Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Icopec Publication, London, 2017
INTRODUCTION: CURRENT DEBATES IN BUSINESS STUDIES We are constantly defining our world and our place in it. Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow writes: “The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.” This progress most recently is focused on defining the future of work and driving a competitive business advantage for organizations. In this respect, the human management field has been growing rapidly since the first industrial revolution. All Industrial Revolutions have profoundly changed the world and have provided an economic base that have given rise to professions, the human side of the management, and an improvement in living standards around the world. Now, we are talking about the fourth industrial revolution where machines are doing more and more of the work. Therefore, a complex dilemma is emerging as we start to think of machines as human-like and increasingly performing the tasks that have always been carried out by man. The term Industrial Revolution was first used by Louis-Auguste Blanqui in 1837. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain during the late 1700s and early 1800s. It quickly spread to the United States, and the American Industrial Revolution, commonly referred to as the second Industrial Revolution, started sometime between 1820 and 1870. There were many advances in mechanization of agriculture and textile manufacturing and a revolution in power, including steamships and locomotives. Undoubtedly, this affected social, cultural and economic conditions. The steam engine had been invented before the industrial revolution and was subsequently improved by Watt and others after 1778. The steam engine was initially adapted and used to provide power for a whole series of machines and as a result was in many ways the most important ‘enabling technology’ of the time and as a result was the most significant contribution to the first industrial revolution. Steam driven machines were gradually improved, adapted for wider uses such as in the production of textiles and the mining of iron and tin. This evolution continued to enable the operation of more
complex machinery, such as machine tools, lathes, and farm machinery. Although such advances have brought many positive improvements to human life, they have brought with them many issues and challenges as well. For example, a reduction in agricultural production as people abandoned their farms to work in city factories where they could earn a higher income. The Industrial Revolution provided an incentive to increase profits, and as a result, working conditions in factories deteriorated. Long hours, inadequate remuneration and minimal breaks became the norm. This subsequently led to health issues for many factory workers. Labor movements in the United States developed momentum from the late 19th century in response to poor working conditions that developed during the Industrial Revolution. The Second Industrial Revolution, which began in 1850, continued for well over a century, through the 1970s. The main causes of the second industrial revolution have been identified as increased efficiency in use of natural resources, abundant labor supplies, strong government policies, new sources of power, expansion of railroads and American inventors and inventions. It was a period of growth for pre-existing industries and emergence of new ones. It was a time of great inventions in such industries as the steel, oil, and electricity. The development of new technologies - for that time - led to what we now call globalization, and created a rough draft of our world today. The Second Industrial Revolution was another great leap forward in technology and society. This created a higher standard of living, as well as a major incline in unemployment due to machines usurping the jobs of actual humans. Production costs and product prices fell dramatically, paralleling the rapid growth in productivity. Among the many significant effects, the second industrial revolution left a deep societal imprint through such outcomes as urbanization, marital norms and family separations, craftsmanship, education, the pace of work, and so on. Many workers, mainly women, who had been drawn into cities for factory work, found themselves unemployed as machines decreased the demand for human labor. The Third Industrial Revolution was brought about by advances in information-communication technologies, the renewable energy sector, fundamental changes in the way people do business, human relationships, social governance, and media in the field of education. Internet technology and renewable energies merged to create a new infra
structure for a Third Industrial Revolution that changed the way power is distributed in the 21st century. The first widespread use of the term was in the book «Third Industrial Revolution» by the American economist and writer Jeremy Rifkin, who introduced the concept of the so-called 3rd Industrial Revolution to the market in 2011. The United States and Japan played leading roles in the development of computers. During the Second World War, great efforts were made to apply computer technology for military purposes. Following the war, computer use ballooned through the American space program. Japan, meanwhile, specialized in the use of computers for industrial purposes, pioneering robotics. The acceleration phase of the 3rd Industrial Revolution started around 1980 with the advent of the microprocessor. Soon thereafter, rapid developments in computer and communication technologies drove societies around the globe in dramatic new directions. The technological forces commanding this revolution tend to exhibit pitfalls quite similar to the preceding two revolutions. Advances in technology tend to be capital intensive (favouring those who already have money and other resources); skills-biased (favouring those who already have a high level of technical skill); and labour-saving (reducing the total number of jobs in the economy). However, with the third revolution, there was a visible transformation from the industrial society into a service society. In the first two revolutions, mechanization relieved physical labor; the third revolution relieved mental labor. This revolution made lower positions in industry increasingly obsolete, resulting in the emergence of entirely new roles in the service sector. Now, the world is talking about the fourth industrial revolution. This new industrial paradigm merges the digital and physical worlds through the Cyber-Physical Systems enhanced by the so-called Internet of Things. Being such a comprehensive phenomenon, it has consequences for industry, markets and the economy. The expectation is growth in production processes and increasing productivity, affecting the whole product lifecycle, creating new business models, changing the work environment, and restructuring the labor market. However, as can be expected, there are less-than-ideal consequences with this era as well. Even though we are at the beginning, some of the primary concerns emerging are: IT security-related threats that involve directed or undirected attacks on enterprise systems in order to steal business-critical, internal information; threats concerning entrepreneurial decision making and organizational aspects; threats
related to the efficient and compliant execution of core business processes; threats arising from deliberately manipulating, over-loading or destroying hardware or software components of production systems; and technical threats that describe unspecified behavior of communication, hardware or software components due to defects or aging. Therefore the topics being effected the most are new business models and the impact on value chains and SMEs, financial and accounting systems, labor and employment, education and training, and human resources. The chapters of this book have outlined some of these key components for organizations in the future developments in the organization of work, employment conditions and employees’ motivation and career prospects (Organ and Kengel, Chap.1; Staub and Akkaya, Chap. 6; Yilmaz and Bilkay, Chap. 5, Ozturk and Kasko-Arici, Chap. 2; Bilgili, Ozkul, and Bilgili- Suluk, Chap. 12; Semih and Alüftekin-Sakarya, Chap. 7), as well as educating and training for upcoming needs (Djenouhat, Chap. 9; Ustun and Koca-Balli, Chap. 16; Uysal, Chap. 17; Ersoy and Saygili, Chap. 21) The authors have also tried to provide information on of how social media impacts future developments (Urhan, Chap. 9; Maden and Koker, Chap. 10) along with importance of emotional intelligence (Mert and Bayrak-Kok, Chap. 15; Mohan-Bursali, Chap. 21; Kocabas and Antalyali, Chap. 13). All of these technological developments also generate imbalances in human life (Okutan and Balaban, Chap. 14; Halis, Chap. 19, Ozturk and Kasko-Arici, Chap. 18), therefore strategies and financing for new developments become important aspect in the future era (Avunduk, Chap. 3; Kiziloglu and Bayrak-Kok, Chap. 4; Eroglu-Pektas and Damar, Chap. 11) Individual abilities and skills now play a greater role due to more interaction between humans and machines. With this book, our overall assumption is that current trends will create new conditions, expectations, and employability skills.