legal regimes, the balance of power between capital and labour, as well as the key question of how technologies are deployed in different contexts. Older work by historians like Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, and others on labour during the industrial revolution is being revisited. Recent scholarship on AI and inequality by Daron Acemoglu and others call for renewed attention to workers.
This conference seeks to bring historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists and scholars of industrial relations to investigate how workers have experienced and responded to technological change. We encourage papers that treat technological shocks not simply as an exogenous force acting upon workers, but as a relational and even conflictual economic, social, political, and cultural process. Who chooses which technologies are introduced and why? Which workers bear the costs of adjustment and how have they resisted, managed, or welcomed them? What determines whether productivity gains produce higher wages, shorter working hours, greater employment security or displacement and inequality? And what can historical episodes of automation and technological disruption tell us about the choices confronting workers, employers and governments today, in the face of AI?
We particularly welcome grounded contributions capable of informing the central themes of the conference. Those include:
- technological unemployment, displacement and job creation;
- deskilling, reskilling and changing occupational structures;
- wages and productivity;
- worker agency and informal resistance;
- trade unions, labour politics, and workplace technological adoption;
- gender, race, class and unequal exposure;
- apprenticeship, education and retraining;
- managerial strategies and the reorganisation of work;
- worker knowledge and participation;
- technological change and working time;
- uneven and combined national, regional, and local labour-market adjustment;
- migration as a response to displacement;
- energy systems and the environment of work technologies
- the politics and regulation of labour-saving technologies;
- historical comparisons between mechanisation, electrification, containerisation, computerisation, robotics, and other shifts and AI;
- the relationship between contemporary predictions of technological unemployment and earlier episodes of technological anxiety.
If you would like to participate, please submit a paper abstract of around 300 words and a short biographical note about yourself by to labournetwork@torch.ox.ac.uk by Friday 16 October. If you miss the deadline, please let the organisers know about your proposal. There are no conference fees. National and international travel and accommodation support to and in Oxford can potentially be provided on request.