PROBLEMS OF SYMBOLIC TOIL

...Though they still spend time on the telephone, the system is programmed so that accounts pop up continuously during the day according to a programmed scoring system...

...Why should I let it do my thinking for me...

...I like to feel that I have a chance but with the tubes you don't have a chance...

...But in many cases resistance is the only available means for employees to articulate their response to the substance of the changes...

...Consequently, what was once a decision is not exactly a decision any longer...

...It has opened up opportunities for older industries to expand, particularly those that are service-related...

...The abstraction of work further suggests a change in the salient mode of social control at work...

...I don't know where those letters go or what happens to them...

...This meant that turning out a report took almost twice as long as it should...

...I may be auditing, but I don't feel like I'm auditing...

...But the real risk lies in the ' Herbert Simon, "The Consequences of Computers for Centralization and Decentralization," in The Computer Age: A Twenty Year View, Michael Dertouzos and Joel Moses, eds...

...Computer technology has created new industries and new careers...

...Because systems planning and design can be highly centralized activities managed by a small group of experts, any single user is likely to have little or no understanding of the system's comprehensive functioning or the decision rules and normative criteria built into programs...

...This kind of psychological dynamic insulates information from the kind of debate and confrontation that insures its quality...

...This increases the substitution of labor while trivializing most of the collectors' activities...

...As one analyst explained: "I think, then I write down my calculations directly...

...We are accustomed to thinking of brain jobs as challenging and rewarding...

...2 Bill collectors working with an automated collections system also spend their days in front of visual display units...

...These new time pressures extend up and down the managerial ladder...

...newspaper workers like Nellie Weymouth can no longer touch a plate of type...

...In general, these issues are likely to affect collective bargaining by increasing the territory in which formal, legally binding agreements become necessary...

...You don't need a memory and you don't need to think, but you do need a clear head...

...I don't feel that I really know the data unless I can get my hands on it, so I have to rework it manually...

...Since there is nothing before you but numbers, more imagination is required...

...But the computerization of work can build the industrial engineer's presence into all real-time activities...

...For example, the system that automated collections activities was designed to substitute the computer for human judgment as much as possible...

...He also feels that anyone can now do the job...

...Linda Winthrop, the data analyst, sought to retain some sense of control over her job by reworking most calculations by hand...

...So you tend to let it go...

...When work activities are monitored and controlled by the computer, such casual arrangements become impossible...

...Some of our future articles will document the experience of longshoremen faced with technological change on the docks, of oil and chemical workers faced with lethal threats to their health, of steelworkers confronted by economic depression in their communities, and of young black and Hispanic workers who cannot enter the primary labor force at all...

...It involves the adaptation of computer-based information technology to jobs in all parts of the labor market...

...But lately his job just isn't the same...

...In such situations thinking can become so formal that it is not related to the concrete, often messy and ambiguous situations a manager is trying to understand...

...Public policy concerning job creation has played a catch-up game, tagging along after the random fallout produced by economic expedience and technological seduction...

...What is an organization if people do not have to come face-to-face in order to accomplish their work...

...Maybe when they see how bad the information is, they'll give us back the jobs...

...This may limit the traditional identification with occupational roles...

...With this system, I am supposed to type into the machine and let it think...

...It also works to preserve the authority of those who actually design the system and develop the program...

...This aspect of information systems can have an effect on the quality of planning at the senior management level, on the psychology of professional work, and on the job satisfaction of white-collar "production" workers...

...52 prospect of decisions becoming increasingly analytic and insulated from any confrontation with the true complexities of the situations they are designed to govern...

...What will be the effect if a vast range of jobs are characterized by abstraction, focused attention, and routinization...

...And just as the labor process becomes more abstract, so will the relations of power that bind employees and managers...

...there are no guidelines...

...For example, when senior managers work with computer-based models of economic activity without having full access to the theoretical biases built into the program, forecasts based on such complex planning models can become self-fulfilling prophecies, dictating actions in response to rational assessments of how a diverse set of variables should interact...

