Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021. xiv, 238 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 9780228008804.
Nilanjan Raghunath seeks to understand high-skilled millennials, the professionals among the largest generation in workplaces and increasingly their middle managers, facing rapid technological change, trade wars, and pandemics. She offers three linked contributions: that the future of work must be understood as gruelling competition and continuous disruptive change necessitating lifelong employee reskilling and proactive and responsive collaborations of governments, businesses, and networks; a discussion of the human capital implications of two state-of-the-art Singaporean government initiatives designed to build the inclusive policies, roadmaps, collaborations and infrastructure for life-long employee retraining and to catalyze innovations for the digital economy; and a case study of the motivations and prospects of Singaporean high-skilled millennials adapting to rapid disruptive technology change. She argues against a myopic focus on technologically determined futures, suggesting that reskilling and policies focus on people rather than just technologies, with an emphasis on training that strengthens social skills and networking as much as programming skills, and policies that focus on employment and collaboration as much as technological upgrading. This is a welcome stand increasingly common to future-of-work discussions.
Raghunath recognizes that the pace of automation and AI change has accelerated during the pandemic and trade wars, creating many new uncertainties for workers, firms, and governments. Competition in the digital economy is global and fierce and firms must continually adapt to remain competitive and to attract workers who can meet disruptive technological challenges. Even high-skilled workers are anxious about failing to keep up or failing as entrepreneurs. Remote work and trade wars have accelerated automation, straining firms and networks but also impacting a wide array of government policies and systems. Algorithms are penetrating ever more aspects of work and society, forcing firms, networks, and governments to consider a host of new challenges—whether data governance, algorithmic fairness, disinformation, and other factors.
The author discusses how rapid change affects interactions between high-skilled millennials and firms, situating this discussion within sociological literature on organizational culture. According to Raghunath, the relative empowerment of high-skilled millennials and their networks, stemming from rapid and disruptive technological change and fierce competition in which firms are pushed to continually innovate, enables a sort of ongoing open dialogue between millennial workers and firms. These conversations, and the dynamic fuelling them, underpin the familiar flat digital economy firm hierarchies, with open collaborative work and play spaces, agile teamwork, continual feedback, review and training mechanisms, and large numbers of contract workers as well as the entitlement and churn of high-skilled millennials and their networks. Her discussion dismisses most negative stereotypes of high-skilled millennials. Pandemic, trade war, and regulatory actions in the several years since research for this study was completed might modify elements of this discussion (remote work and layering) but underline others (flexible work, agile teamwork, contractors, churn, and work-life balance).
Taking this discussion of millennials and firms in flux to a wider governance frame, Raghunath posits what she calls proactive governance: government-led collaborations with business people, the media, and intellectuals to anticipate, enable, co-create, regulate, and update policy for future work. Collaborative foresight and response are things many governments attempt, though careful to limit the scope for discretion, regulatory capture, and disinformation, and conscious of the limits of governments and industry in anticipating disruptive innovation.
Raghunath suggests that Singapore’s emerging governance of the digital economy is an example of proactive governance, focusing discussion on the human capital implications of two Singaporean digital economy efforts: the SkillsFuture Initiative, building inclusive policies, roadmaps, and infrastructure for life-long training for the digital economy; and the Smart Nation Initiative, fostering innovations in very large data generation through sensors, data storage, and associated analytics. From a wealth of Singaporean social, educational, and industrial policies and government, industry, and university collaborations over the last several decades, Raghunath draws out key strengths (meritocracy, self-reliance, social stability, and pragmatism) and challenges (creativity, social skills, and risk aversion) for high-skilled millennials and highlights critical implications for secondary and tertiary education systems.
A case study of the motivations and prospects of Singapore’s high-skilled millennials follows. This suggests that, relative to counterparts elsewhere, Singaporean high-skilled millennials are pragmatic, see self-reliance and meritocracy as the routes to economic success, and ethnic integration and family support as central to social stability, strongly echoing long-standing Singaporean narratives. They see technological competence as the baseline whatever their field of endeavour and welcome automation and AI, focusing their anxieties instead on whether they will fail to make something of themselves or contribute to society. These are reasonable findings, though the caveat about counterparts elsewhere is less persuasive given her earlier discussions on organizational culture that suggest similar or equivocal findings on the motivations and aspirations of high-skilled millennials. Readers may be struck by the seeming lack of salience of global networks and communities.
Raghunath tells an optimistic story featuring familiar Singaporean tropes of pragmatic self-sacrificing families, far-sighted social and industrial policies, and highly competitive education systems shaping high-skilled millennials and secondary and tertiary education systems. Unaccountably she does not draw out implications for technical education or entrepreneurial training systems or for industrial policies, barely sketching the outlines of the deep technology collaborations the Singaporean government has engaged in over decades that have increased global linkages and promoted a national venture capital sector and Singapore as a base for regional headquarters of global technology giants and global universities (Toni Eliasz, Jamil Wyne, and Sarah Lenoble, The Evolution and State of Singapore Start-up Ecosystem: Lessons for Emerging Market Economies, World Bank, 2021). Similarly, she offers welcome speculations about extending proactive collaborations to some Singaporean workplace concerns (aging populations, neuroscience, and fertility) but misses others, such as the reskilling of larger population groups or migration policies. Perhaps such missed opportunities require more complicated tropes.
Stephen J. McGurk
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver