Valueware: Technology, Humanity and Organization

by Christopher Barnatt

Against an emerging landscape of intranets, extranets, virtual communities, and virtual reality, this book highlights the dangers of individuals or organizations becoming technology-rich but value blind. Valueware also champions the evolution of a gentler mode of capitalism as just one of many hopes for a more caring and sustainable 21st century. After detailing the critical forces now driving the convergence of technology, humanity, and organization, Barnatt then balances a wide spectrum of value perspectives, including those of past and present management gurus, Internet pioneers, and Generation Xers.

Knowledge-empowered individuals and organizations are already beginning to learn the value of global interdependence over independence. Cutting-edge technologies and new social structures may also soon empower more relationship-rich markets, which begin to mediate human affiliation via money but in a gentler capitalist structure. Barnatt doesn't claim to predict the world of tomorrow. However, by detailing alternative millennial realities from which key future-shapers may choose, it instead champions future gazing as future shaping.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1999

About the author

Christopher Barnatt is an author, futurist, and Associate Professor of Computing & Future Studies in Nottingham University Business School. He runs the websites www.explainingthefuture.com and www.explainingcomputers.com, as well as their YouTube channels at www.youtube.com/explainingthefuture and www.youtube.com/explainingcomputers