...Labor-management relations on the shop floor have been largely defined by the struggle for control over decisions regarding the placement and timing of the worker's physical efforts...

...As the skills we possess in white-collar and professional occupations become more abstract and thus similar to one another, it will become increasingly difficult for us to think how to respond to the question, "What do I do...

...He has been a collector for more than ten years and takes pride in his ability to recoup cash for the company...

...As long as the labor market is able to expand as it did during the 1970s, it is unlikely that national planning will be seriously considered...

...Instead of approaching a supervisor or fellow employee for information or clarification, it was now only necessary to inquire into the terminal...

...He thinks the pressure is too great and the only way to get the supervisor off his back is to key in work he has not completed...

...55 see the line of type as soon as it was produced...

...One collector who had experience with the prior manual system described the difference this way: "The computer means work is more intense, though you might have accomplished something faster manually...

...While he knew more about the collections process than anyone else, he also believed that "people don't want to work anymore...

...If advanced computer-based systems are designed in ways that simply replicate all of the past features of industrial work (fragmentation, repetitiveness, low choice, little or no control), organizations can look forward to a radical separation of a small managerial elite, whose work requires some original thought, from the vast majority of jobholders whose tasks are computer-mediated and highly rationalized...

...Assembly-line workers might agree to a heightened pace in the morning in return for a more relaxed pace during the afternoon...

...In recent contract negotiations between AT&T and the CWA, a new quality of work life agreement establishes labor-management committees to discuss technological change...

...How else can we be sure the system is correct?' As work activities are abstracted, their meaning is altered...

...These developments might result in demands for formal arrangements as a part of collective bargaining agreements where an informal understanding once sufficed, extending the legitimate territory of collective bargaining...

...But if the labor market cannot replenish jobs at appropriate skill levels, those whose business it is to think about the well-being of the society as a whole will have to face the prickly question of how to keep us all in jobs...

...New people have no idea of the manual procedures so they never see or understand the processes...

...When managers were asked why the system was designed that way, the response was: "We tried to put Bill 56 Smith's brain into the computer...

...The job has become very abstract...

...The computer-mediation of work translates many occupational activities (from airline piloting to building cars) into abstract monitoring routines, thus washing away the distinctive features of many job-related skills...

...Supervisors in the office or foremen on the shop floor are as subject to the computer as are their subordinates...

...For example, in the Volvo plant in Kalmar, Sweden, designed to enhance "the quality of work life," a computer system was installed to monitor assembly operations...

...As one office worker said, "When a person makes a mistake with a computer, to try and get that mistake corrected is so much red tape...

...As the technology opens up new possibilities for patterns of work behavior, it will also mean that categories that have long defined our social life, such as the division of work and leisure time and accepted boundaries of private and public behavior, will be altered...

...What happens to the shared purpose and commitment of members if their face-to-face interaction is reduced...

...You felt you knew your people, your accounts...

...For example, information technology can assimilate many ordinary supervisory functions...

...The computer tells you which account to work, and you can't keep an overview of your accounts because the file is automatically updated each day...

...Similarly, how should an "abstract" organization be managed...

...Managers and workers may be called upon to monitor such "decisions," as Herbert Simon has suggested...

...They preferred to answer to a human being with whom they could interact, negotiate, discuss, argue, and explain, rather than to a computer whose only means of "communication" is unilateral...

...The main preoccupation she and her friends share each long night as the paper is printed is—"how can we make something go wrong...

...These and most of the other articles in the series describe the first-hand experience of workers as they confront changes in their work lives...

...This manager had not yet realized that the structure of familiar processes tends to become less important than the ability to reenvision tasks and functions that more fully exploit the capabilities of the new technology...

...As one typesetter said: "I used to 2 Gunn Johansson and Gunnar Aronsson, "Stress Reactions in Computerized Administrative Work," Reports from the Department of Psychology, University of Stockholm, Supplement 50, November 1980...

...Our special series, "Work and Workers in the 1980s," is edited by William Kornblum and David Bensman...

