Updates books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine

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