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Books: In the Age of the Smart Machine: chapter one

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## Index ## 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. * 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 ## 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 Technology represents intelligence systematically applied to the
problem of the body. It functions to amplify and surpass the organic 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- limits of the body; it compensates for the body's fragility and vulnera-
...@@ -112,6 +305,99 @@ ...@@ -112,6 +305,99 @@
-- 40 -- 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 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 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 point. Where Bright saw the glass half full because the physical demands
...@@ -126,4 +412,4 @@ ...@@ -126,4 +412,4 @@
development, it would become progressively less capable and, thus, less development, it would become progressively less capable and, thus, less
bl ... 85 bl ... 85
-- 49 -- 48-49
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