Study the passages below and answer the questions that follow each passage.

Advanced technology has created a vast increase in occupational specialties, many of them requiring many, many years of highly specialised training. It must motivate this training. It has made ever more complex and “rational” the ways in which these occupational specialties are combined in our economic and social life. It must win passivity and obedience to this complex activity. Formerly, technical rationality had been employed only to organise the production of rather simple physical objects, for example, aerial bombs. Now, technical rationality is increasingly employed to organise all of the processes necessary to the utilisation of the physical objects, such as bombing systems, maintenance, intelligence and supply systems. For this reason, it seems a mistake to argue that we are in a “post-industrial” age, a concept favoured by the laissez innover school. 

On the contrary, the rapid spread of technical rationality into organisational and economic life and, hence, into social life is more aptly described as second and much more intensive phase of industrial revolution. One might reasonably suspect that it will create analogous social problems. Accordingly, a third major hypothesis would argue that there are very profound social antagonisms or contradictions not less sharp or fundamental than those ascribed by Marx to the development of nineteenth-century industrial society. The general form of the contradictions might be described as follows — a society characterised by the employment of advanced technology requires an ever more socially disciplined population, yet retains an ever-declining capacity to enforce the required discipline. 

One way readily describes four specific forms of the same general contradiction. Occupationally, the workforce must be over-trained and under-utilised. Here, again, an analogy to classical industrial practice serves to shorten and simplify the explanation, I have in mind the assembly line. As a device in the organisation of the work process, the assembly line is valuable mainly. It gives management a high degree of control over the pace of the work and, more to the point in the present case, it divides the work process into units so simple that the quality of the work performed is readily predictable. That is, since each operation uses only a small fraction of worker’s skill, there is a very great likelihood that the operation will be performed in a minimally acceptable way. Alternately, if each operation taxed the worker’s skill, there would be frequent errors in the operation, frequent disturbance of the workflow, and a thoroughly unpredictable quality of the end product. The assembly line also introduces standardisation in work skills and thus makes for a high degree of interchange ability among the workforce. 

For analogous reasons, the workforce in advanced technological systems must be relatively over-trained or, what is the same thing, its skills relatively under-used. My impression is that this is no less true now of sociologists than of welders, of engineers than of assemblers. The contradiction emerges when we recognize that technological progress requires a continuous increase in the skill levels of its workforce, skill levels which frequently embody a fairly rich scientific and technical training. While at the same time, the advance of technical rationality in work organisation means that those skills will be less and less fully used. Economically, there is a parallel process at work. It is commonly observed that the workforce within technologically advanced organisations is asked to work not less hard but more so. This is particularly true for those with advanced training and skills. Brzezinski's conjecture that technical specialists undergo continuous retraining is off the mark only in that it assumes such retraining only for a managing elite. To get people to work harder requires growing incentives. Yet the prospérity which is assumed in technologically advanced society erodes the value of economic incentives. Salary and wage increases and the goods they purchase lose their overriding importance once necessities, creature comforts, and an ample supply of luxuries are assured. As if in confirmation of this point, it has been pointed out that among young people, one can already observe a radical weakening in the power of such incentives as money, status and authority.