...A more likely combination is that more jobs will require focused cerebral attention while nevertheless being experienced as boring and routine...

...Carting, hauling, lugging, chopping, hewing, digging—the transformation of nature with our shoulders, backs, arms, and legs—are activities in which very few of us will participate...

...In general we seek to present the work of authors who have had direct experience with workers on their jobs, but we will also include articles that analyze some of the major demographic trends in the labor force and the job market...

...Unlike industrial work, which depended upon machines that were extensions of the human body, computer-mediated work involves little in the way of physical effort...

...Managers and professionals often resist having their work interface with computerbased information systems for reasons involving questions of status associated with typing into computer terminals, the loss of personal secretaries, the lack of understanding of the systems' capabilities, or the fear that their contribution will come to seem less important and even dispensable...

...or it might be possible to speed up and produce the quota in 45 minutes, saving 10 minutes in which to drink coffee and relax...

...They tend to short circuit the creative envisionary process—the model becomes the only thing that happens and the vision never takes place...

...Linda does not let on but she has little or no trust in the system upon which she must depend for most of her information...

...The computer now provides them with all the information they need...

...After all, the rest of the fun is mostly gone...

...It will take some penetrating observation and analysis to develop an understanding of the peculiar inner tensions of a society in which "work" has vanished...

...Where there are unionized employees, growing militancy toward these forms of hidden computer supervision has already forced some organizations to rethink the design of their computer systems...

...The computer randomly distributes accounts among the collectors, and the greater volume assures that "you can't get to know any 51 account in depth...

...Does the organization itself become an abstraction...

...The bill collectors that were interviewed complained of mental strain, fatigue, eye problems, and a variety of physical stress symptoms...

...There are , of course, often good reasons for firms to subject their employees to this change: increasing productivity, expanding markets, enhancing services or products, improving the management of complexity...

...But this attitude overlooks some of the most significant features of the new structure of work...

...Though there is considerable concern both within the private sector and among its observers as to the potential impact of such automation on national employment levels, there are no effective political mechanisms for cogent national planning regarding job creation or destruction...

...Linda Winthrop is a data analyst in the commercial planning department of a large bank...

...Gerry Alvarez is a bill collector working in the headquarters of a large discount store chain...

...The overall effect of this change in their working procedures is close attention to a screen full of information during the eighthour work day...

...We begin with a pair of articles on two of the newer trends in the workplace, the computer revolution and its implications for the future of work, and the small but growing movement for worker ownership...

...Instead, it is a working-out of information according to rules that are specified and embedded in a computer program...

...Information is imperfectly exchanged (often in corridors, washrooms, or over lunch), and there is usually considerable lag time before the quality of decisions can be assessed...

...As one collector put it: "People get so discouraged because the work keeps flowing into your terminal, no matter how much you finish...

...It becomes difficult to challenge information without understanding how it was generated, especially when there are no independent experiential reference points for judging its validity...

...Management and the Nature of Organizations AS COMPUTER-BASED INFORMATION TECHNOL OGY presents important challenges to the traditional psychology of work, it holds the potential for changing some fundamental definitions of management and organization...

...Thousands of dollars were invested in his training, but he now is expected to baby-sit a control panel...

...Now I type into the terminal...

...Workers in America are under severe attack on at least two fronts: the Reaganauts are using the power of the state to dismantle decades of protective regulations...

...The desire to retain some control over the job can take many forms...

...It is easy to find meaning in your job if you are a nurse interacting with patients, but what happens when you are expected to monitor patient information from a video screen...

...What happens when a group of workers is suddenly made to feel powerless and undervalued because of the introduction of computer technology to their jobs...

...The meaning of "accomplishing a task" also undergoes a fundamental change...

...When asked why, their first response was that they needed a backup system...

...On a good flight, he shouldn't have to do a thing...

...bill collectors no longer handle account cards...

...Very often these subversive activities are dismissed as "resistance to change...

...There are the technical kinks—her data is sometimes mutilated or disappears entirely— yet even when things run smoothly she does not trust that all the proper calculations are performed...

