Abstract

Editorial first paragraph: Why this special issue?
As New Technology, Work and Employment (NTWE) celebrates its silver jubilee, this special issue aims to honour the longstanding imperatives of the journal by providing an opportunity to Make Space for critical accounts of NTWE. It is our intention that this space may be offered to approaches that have their roots in other traditions or adopt slightly different sensibilities to those that are typically found in NTWE. However, before we introduce our attempt at making such space, we want to recognise the importance and value of the work of NTWE. In the first instance, credit must go to the late Brian Towers, the founder and chairman of the Editorial Committee of the journal. Brian was also an academic with the foresight and energy to recognise that themes laid down in Gill's 1985 seminal study of Work, Unemployment and the New Technology should form the basis of a coherent academic research programme with an associated journal. As Baldry (2011) has recently observed in his NTWE Editorial Chronicling the IT Revolution, in the mid-1980s, the demand for a coherent body of academic research was a direct response to emerging discourses of the time, many of which appeared rhetorically rich, optimistic and long on hope whilst light on analysis. Indeed, to have a journal that was dedicated to critical studies of the implications and impact of new technologies on work experiences and employment was both radical and necessary given a period typified by talk of new revolutions (Bell, 1974; Stonier, 1982) and the future of work (Jones, 1982; Handy, 1984). With a distinctive empirical focus, NTWE demonstrated that the introduction and implementations of new technologies in workplaces were (and remain) contested terrains. Indeed, the empirical character of NTWE remains a major contribution in organisational studies and as Baldry also noted, developments in NTWE have taken quite specific trajectories in terms of sectors considered, occupational identities scrutinised and ‘new’ managerial practices introduced to reconfigure control of work. The political sensibility for critiquing managerial rationality remains strong.