Having looked at how firms develop innovations and bring them to market, and the role of entrepreneurs and states in shaping those processes, we turn now to the question of what innovations do to society. Innovations, after all, do not just concern the firms that create them. We begin at the most macro of macroscopic levels with Perez’s paper on technology bubbles, asking how societies are transformed through successive waves of technological revolution and what happens as those waves flood over society. Staying at the macroscopic perspective with Zuboff’s paper on Big Other, we look at how technological change transforms capitalist dynamics and ushers in both new logics of accumulation and new forms of exploitation. Then, we move to the question that the popular press tends to phrase as “Will robots take our jobs?” as we look at the history and future of workplace automation with Autor’s paper and Bessen’s analysis of the conditions that lead to widespread, as opposed to highly concentrated, societal gains from technology.

As innovation changes society, so too does it change organizations and work. In some ways, the same questions arise: What kind of work will we be doing, and what work will disappear or be changed? How does technology make it possible to increase worker productivity, possibly through ever more exploitative means? At what timescales should we expect technologies to impact industries, professions, and workers in different ways? But these are, in a way, “just” societal questions writ small. We should not leave them behind when we turn our attention to organizations. They should stay with you, but you also want to be asking additional ones. In this chapter, we raise some of these additional ones and ask how technologies change how we work and organize. The paper by Bodrozic and Adler looks at the longue durée and takes an incredibly broad view, showing how management concepts evolve in response to the possibilities and problematics of (Neo-Schumpeterian) technological revolutions. Beane’s paper does almost the opposite. It looks very closely at how a very specific technology influences how people learn in organizations, highlighting all the variation and nuance and complexity that plays out at the micro-level of organizations. To close, we turn to Dell’Acqua et al.’s very recent working paper and its examination of artificial intelligence and how that particular technology might influence work and organizing as we know them.