...Swedish researchers are finding that office workers who spend most of their day at visual display units show significantly more physiological symptoms of stress, including high blood pressure and high-stress hormone levels, when compared to employees who do not interact continuously with the computer system...

...He no longer needs to travel to the branches, talk with people, and examine books...

...When supervision is built into the computer system and labor does not pro60 duce sweat, the political dimension of work is not experienced with great force...

...This makes it possible to formalize the skills and know-how intrinsic to a job and to integrate them into the computer program...

...for the compression of time means that work can become more pressured and demanding once it has been reorganized by "labor-saving" automation...

...They perceived it as encroaching upon an important part of their "brain" work...

...While people were once satisfied if the response from a computer system was forthcoming in 24 hours, those who work with them are now impatient if information takes more than five seconds to appear...

...Gerry wants to quit his job...

...The greater part of the organization behavior literature can be read as the deciphering of these interpersonal norms and the consequences of their imposition...

...W. K. and D. B. Tomas Lindstrom is a commercial airline pilot...

...It is also transforming the social life of the workplace...

...Beyond a consideration of jobs that are marked by this curious combination of abstraction and routinization—what of the process of abstraction itself...

...The meaning of the job is thinner, less accessible...

...In some cases information systems provide technical support for a range of professional and managerial activities...

...Perhaps any discussion of computer-mediated work must inevitably come around to the question of job loss...

...Such informal arrangements do not detract from actual production but serve to humanize the job and create some sense of control over the work tasks...

...Employees on a highly computerized newspaper printing operation took a gleeful pride in system breakdowns and looked for ways to demonstrate the inefficacy of "intelligent" equipment...

...You have to build up in your mind the way the system works...

...Printouts or other immediate forms of visual access to employee output are available to supervisors and managers, thus limiting their dependence on face-to-face supervision but potentially increasing the amount of surveillance that can occur...

...Does this quality of abstraction affect people's understanding of the work itself...

...The regional auditor for a bank now receives financial information on-line from nearby branches...

...This free space is fundamental to the psychology of professional work—it is the reason that most people would prefer being professionals to assembly-line workers...

...The tradition of supervision and control that grew up with the industrial enterprise depends on personal contact...

...As these developments overtake us, they will make it necessary to rethink basic conceptions of the nature of organization and management...

...Top management and systems developers believed the system could serve as a constant source of feedback to account officers, helping them to manage their account activities and maximize fee-based revenues...

...For the manager who functions in the context of a continual flow of complete information, much of this ambiguity is reduced...

...Six months after the system was in place, not one of the 20 analysts in the department had ever used it...

...This means that telephone time per account is kept to a minimum...

...The dreams of industrial engineers to create a perfectly timed and rationalized set of activities have always been only imperfectly realized...

...In the midst of such change, groups that are well organized, informed, and awake will face an opportunity to help fashion modes of collective behavior that suit their needs...

...They come to their jobs, but they are not working...

...I don't know what the print will look like...

...The industrial organization as a collective enterprise came into existence in part because it was necessary to bring people together around a central energy source that fueled the means of production...

...The design of an information system— especially where office production activities are concerned—can communicate a management style in other ways...

...Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979...

...Based on recent field work I have conducted in several large organizations, this essay will identify four areas where implications for the psychology of work and the quality of organizational life have emerged...

...Lindstrom is bored, and angry...

...Lately, Lindstrom's job just isn't the same...

...Once productive activity is organized by information technology, neither physical effort nor interpersonal conduct are very relevant to performance...

...Work has come a long way since Marx defined labor as a process in which man "opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants...

...Tom, Gerry, Linda, and Nellie are supporting actors in a drama of national proportions...

...For example, one bank installed an information system that could make many of the routine credit calculations for the analysts in the department...

...When they worked manually, they had to consult various files and spend considerable amounts of time on the telephone...

...But the more activities are planned in advance and concretized in an automated process, the less they require actual decision-making at each stage of execution...

