Automation Anxiety and Augmentation Aspiration: Subtexts of the Future of Work
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| Author | Elisabeth K. Kelan |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12679 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 34, 2057–2074 (2023)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12679
Automation Anxiety and Augmentation
Aspiration: Subtexts ofthe Future of Work
Elisabeth K. Kelan
Essex Business School, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK
Corresponding author email: Elisabeth.kelan@essex.ac.uk
How are gender, class, and raceimagined in relation to automation and augmentation in
popular books on the future of work? This paper problematises intersectional inequality
subtexts in books on the future of work to develop new research directions. The paper
shows how automation anxiety is conceptualised as relating to the threat that men might
lose their jobs. While working-class men are constructed as unable to reinventthemselves,
middle-class men are presented as unable to remain the main providerfor a nuclear fam-
ily. Augmentationaspirations relate to how social and emotional skills are considered as
future-proof, but who gets credit for displaying such skills remains uncertain. Creating
and working with machines is also considered future-proof,but there are silences around
inequality subtexts in relationto data, the designers, and the design ofthose technologies.
The article suggests a research agenda that can be used to understand how inequalities
emerge and how they can be diminished in discussions about automation and augmenta-
tion in the future of work.
Introduction
Since the publication of The Fourth Industrial Rev-
olution (Schwab, 2016) and The Second Machine
Age (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014), myriad
books have sought to make sense of changes
associated with the future of work and technol-
ogy, to help prepare managers, policymakers, and
the general public to take appropriate actions.
Books on the future of work have a long tradition
(Donkin, 2010; Gratton, 2011; Maitland and
Thomson, 2011) because they speak to the human
need to understand and potentially ameliorate the
future (Nowotny, 2021). The latest reiteration of
this literature focuses on technical developments
associated with digitalisation, articial intelli-
gence, robotics, automation, and augmentation
in relation to work. As such, the future-of-work
literature is of prime concern for management
scholars who aim to understand phenomena such
as the adoption of new technologies and digital-
isation at work (Brivot, Lam and Gendron, 2014;
Haak-Saheem, Hutchings and Brewster, 2022;
Shankar, 2020; vom Lehnand Heath, 2022). Yet a
critical analysis of the future-of -work literature is
still largely missing (Howe, Hentrup and Menges,
2021; Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2022). One of the
central debates in this literature asks if the future
of work will be dominated by automation or
augmentation; automation suggests that human
jobs will be automated and thus disappear with
increasing use of technology, while augmentation
means that humans and machines collaborate
and augment each others’ skills (Raisch and
Krakowski, 2021). While often constructed as
opposites, it has been shown that automation and
augmentation are in a paradoxical relationship
and co-exist (Raisch and Krakowski, 2021).
However, this raises the question of how in-
equalities are considered in the latest reiteration
of the future-of-workliterature. Awealthof lit-
erature in business and management has analysed
inequalities such as those around gender at work
(Adamson and Kelan, 2019; Ashman et al., 2022;
Cooper et al., 2021; Gatrell et al., 2014; Haak-
Saheem, Hutchings and Brewster, 2022; Kelan,
2014; Mavin, Grandy and Williams, 2014; Pio and
Essers, 2014; Priola and Chaudhry, 2021). Such
© 2022 The Authors.British Journal of Management published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf ofBritish Academy
of Management.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distri-
bution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited.
2058 Kelan
analyses regularly draw on Acker’s work (Bendl,
2008; Poorhosseinzadeh and Strachan, 2021)
through concepts such as the ‘gender subtext’.
