ABSTRACT
The introduction of information technology, it is widely argued, may well have significant consequences for those who work with it. But those consequences are not innate in the technology itself, which affords a range of choices of application, including alternative options for work organization. Management may impose the changes, or may willingly or unwillingly negotiate them with its employees or their representatives. The ensuing arrangements may enskill those working with IT, deskill them, or recompose work in a more complex fashion not easily labelled in these ways. Optimistic discussions of the potentially liberating and skill-enhancing nature of IT are qualified by the gloomy predictions of labour process theory, stressing the capacity of computerization to routinize and control most work where it does not eliminate it altogether.