...He is now required to monitor a set of computer controls that automatically makes all flight decisions...

...And the tube is gonna tally what you've worked every minute...

...First there are the obvious problems of morale and motivation...

...At the same time, a reliance on such models can limit the type of information that managers seek...

...The Abstraction of Work ANOTHER FEATURE of computer-based information technology concerns the way in which it abstracts most of the work it reorganizes...

...One aspect involves the invisibility of many features of work when it becomes computer-mediated...

...This attitude was designed into the system along with his specific knowledge about the job...

...In some ways it's quicker to control things, but it's more difficult to define what you want...

...What the airline pilot, the bill collector, the data analyst, and the cold-type operator have in common is that their work consists of reading and manipulating electronic symbols...

...The bank's technologists saw the system as one that freed the analyst from the most mechanical aspects of the job...

...Some early reports are beginning to emerge regarding the stress built into such routine computer-mediated jobs...

...Our aim in this series, therefore, is to explore the many ways American workers are coping with these renewed attacks...

...A bill collector put it this way: "People lose their temper faster with the tubes...

...White-collar work has depended upon facetoface interaction and written communication...

...Once a manager becomes accustomed to receiving in two hours a report that once took two days to compile, any delay is considered intolerable...

...Rarely has top management thought through the issues creatively enough to critique our models...

...For example, employees in the commercial credit office of one bank complained of the isolation demanded by the new computer-mediated work procedures...

...Yet there should be no confusion about the fact that individual firms undertake massive computer-based automation projects with labor force reduction as a primary goal...

...Management Style and Labor Relations COMPUTER SYSTEMS that are designed according to traditional negative assumptions about human motivation are likely to exacerbate any existing, underlying organizational problem...

...Invisibility as a feature of the abstraction of work can affect professionals as well...

...He was selected for the job because of his intelligence, physical strength, and mental stamina—characteristics that are critical for the complex and varied decisions a pilot must make during flight time...

...Bill Smith had managed collections for 30 years...

...Conversion to computer-based work procedures can have a profound, and often unintended, effect on the quality of social life at the workplace...

...While the system allows for a greater volume of transactions, it takes most of the skill requirements out of the job...

...For clerical workers who find their workload increasing with the introduction of computer technology, system failures or slow response times are considered unjust and are met with anxiety...

...This speed of access, retrieval, and information processing is the key to improving the productivity of the office...

...being a "good collector" no longer makes a difference...

...An office worker in a large insurance company articulated her frustration and sense of hopelessness this way: I used to love my work but now I come in with a defeatist attitude...

...Despite top management's persuasions to the contrary, the branch operations people insisted on continuing to make up tickets...

...As more jobs become subject to this "thinning out" of meaning, will work become less important in people's lives, or will there be a new response that challenges employers to provide more meaningful jobs...

...As more office and professional jobs are made subject to the changes entailed by computer technology, people who valued white-collar jobs because of the more easygoing working conditions they offered (in which individual productivity was imperfectly measured) will experience automation-induced pressures similar to those that symbolized the most strenuous industrial work...

...Outsmarting the system became the most challenging aspect of the job...

...57 tern...

...A key element in the productivity of the traditional manufacturing operation has been the careful control of the human body as it labored...

...A video display unit replaced co-workers as the principal focus of interaction...

...Unless attention is paid to the psychological dimensions of computer-mediated work, individuals are likely to channel their energy into various forms of resistance—not merely resistance to change, but resistance to the substantive differences they experience on the job...

...Facetoface supervision can only occur on a partial basis, and workers usually find ways to pace their own activities so that standards can be met at a reasonable pace...

...The computer is] just an inanimate object that stands on your desk and you have to fight it every single day...

...She put her situation this way: "There's a machine out there somewhere and my numbers go God knows where...

...Further discussion led to the following statement from the operations manager: "You need something you can put your hands on...

...It's as if they want us to become extensions of the computer...

...They must read and process information continuously, while the work itself is experienced as routine...

...But the marketing professionals steadily resisted utilizing the system...

