From 2d285739d628fe7268180bc0fa59bbb335165983 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Silvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2018 11:39:16 -0300
Subject: [PATCH] Updates books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine
---
books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md | 39 +++++++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 39 insertions(+)
diff --git a/books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md b/books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md
index 953d22d..a63839d 100644
--- a/books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md
+++ b/books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md
@@ -816,3 +816,42 @@ Another form of [labor camp](/books/historia/ibm-holocaust), it's mirror image:
etc., do not lend themselves to control. ,,65
-- 121-122
+
+### Office technology as exile and integration
+
+ One afternoon, after several weeks of participant observation and
+ discussions with clerks and supervisors, I was returning to the office
+ from a lunch with a group of employees when two of them beckoned
+ me over to their desks, indicating that they had something to show me.
+ They seated themselves at their workstations on either side of a tall
+ gray partition. Then they pointed out a small rupture in the orderly,
+ high-tech appearance of their work space: the metal seam in the parti-
+ tion that separated their desks had been pried open.
+
+ With the look of mischievous co-conspirators, they confided that
+ they had inflicted this surgery upon the wall between them. Why? The
+ small opening now made it possible to peek through and see if the
+ other worker was at her seat, without having to stand up and peer over
+ or around the wall. Through that aperture questions could be asked,
+ advice could be given, and dinner menus could be planned. At the time
+ I took this to be the effort of two women to humanize their surround-
+ ings. While I still believe that is true, the weeks, months, and years that
+ followed led me to a fuller appreciation of the significance of their
+ action.
+
+ Installing those partitions was the final step that completed the
+ clerks' relegation to the realm of the machine. Exiled from the inter-
+ personal world of office routines, each clerk became isolated and soli-
+ tary. That interpersonal world involves the work of managing; it is the
+ domain in which coordination and communication occur. These clerks
+ not only had been denied benign forms of social intercourse but also
+ had been expelled from the managerial world of actino-with that had
+ formerly required them to accept, in some small degree, responsibility
+ for the coordination of their office. Installing the partitions was one
+ concrete technique, among others, designed to create the discontinuity
+ needed to achieve Leffingwell's goal: to convert the clerk from an inter-
+ personal operator to a laboring body, substituting communicative and
+ coordinative responsibilities with the physical demands of continuous
+ production.
+
+ -- 125
--
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