Browse Books

Reviewer: Eric A. Weiss

During her research and consultancy on organizational change and workplace innovation, Zuboff realized that the course of automation in the past ten years represented the beginning of an important historical event, a transformation of such immense proportions as the creation of the factory system in the 19th century. She saw that for the workers who were suffering automation, “a world of sensibilities and expectations was being irretrievably displaced by a new world.” She determined to try to learn enough about the process and its potentialities to frame the choices that would be laid open and suggest how we might seize new opportunities and avoid the worst mistakes of the past, rather than simply repeat old patterns. This book is the result. Zuboff tells about her five-year research program of face-to-face interviews with and observations of dozens of workers from eight disparate but anonymous firms (ranging from pulp and paper mills to banks) that were, to some extent, applying computer-based information technology to their operations. The author reports, often in the stilted style of Harvard Business School case studies, that her subjects generally did not like what was happening to them and their jobs, an opinion with which she is in total sympathy. The book jacket blurb gives the tone, saying a “wrenching sense of disorientation . . . follows in the wake of the `smart machine'” and “computers may merely further automate blue- and white-collar jobs, achieving unprecedented speed and consistency, robbing workers of whatever skill and gratification they may retain, and increasing the impersonality and remoteness of management.” The author takes it for granted that this is wrong. Then she goes beyond the mere facts and, in a style characteristic of a professor and a social scientist, she prescribes how it should be done to get it right. Unfortunately, she found it necessary to coin new words like “textualization,” “intellective,” and the most pervasive “informate,” which seems to mean `to collect and furnish a lot of information': “Activities, events, and objects are translated into and made visible by information when a technology informates as well as automates.” She says little about the technology of automation or computer-based information handling, and not much about the results unless they are clearly bad, but she has a lot to say about organization, interpersonal relations, hierarchy, authority, and (especially) power. Her prescription is again previewed on the book jacket: “that same technology, however, may `informate,' empowering ordinary working people with overall knowledge of the productive process, making them capable of critical and collaborative judgments about production and distribution.” The author clearly hopes for a more egalitarian and democratic organization of work in the future and sees computer technology, properly applied, as a means to this dreamy end. As Robert Howard wrote in the New York Times, the book is imaginatively conceived and closely argued with scholarly seriousness. I might add that it is full of references to social science, historical, and literary writings and totally devoid of technical references. In short, it is the kind of book that social scientists will like and that technologists and managers who have fought real automation battles will dislike and feel uncomfortable about. The author is naive about the nature of industrial work. She has watched it, but she has not done it for wages or for very long. Her discussions of how pulp plants operated before automation and how splendid it was for the worker to squeeze the sulfite stuff between his fingers reminded me of Gilbert and Sullivan's phrase, “To lay aloft in a howling gale, may tickle the landsman free . . . .” Similar criticisms apply to her vignettes of how bank and investment department paper shufflers worked before they had keyboards. Those of us who have seen sailing ships, hand-stoked locomotives, hand-mined coal, and hand-dug ditches replaced by mechanization and the early forms of automation are skeptical about the romantic aspects of the sweaty and dangerous old crafts. Machines make things better, not worse, and they make work easier and faster. The author is on sounder ground when she deals with organizational theory and practice. Several of her sketched case studies reveal the consequences of stupid management and skimped training, but her dream of a democratic workplace is about as visionary as a dream of a democratic Harvard Business School and for the same reasons. Like the history of the industrial revolution, the popular and academically accepted history of the information revolution will be written by historians and social scientists. They will explain it in terms they understand, that is, in terms of organizations, people, power, psychology, and politics. They will make little intelligent reference to the prime moving cause of the revolution, the remarkable and compelling technology. Indeed, they will denigrate technology by saying it was of little importance. This book is an early contribution to that history. In spite of Zuboff's excellent qualities of observation and an analysis of some important situations, it suffers severely from the author's perhaps deliberate downplaying of the technology involved. Joseph Weizenbaum says this book is “an important scholarly masterpiece that will soon find its place in the libraries of everyone at all interested in what difference the computer makes to how business, industry and management work.” Uncharacteristically, Weizenbaum's accolade is too strong.