...Their output now depends on the timely and reliable functioning of the system...

...As a result, interpersonal behavior rather than physical discipline has been the focus of control...

...Collections workers who lost control over the work process could only retrieve some sense of mastery by keying fictitious data into the system of account files...

...As one staff analyst in a corporate planning department put it: The sophistication of the computer model makes it the focus of the planning process...

...These professionals have traditionally been motivated by the 53 chance to display their artistry as bankers, but the "art" in their jobs is reduced as increased information organizes the context of their work...

...Information comprehension and sustained attention may become the new standards of productivity...

...Their discontent and feelings of powerlessness will hasten the unionization of the whitecollar labor force...

...The workers protested the red light, insisting that the supervisory function be returned to a foreman...

...The computer was programmed to flash a red light signalling a quality-control problem...

...Two aspects of abstraction emerge frequently in discussions with workers in different occupations...

...By increasing the transferability of on-the-job skills, individual loyalty and commitment to the organization may be diminished, as non-work activities provide greater opportunity for individual development and expression...

...If they cannot register their protest as a grievance, they will tend instead to withdraw their concern from the quality of their work or seek covert ways in which to sabotage work activities...

...She keeps parallel records and often repeats calculations manually before she uses them for a report...

...He has learned to master various techniques for cajoling people to pay up...

...If work can be accomplished remotely, then not only will managers face the prospect of managing people they do not see, but they themselves will be able to accomplish many of their managing activities from afar...

...When the means of production become dependent on electronic technology and information flows, it is no longer inevitable that labor be collective and synchronous...

...Employees reacted against what they saw as the erosion of the old "Ma Bell" familial culture, and they organized a Job Pressures Day to protest the oversupervision, stress, and discipline imposed in large measure by the computer sys3 International Federation of Automation Control, Newsletter #6, September 1978...

...The person is just a number...

...People become more technical and sophisticated, but they have an inferior understanding of the banking business...

...The center of gravity in the workplace has shifted from jobs that require bodily involvement to those that require cerebral involvement...

...Generally, when work becomes computer-mediated it no longer offers physical access to the object of work processes...

...In other instances, computers are applied directly to production and jobs are reformulated so that people execute their tasks through information technology, a phenomenon I will call the "computer-mediation" of work...

...She spends her days accessing information from a central data bank and plugging it into various forecasting models that serve as the strategic basis for critical marketing and credit decisions...

...If employees depend upon the computer system in order to accomplish their work but the system is experienced as an enemy, the quality of the work must suffer...

...But this increased demand for a particular form of mental effort does not mean a correlative increase in the 54 degree to which these jobs are interesting, varied, challenging, or promising greater opportunities...

...As decision rules become more explicit, they are, theoretically, subject to more deliberate planning...

...A corollary of the invisibility of work is its intangibility...

...Account officers perceived the information system as encroaching upon a primary source of their job satisfaction...

...It takes extra time, but this way she feels in control of the information...

...In this endeavor managers are carrying out their mandate to maximize efficiency and productivity—a mandate that has inherited force from the pressures of international competition...

...How much do we understand about the unique demands that computer-induced work abstraction make upon people at any occupational level...

...For example, in the marketing area of one bank, an information system was developed that could provide complete profiles of all accounts while assessing their profitability according to key corporate criteria...

...As the use of computer applications moves up the organizational hierarchy, managers and professional staff are often wary of systems that seem to encroach upon their judgment, their freedom, or the "art" of their professional assessments...

...If we consider that human beings are toolusers and relate to the world through being able to touch it and act upon it, then the potential significance of intangibility as a feature of computer-mediated work takes on a sharper focus...

...3 Workers in the Bell system have complained about being strictly monitored by computer technology...

...I know the firm and the problem...

...The firm has adopted a computer system to distribute and organize collection activities...

...This abstraction of work routines is shared by many American workers, from those who monitor the continuous automatic processes of an oil refinery to hospital nurses, bank tellers, and engineers...

