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labor requirements. But its potential to inform organizational members about the
work process and thus improve operations and increase innovation is the aspect
of technology that will be most important to long-term organizational success.
Automate/lnfomate:
The Two Faces
of Intelligent Technology
Shoshana Zuboff
2 ut your eye to the kaleidoscope and hold it to- new choices. An innovation like the steam en-
ward the light. You see a burst of color, tiny gine, the telephone, the electric light, or the
fragments in an intricate composition. Imag- computer is not only an element within the
ine a hand slowly turning the kaleidoscope’s pattern; it is a force that turns the rim, a con-
rim until hundreds of angles collapse, merge, crete presence that silently evokes a new vi-
and separate to form a new design. A fun- sion of the potential for relatedness and, in
$ damental change in an organization’s techno- the end, provides the occasion for a new
E logical infrastructure wields the power of the design.
3 slow-moving hand at the turning rim. Tech- It is in this sense that technology
I nology defines the horizon of our material cannot be considered neutral. It is brimming
? world as it shapes the limits of what is possi- with valence and specificity in the opportuni-
zg ble and what is barely imaginable; it erodes ties that it creates and forecloses. Air travel
5 assumptions about the nature of our reality, has allowed us to conquer time and distance
j the “design” in which we dwell; and it creates in a new way by knitting the planet together 5
and giving us access to other peoples, places, companies, in industries as diverse as bank-
and cultures. The electric light rescued the ing, telecommunications, and paper and pulp
night from darkness. Telephones permit us to production, I shall discuss some themes that
pursue intimate contact without bodies that cut across organizational boundaries and
touch or eyes that meet. The litany of dra- seem to have relevance to a wide range of set-
matic new organizations of reality engen- tings. Specifically, this article will sketch two
dered by new technologies is a long one. divergent conceptions of information tech-
But between the turning rim and the nology and their respective implications for
emergence of a new pattern, another force in- the organization of work.
fuses the final configuration of elements with
meaning. This is the human activity of choice.
As the limits of the possible are newly de- AUTOMATE / INFORMATE:THE DUALITY OF
fined, so too is the opportunity for choice INTELLIGENT TECHNOIOGY
multiplied. Shall I fly or drive or take a train?
What is my destination? Shall I use the tele- As the logic of Frederick Taylor’s scientific
phone to maintain intimate contact with management began to take hold earlier in this
friends I rarely see? If so, whom shall I call, century, the substitution of machine power
how often, and for how long shall we speak? for human labor became the obvious solution
The metaphor of kaleidoscopic change is fi- for increasing the speed and volume of
nally a limited one. Those pretty fragments production. Beginning with Fords Highland
align themselves without meaning, but Park auto-assembly plant in 1915, technol-
change in human societies is not quite as ogy would be relied on to complement or
blind. Though intentions do not necessarily supplant human direction. In Mechanization
predict consequences, human beings do pro- Takes Command, Siegfried Giedion describes
ceed by constructing meaning, assessing in- this process:
terests and, with varying degrees of aware-
ness, making choices. It is in the realm of The instruction cards on which Taylor set so much
value, Ford was able to discard. The conveyer belt,
choice that technology reveals a certain in-
the traveling platform, the overhead rails and mate-
determinacy. Though it redefines the horizon rial conveyers take their place. . Motion analysis
of possibility, it cannot determine what has become largely unnecessary, for the task of the
choices will be made and for what purposes. assembly-line worker is reduced to a few manipula-
In these final decades of the twen- tions. Taylor’s stopwatch nevertheless remains, meas-
uring the time of operations to the fraction of a
tieth century, many long-standing assump-
second.
tions about how work is organized are being
challenged by a new technological presence. H. L. Arnold, an industrial jour-
Advanced computer-based information tech- nalist, wrote enthusiastically about the Ford
nology is providing a new infrastructure that innovations that maximized the continuity of
mediates many of the productive and com- assembly. He summarized the key elements of
municative activities most central to or- the productivity strategy: First, all needless
ganizational life. This article will examine the motions were eliminated from the workman’s
role that information technology can play in actions and second, the task was organized to
restructuring the work place. Having inter- require the “least expenditure of will power,
viewed approximately 500 workers and man- and . . . brain fatigue.” This formula is of en-
6 agers at ten research sites representing six during significance as it has dominated the
Informate” (in Human Resource Management:
Trends and Challenges, edited by Richard Wal-
ton and Paul Lawrence, Harvard Business
School Press, 1985). She has also published ar-
ticles on the historical and ideological dimen-
sions of work organization, including “l Am
My Own Man: The Democratic Vision and
Workplace Hierarchy” (in Democracy at Sea,
Shoshana Zuboff is assistant professor of or- edited by Robert Schrank, MIT Press, 1983)
ganizational behavior and human resource and “The Work Ethic and Work Organization”
management at Harvard University, Graduate (in The Work Ethic, edited by lack Barbash,
School of Business Administration. She earned Industrial Relations Research Association,
her Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard 1983).
University and an undergraduate degree in Zuboff has lectured and consulted widely in
philosophical psychology from the University the United States, Latin America, and Europe.
of Chicago. Her consulting work has focused on the oppor-
Since 7980, Zuboff has been engaged in field tunities offered by information technology for
research that focuses on the social psychology innovative approaches to work organization
of work as it is reorganized by computer-based and management. She is a member of the
technology. She is currently completing a book editorial boards of the Harvard Business Re-
based on her field research (to be published by view and of Office: Technology and People as
Basic Books in 1987), and has written numer- well as a member of the Visiting Committee to
ous articles on the subject of information tech- the College of the University of Chicago. Her
nology in the work place, including “New initial field research was supported by an
Worlds of Computer Mediated Work” (Harvard award from the National Institute of Mental
Business Review, 1982) and “Technologies that Health.
and skill it’s a waste of life. Using the new technology please refer to the special reprint service
to its full potential means using the person to his or
18 her full potential.