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Browsing Business Research Collection by Subject "Acceleration"
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- PublicationAre we living in a time of particularly rapid social change? And how might we know?In an editorial for this journal a decade ago, then-Editor-in-Chief Fred Phillips asserted that social change was proceeding at hyper-speed and, moreover, that it had consequently come to outpace technological change. This paper submits these claims to empirical assay. In so doing, we address the myriad problems attendant upon determining and interpreting the sort of data that might support us in our cause. Notwithstanding the innumerable caveats that this necessarily entails, and restricting ourselves to considering US data, we conclude that a wide range of indicators suggest that millennial Americans are not living in a time of particularly rapid social change, at least not when compared to the period 1900–1950. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that the data that we have considered does not easily support a contention that significant variation in social change occurs in long wave-like cycles. The evidence is more supportive of a punctuated equilibrium model of change.
20Scopus© Citations 3 - PublicationRunning to Stand Still: Late Modernity's Acceleration FixationThat we live in a time of unprecedented and ever-increasing change is both a shibboleth of our age and the more-or-less explicit justification for all manner of 'strategic' actions. The seldom, if ever, questioned assumption is that our now is more ephemeral, more evanescent, than any that preceded it. In this essay, we subject this assumption to some critical scrutiny, utilizing a range of empirical detail. In the face of this assay we find the assumption to be considerably wanting. We suggest that what we are actually witnessing is mere acceleration, which we distinguish as intensification along a preexisting trajectory, parading as more substantive and radical movement away from a preexisting trajectory. Deploying Deleuze's (2004) terms we are, we suggest, in thrall to representation of the same at the expense of repetition of difference. Our consumption by acceleration, we argue, both occludes the lack of substantive change actually occurring while simultaneously delimiting possibilities of thinking of and enacting the truly radical. We also consider how this setup is maintained, thus attempting to shed some light on why we are seemingly running to stand still. As the Red Queen said, 'it's necessary to run faster even to stay in the one place'.
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