Technological Change and the Organization Man: Preliminary Conceptualization of a Research Project.

This article studies the effect of technological change on the employment of workers on the lower status levels of military, industrial, and other large-scale organizations. With reference to the increasing tempo of technological change, the measure is not only the tremendous flood of patent applications but also the increased emphasis on research and development in all largescale organizations. "Accelerating change" and "bureaucratic organization" are two key factors in the conceptualization of our research problem. It is the fact that career commitments to these large-scale organizations appear to be on the increase. More and more of the middle class is becoming committed to military careers, civil service careers, telephone company careers, or careers in some other large-scale organization. The considerable amount of writing in the field of management contains much background material for any such new study of the people who do the managing. Technological change usually brings to mind images of automated machinery, or perhaps a vastly improved method of manufacturing some product due to a break-through in the physical or biological sciences.