Working Life Barometer in the Baltic Countries 2002 (pdf) - mol.fi

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MODERN SOCIETY – INFORMATION SOCIETY
Working at home is often linked to the utilisation of modern office technology,
computers and mobile phones. These tools enable the work to be done
elsewhere than at the workplace. Information and computer technologies have
led to profound changes in the organisation of work at micro level as well as
in labour markets at macro level over the last decades. The ability of individuals,
companies and government to adapt to these changes appears to largely
determine their success in the information society. This is being reflected by
EU policy making such as the eEurope initiative and the European Employment
Strategy, and has led to increasing demand for timely data on information
society related issues such as ICT-enabled new ways of working, telework,
work-related IT skills, employment in IT sectors and occupations, and
many more. (SIBIS 2002, 5).
This transition in progress world-wide is characterised by the information
technology ‘revolution’ and - by way of this - the spread of a new economy,
globalisation, and the rise of the so-called network society. (See e.g. Castells
1996). The boundaries of nation-states may remain as they are for the most
part, but their ability to confine within them - or prevent the access of - various
ideas, cultural influences, international competition, movements of capital etc.,
has become substantially weakened. (Beck 1999). The present day signifies in
many senses a ’death of distance’, an opening up of borders, and an ever
greater mutual separation of the concepts of time and place (see e.g. Bauman
2002, Giddens & Pierson 1998). These aspects have a strong impact on working
life, too. The transnationalisation of companies, the alteration of their
strategies to cover the world as widely as possible, and the change in their organisations
to be more network-oriented, mean a rather different operating
environment - to which people have become accustomed in recent decades in
the Baltic countries as elsewhere. It was not until the advent of modern information
technology, headed by the Internet and mobile phone technology, that
the change became possible. The ’death of distance’ mentioned above means
that back-and-forth communication between actors can take place at the same
time, independently of their physical distance from one another.
This societal upheaval is not treating all citizens in the same way. Some are
better placed than others in the ever-growing transition to a life that is organ-