...Instead of making out tickets that were sent on to a key-punch center to be processed overnight, operators entered data directly into terminals and account information was immediately changed...

...The tradition of scholarship that has tried to make sense of the relationships between productive activity, social organization, and psychological meaning will have to assimilate the fact that by the year 2000, less than 20 years from now, work will be typically characterized as the electronic manipulation of symbols...

...The image of the assembly line that has served the popular and the scholarly imagination so well is no longer a stereotype of the workplace...

...As far as Nellie is concerned, the difference between hot and cold type is that "one has no blood and doesn't really need people at all...

...Instead of working that big printing contraption and handling all the crafty judgments it required, she now works at a computer terminal where she types information into a visual display unit...

...How else can we keep our heads above water...

...The uncertainty of limited information may lend itself to errors of judgment, but it also provides a "free space" for actions that feel inspired...

...Those symbols, the language of the computer, mediate between the workers and the work they once performed directly...

...and, taking new initiative and courage from their friends in Washington, the corporations are accelerating the pace of automation, plant closings, and the export of jobs...

...Employees note that their work involves manipulating symbols, but what goes on "behind the screen" is lost to view...

...Resistance often increases if the information system is perceived to limit the professionals' freedom or to increase the measurability of their work...

...I know somewhere they're printing a paper...

...But there are likely to be social and psychological implications that have not yet received much systematic attention...

...Manufacturing workers could always count on being able to negotiate with foremen for a certain amount of flexibility on the job...

...People think that today's society owes them something...

...The flow of "perfect" information, in reducing ambiguity, was also seen as limiting their opportunities for creative decisions...

...One bank manager said: Now you make an input and it's gone...

...Where workers are not organized, their responses to the built-in pressures of computer surveillance and increased time pressures have fewer constructive outlets...

...This means they need hardly move away from the screen during the entire day...

...Their managers were confronted with high productivity figures that were not matched by the size of monthly revenues...

...Somehow when you could see all of your account cards in front of you and write down information, it didn't seem that way...

...In part, this is so because of a tendency to view information technology as just another step in a long line of innovations in the workplace...

...Indeed, the core of Taylor and Gilbreth's genius was to develop a systematic method for recording and therefore controlling the body in time and space...

...This process is at work in the newly computerized job of the airline pilot or of the bill collector cited above...

...Nellie Weymouth was a linotype operator until recently when her job was altered...

...People start creating programs that don't necessarily reflect the spirit of the operation...

...The consequences of computer-mediated work will not be restricted to the workplace...

...Direct Experience, Individual Judgment, and Information Technology IT IS THE INTENT of the intellectual technology at the core of a computer system to substitute algorithms or decision rules for individual judgment...

...In this way the organization of work may come to be mirrored in the organization of attention in the workplace...

...The immediacy of access to information and consequent increase in the volume of transactions or operations that can take place also has the effect of compressing time and altering the rhythm of work...

...If some of the present trends in the design of computer-mediated work systems continue, it is likely that they will undermine parallel efforts at improving the quality of the workplace...

...Many managers' first response to this situation is to look for ways to increase control over the work process, but the more they attempt to control the process, the more the employees will search out ways to subvert that control and gain some personal sense of mastery...

...Work accomplished through the medium of video terminals or other intelligent equipment can be recorded on a second-by-second basis...

...For example, in a branch of one bank, an on-line computer system had been installed for updating information on current accounts...

...At present most professionals and managers function in fairly ambiguous environments...

...For example, nurses now monitor patient information from terminals instead of visiting patients...

...The Communications Workers of America (CWA) claim that the stress produced by continual computer surveillance represents a qualitatively new kind of workplace problem and will require new labor strategies...

...The only way to deal with it is to fake some work...

...New forms of organizational arrangements will become possible as work can be performed in the home or on the road—as long as a terminal and communications link are available...

...Just as industrial technology has cut the pattern for the social organization and role definitions of industrial and nonindustrial occupations alike, computer-based information technology will play a critical role in shaping the social construction of reality and in engendering new forms of behavior in the coming decades...