ISOLATION AND TECHNOLOGY: THE HUMAN DISCONNECT

Isolation And Technology: The Human Disconnect



Isolation and Technology: The Human Disconnect

Since the 1950s (Koontz and O'Donnell, 1968), many management theorists have accepted four primary management functions: planning, organizing, influencing, and controlling. Of these, the control function has been described by a series of dualities in metaphors that range from pendulum swings (Abrahamson, 1996) through rational/normative surges (Barley and Kunda, 1992) and scientific management/human relations alternations (Edwards, 1979) to the pressure ? release effect of transactional/interactional control (Brennan and Vega, 2000; Vega and Primeaux, 1999). An interdisciplinary examination of the role of control and the dualities that surround it reveals a series of mechanisms with which behavior and/or output is managed. A partial list of these includes financial or operating controls, structural, mechanical, or personal controls, technological, economic, gender-based, technical-social, bureaucratic, and institutional controls. Within the lengthy list of mechanisms is hidden the use of isolation as a method of interactional control.

Interactional control involves managing relationships in order to direct behavioral responses (Brennan and Vega, 2000). Isolation in its many forms has been a powerful tool for controlling behavior for the whole of human social history. The shunning practiced by religious sects (Diekema, 1992), solitary imprisonment, a refusal to meet another's eye in a social situation, simple social snubs, all contribute to a powerful sense of social isolation, the goal of which is to effect behavioral change. The process is no less potent in the work environment, although the stimuli and conditions differ.

Isolation/privacy

This paper will pursue an interdisciplinary quest for the causes and effects of isolation, including the competing concerns that technology isolates workers (Licata, 1984) and that technology has undermined our privacy (Townsend et al., 1998) and, therefore, we are never alone. Most (but far from all) of the research conducted over the past half century has been positivist in nature; we have identified our task as understanding and integrating previous learning in a more relativist manner.

“Isolation” has as many definitions as there are theorists. For our purposes, social isolation, as distinct from privacy, has the following characteristics:

•it is imposed by others (Diekema, 1992);

•it is not necessarily related to physical separation (Diekema, 1992);

•it is closely associated with alienation (Edwards, 1979; Erickson, 1986); and

•it is linked, in organizations, to formal status for those with low status to begin with (Miller, 1975).

Erich Fromm (1941) traced the path of human freedom from the Middle Ages through the 1930s and drew several conclusions that have significance in this context. The history of human freedom mirrors the simultaneous increase and diminution of personal and social isolation. As freedom increases, so do both individuation and isolation (Fromm, 1941, p. 62). From medieval times to the Renaissance, economic needs were subordinated to human needs, resulting in little or no competition and great solidarity along with a notable lack of individual freedom and permanent connection to social roles. As the growth of capital and wealth created a moneyed class during the Renaissance period, wealth became more important than established social ...