The gender subtext refers to implicit assumptions
that exist in texts (Acker, 2012). Gender subtexts
have been identied in earlier business and man-
agement literature (Adamson and Kelan, 2019;
Bendl, 2008; Fondas, 1997; Kelan, 2008c; Ogbor,
2000) but have not been discussed in relation to
the latest future-of-work books that focus on digi-
talisation. Furthermore, the gender subtext can be
expected to interact with race and class subtexts
(Acker, 2006, 2012), which together form inequal-
ity subtexts. Because technologies embed and
amplify gender, race, and class (Buolamwini and
Gebru, 2018; Wajcman, 1991, 2004), analysing
inequality subtexts in the technology-focused
future-of-work literature is a central concern for
business and management research and can be
used to develop new research questions through
problematisation (Sandberg and Alvesson, 2011;
Alvesson and Sandberg, 2011).
The purpose of the paper is to problematise
inequality subtexts in popular future-of-work
books to identify future research directions. The
paper makes three contributions. First, it devel-
ops the notion of inequality subtexts. Second,
it shows how automation anxiety is focused on
white-collar and blue-collar jobs commonly held
by men. Third, it reveals how augmentation is
expressed through social and emotional skills that
are deemed important yet the deeper relevance
of aspects ofgender, race, and class remains
unconsidered. The article thereby extends the
debates on the automation/augmentation paradox
in the future-of-work literature by showing how
problematising inequality subtexts leads to new
research avenues that can cast light upon how in-
equalities emerge and how they can be diminished.
Inequality subtexts and futures of work
Since Acker’s(1990) seminal paper, organisational
structures, processes, and practices have been
conceptualised as gendered. The gendered nature
of organisations is visible through the abstract,
disembodied, and unencumbered worker; rather
than being gender-neutral, this ideal construction
has been shown to be implicitly gendered as a man
(Acker, 1990, 2009, 2012, 2006). Gender is also
visible in how men and women are constructed:
men appear as active agents, whereas women are
cast as providing emotional support (Acker, 1990).
Central to gendered organisations is the gender
subtext. While gendered substructures in general
include processes, organisational cultures, interac-
tions, and identities, the gender subtextforms part
of the gendered substructure oforganisations but
refers specically to text such as guides, memos,
and policies (Acker, 2012). The gender subtext
includes, for example, the belief in essential gen-
der differences, such that women are nurturing
and caring and are providing unpaid work in the
home, whereas men are assumed to be good with
technology and to be in paid employment. Gender
subtexts have been widely used to analyse gender
in organisations (Benschop and Doorewaard,
1998a; Kelan, 2008b; Bruni, Gherardi and Poggio,
2004; Benschop and Doorewaard, 1998b). The
gender subtext is particularly useful for studying
written material such as texts or books (Bendl,
2008). Researchers have shown that management
literature has a gendered subtext (Bendl, 2008),
that management literature draws on ideals as-
sociated with femininity without acknowledging
this feminisation (Fondas, 1997), and that man-
agement books display gender awareness, with
women being constructed as the new ideal workers
(Kelan, 2008c).
Acker (2006) reworked gendered organisations
through the concept of inequality regimes. Acker
denes inequality regimes ‘as loosely interrelated
practices, processes, actions, and meanings that
result in and maintain class, gender and racial in-
equalities within particularorganizations’ (Acker,
2006, p. 201). Inequality regimes thus make use of
intersectionality, an analytical framework to show
how different forms of inequalities interact and
thus create unique relations to power (Crenshaw,
1991; McCall, 2005; Nash, 2008; Kelan, 2014).
While Acker draws on the gender subtext as out-
lined above, she also species the class and race
subtexts. Acker uses class to denote ‘differences in
access to and control over resources’(Acker, 2006,
p. 444). CEOs of larger organisations,for instance,
take elite positions in society and are often men,
whereas women were for a long time conned to
lower-level work (Acker, 2006). The neoliberal as-
sumption that individuals are responsible for their
own position in the labour market, is concealed
in ‘management’ discourses and is a class subtext
(Acker, 2012). However, often such class structures
are hidden beneath individualisation; in modern
© 2022 The Authors.British Journal ofManagement published by JohnWiley & Sons Ltd on behalfofBritish
Academy of Management.
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