From 22d974185ff6931ba2cb5e24ffb1de3b6d9b27ee Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Silvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2018 10:58:01 -0300
Subject: [PATCH] Books: In the Age of the Smart Machine: chapter one
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## Index
-* Taylor, 41, 42.
+* Deskilling, diplacement of "the human body and its know-how" and reskilling, 57.
* Body's dual role in production: effort and skill.
+* Rebellion against the automated door, 21-23.
+* Humanization (Marx) as "tempering animality with rationality" in the progress of civilization, 30.
+* Uncivilized, savage worker's "spontaneous, instinctually gratifying behavior"
+ in the past, signaling the problem of "how to get the human body to remain in one place,
+ pay attention, and perform consistently over a fixed period of time", 31-34.
+* Paradox of the body, 36.
+* "Singer Sewing Machine Company was not able to produce perfectly interchangeable parts.
+ As a result, they relied on skilled fitters to assemble each product.", 39.
+* Continous Process as a possible way to break the effort-skill body paradox and the U-curve
+ of social integration, 50-56
+
+## Impressions
+
+The transition from manual to automated, the process of transferring knowledged
+from the body to the machine is a sistematization of the transference of
+knowledge from art (work whose reproduction is challenging) to technics
+(pramatized art, the art of practical, efficient life):
+
+ However, the term transfer must be doubly laden if it is to adequately describe
+ this process. Knowledge was first transferred from one quality of knowing to
+ another-from knowing that was sentient, embedded, and experience-based to know-
+ ing that was explicit and thus subject to rational analysis and perpetual
+ reformulation. The mechanisms used to accomplish this transfer were themselves
+ labor intensive (that is, they depended upon first-hand ob- servation of
+ time-study experts) and were designed solely in the con- text of, and with the
+ express purpose of, enabling a second transfer- one that entailed the migration
+ of knowledge from labor to manage- ment with its pointed implications for the
+ distribution of authority and the division of labor in the industrial
+ organization.
+
+ -- 56-57
+
+Intro mentions a control room like the Star Trek bridge. It makes me relate
+to the skilled worker at one of its limits - those of the austronaut. Highly
+skilled and disciplined, could be an interesting comparison.
## Excerpts
+### Choices on knowledge, authority and collaboration
+
+ The choices that we face concern the conception and distribution of
+ knowledge in the workplace. Imagine the following scenario: Intelli-
+ gence is lodged in the smart machine at the expense of the human
+ capacity for critical judgment. Organizational members become ever
+ more dependent, docile, and secretly cynical. As more tasks must be
+ accomplished through the medium of information technology (I call
+ this "computer-mediated work"), the sentient body loses its salience
+ as a source of knowledge, resulting in profound disorientation and loss
+ of meaning. People intensify their search for avenues of escape through
+ drugs, apathy, or adversarial conflict, as the majority of jobs in our
+ offices and factories become increasingly isolated, remote, routine, and
+ perfunctory. Al ternativel y, imagine this scenario: Organizational lead-
+ ers recognize the new forms of skill and knowledge needed to truly
+ exploit the potential of an intelligent technology. They direct their
+ resources toward creating a work force that can exercise critical judg-
+ ment as it manages the surrounding machine systems. Work becomes
+ more abstract as it depends upon understanding and manipulating infor-
+ mation. This marks the beginning of new forms of mastery and provides
+ an opportunity to imbue jobs with more comprehensive meaning. A
+ new array of work tasks offer unprecedented opportunities for a wide
+ range of employees to add value to products and services.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The choices that we make will shape relations of authority in the
+ workplace. Once more, imagine: Managers struggle to retain their tra-
+ ditional sources of authority, which have depended in an important
+ way upon their exclusive control of the organization's knowledge base.
+ They use the new technology to structure organizational experience
+ in ways that help reproduce the legitimacy of their traditional roles.
+ Managers insist on the prerogatives of command and seek methods that
+ protect the hierarchical distance that distinguishes them from their
+ subordinates. Employees barred from the new forms of mastery relin-
+ quish their sense of responsibility for the organization's work and use
+ obedience to authority as a means of expressing their resentment.
