Abstract
The question of the interrelationship of disability, technology and employment is an important one given the centrality of paid employment in underwriting social citizenship and reducing the risks of economic exclusion (Lindsay and Houston 2013; Roulstone and Barnes 2005). Technology might easily be proffered as a panacea for reducing barriers to and opportunities within paid work. Employment, however, remains a domain of hierarchies, exclusion and at times is the apotheosis of the competitive spirit (Driffield 2013; Edwards and Edwards 1979). Yet technology, most notably microchip technology, provides the potential for a redefinition of workspace, time space, typical modes of energy use and even redefinitions of productivity—just what is produced and how (Castells 2011). Key to this potential is the embodied energy and power of microchip technology—both software and hardware—to redefine spatial transactions and the size of transactions that may once have been large, paper-based and physically demanding. Stonier is important here in noting that such changes go beyond simple mechanised technologies which extended human musculature to the extension of human neurology, cognition, data processing and comprehension. Whether such technologies extend or replace neurological function is a moot point, while microchip technologies also extend musculature of course. However, the point is well made by Stonier that such technologies both embody human qualities, while also superseding and supporting those qualities (Stonier 1983). Not only does technology change, often reducing in size, alongside increases in processing capacity, but it has both underpinned and had an elective affinity with broader changes to the nature of work (Moore 1965).
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Roulstone, A. (2016). Employing Technology to Good Effect: Technology, Disability and the ‘Palace’ of Paid Work. In: Disability and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-45042-5_4
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