Introduction

Abstract

Abstract To the extent that businesses plan for the workforce implications of new process technologies that they introduce, it is often in a largely unconscious manner. The fantasy that often governs this unconscious process might be called the “de-skilling myth”: received wisdom and wishful thinking encourage many managers to believe that new technologies will permit them to get along not only with proportionately fewer workers-a perfectly reasonable assumption in many cases-but also with workers who are on average less skilled and doing narrower jobs.