+ Imagine an alternative: This technological transformation engenders a
+ new approach to organizational behavior, one in which relationships
+ are more intricate, collaborative, and bound by the mutual responsibili-
+ ties of colleagues. As the new technology integrates information across
+ time and space, managers and workers each overcome their narrow
+ functional perspectives and create new roles that are better suited to
+ enhancing value-adding activities in a data-rich environment. As the
+ quality of skills at each organizational level becomes similar, hierarchi-
+ cal distinctions begin to blur. Authority comes to depend more upon
+ an appropriate fit between knowledge and responsibility than upon the
+ ranking rules of the traditional organizational pyramid.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Imagine this scenario: The new technology becomes the source of surveillance
+ techniques that are used to ensnare organizational members or to subtly bully
+ them into confor- mity. Managers employ the technology to circumvent the
+ demanding work of face-to-face engagement, substituting instead techniques of
+ remote management and automated administration. The new techno- logical
+ infrastructure becomes a battlefield of techniques, with manag- ers inventing
+ novel ways to enhance certainty and control while em- ployees discover new
+ methods of self-protection and even sabotage. Imagine the alternative: The new
+ technological milieu becomes a re- source from which are fashioned innovative
+ methods of information sharing and social exchange. These methods in turn
+ produce a deep- ened sense of collective responsibility and joint ownership, as
+ access to ever-broader domains of information lend new objectivity to data and
+ preempt the dictates of hierarchical authority.
+
+ -- 5-7
+
+### A paradox
+
+ From the unmanned factory to the automated cockpit, visions of the future hail
+ information technology as the final answer to "the labor question," the
+ ultimate opportunity to rid our- selves of the thorny problems associated with
+ training and managing a competent and committed work force. These very same
+ technologies have been applauded as the hallmark of a second industrial
+ revolution, in which the classic conflicts of knowledge and power associated
+ with an earlier age will be synthesized in an array of organizational inno-
+ vations and new procedures for the production of goods and services, all
+ characterized by an unprecedented degree of labor harmony and widespread
+ participation in management process. I Why the paradox?
+
+ -- 7-8
+
+### Informate and automate: the duality of Information Technology
+
+ Thus, information technology, even when it is applied to automati-
+ cally reproduce a finite activity, is not mute. It not only imposes infor-
+ mation (in the form of programmed instructions) but also produces
+ information. It both accomplishes tasks and translates them into infor-
+ mation. The action of a machine is entirely invested in its object, the
+ product. Information technology, on the other hand, introduces an ad-
+ ditional dimension of reflexivity: it makes its contribution to the prod-
+ uct, but it also reflects back on its activities and on the system of activi-
+ ties to which it is related. Information technology not only produces
+ action but also produces a voice that symbolically renders events, ob-
+ jects, and processes so that they become visible, knowable, and share-
+ able in a new way.
+
+ -- 9
+
+ [...]
+
+ An emphasis on the informating capacity of intelligent technology can provide a
+ point of origin for new conceptions of work and power. A more re- stricted
+ emphasis on its automating capacity can provide the occasion for that second
+ kind of revolution-a return to the familiar grounds of industrial society with
+ divergent interests battling for control, aug- mented by an array of new
+ material resources with which to attack and defend.
+
+ -- 11-12
+
+### The natural attitude
+
+ The most treacherous enemy of such research is what philosophers
+ call "the natural attitude," our capacity to live daily life in a way that
+ takes for granted the objects and activities that surround us. Even when
+ we encounter new objects in our environment, our tendency is to expe-
+ rience them in terms of categories and qualities with which we are
+ already familiar. The natural attitude allows us to assume and predict a
+ great many things about each other's behavior without first establishing
+ premises at the outset of every interaction. The natural attitude can
+ also stand in the way of awareness, for ordinary experience has to be
+ made extraordinary in order to become accessible to reflection. This
+ occurs when we encounter a problem: when our actions do not yield
+ the expected results, we are caught by surprise and so are motivated
+ to reflect upon our initial assumptions. 2 Awareness requires a rupture
+ with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience
+ are called into question and revised. For example, in the early days of
+ photography, the discrepancies between the camera's eye and the hu-
+ man eye were avidly discussed, but, "once they began to think photo-
+ graphically, people stopped talking about photographic distortion, as it
+ was called.,,3
+
+ -- 13
+
+### The Control Room
+
+Whoa, the description of the Control Room from the Piney Wood Mill recalled me
+the Cybersyn Control Room built -- and then destroyed -- less than a decade
+before:
+
+ Workers sit on orthopedically designed swivel chairs covered with a royal blue
+ fabric, facing video display ter- minals. The terminals, which display process
+ information for the purposes of monitoring and control, are built into polished
+ oak cabi- nets. Their screens glow with numbers, letters, and graphics in vivid
+ red, green, and blue. The floor here is covered with slate-gray carpet- ing;
+ the angled countertops on which the terminals sit are rust brown and edged in
+ black. The walls are covered with a wheat-colored fabric and the molding
+ repeats the polished oak of the cabinetry. The dropped ceiling is of a bronzed
+ metal, and from it is suspended a three dimen- sional structure into which
+ lights have been recessed and angled to provide the right amount of
+ illumination without creating glare on the screens. The color scheme is
+ repeated on the ceiling-soft tones of beige, rust, brown, and gray in a
+ geometric design.
+
+ -- 20-21
+
+### Technology, work and the body
+
Technology represents intelligence systematically applied to the
problem of the body. It functions to amplify and surpass the organic
limits of the body; it compensates for the body's fragility and vulnera-
@@ -112,6 +305,99 @@
-- 40
+### The Scientific management
+
+Taylor, when "worker's know-how was expropriated to the ranks of management",
+using information technology -- that _automates_ and _informates_ -- before
+computer adoption, 41-44.
+
+ Scientific management frequently meant not only that individual effort was
+ simplified (either because of labor-saving equipment or new organizational
+ methods that fragmented tasks into their simplest components), but also that
+ the pace of effort was intensified, thus raising the level of fatigue and
+ stress. Effort was purified-stripped of waste-but not yet eased, and resis-
+ tance to scientific management harkened back to the age-old issue of the
+ intensity and degree of physical exertion to which the body should be subject.
+ As long as effort was organized by the traditional practices of a craft, it
+ could be experienced as within one's own control and, being inextricably linked
+ to skill, as a source of considerable pride, satisfaction, and independence.
+ Stripped of this context and mean- ing, demands for greater effort only
+ intensified the desire for self- . 69 protectIon.
+
+ Taylor had believed that the transcendent logic of science, together
+ with easier work and better, more fairly determined wages, could inte-
+ grate the worker into the organization and inspire a zest for production.
+ Instead, the forms of work organization that emerged with scientific
+ management tended to amplify the divergence of interests between
+ management and workers. Scientific management revised many of the
+ assumptions that had guided the traditional employer-employee rela-
+ tionship in that it allowed a minimal connection between the organiza-
+ tion and the individual in terms of skill, training, and the centrality of
+ the worker's contribution. It also permitted a new flexibility in work
+ force management, promoting the maximum interchangeability of per-
+ sonnel and the minimum dependence on their ability, availability, or
+ motivation. 70
+
+ [...]
+
+ A machinist gained prominence when he debated Taylor in 1 914 and
+ remarked, "we don't want to work as fast as we are able to. We want
+ to work as fast as we think it's comfortable for us to work. We haven't
+ come into existence for the purpose of seeing how great a task we can
+ perform through a lifetime. We are trying to regulate our work so as
+ to make it auxiliary to our lives. ,,73
+
+ -- 45-46
+
+Fordism:
+
+ "The instruction cards on which Taylor set so much value, Ford was able to
+ discard. The conveyor belt, the traveling platform, the overhead rails and
+ material conveyors take their place. . . . Motion analysis has become largely
+ unnecessary, for the task of the assembly line worker is reduced to a few
+ manipulations. Taylor's stop-watch nevertheless remains measuring the time of
+ operations to the fraction of a second. ,,74
+
+ The fragmentation of tasks characteristic of the new Ford assembly
+ line achieved dramatic increases in productivity due to the detailed
+ time study of thousands of operations and the invention of the conveyor
+ belt and other equipment that maximized the continuity of assembly.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Effort is simplified (though its pace is frequently intensified) while skill
+ demands are reduced by new methods of task organization and new forms of
+ machinery.
+
+ The continuity of assembly depended upon the production of interchangeable
+ parts for uniform products.
+
+ -- 47
+
+Effects:
+
+ For the majority of industrial workers in the generations that followed, there
+ would be fewer opportunities to develop or maintain craft skills. Mass
+ production depended upon interchangeability for the standardization of
+ production; this principle required manufacturing operations to free themselves
+ from the particularistic know-how of the craftsworker.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Thus, applications of industrial technology have simplified, and gen-
+ erally reduced, physical effort, but because of the bond between effort
+ and skill, they have also tended to reduce or eliminate know-how. 78
+
+ [...]
+
+ Self-preservation would induce the worker to accept automation.
+
+ [...]
+
+ the machine assumes responsibility
+
+ [...]
+
In Braverman's influential critique of what he called the "degradation
of work" in this century, he used Bright's study to make a very different
point. Where Bright saw the glass half full because the physical demands
@@ -126,4 +412,4 @@
development, it would become progressively less capable and, thus, less
bl ... 85
- -- 49
+ -- 48-49
--
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