Shoshana Zuboff's In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power
Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs
IN THE AGE OF THE SMART MACHINE: THE FUTURE OF WORK AND POWER, by Shoshana Zuboff. New York: Basic Books, 1988. 468 pp. $19.95. The voices of labor have always expressed caution at the...
...The traditional logic is that if you begin with one hundred positions and bring in new technology, you should end up with seventy-five positions...
...As one worker observed, "It seems management is afraid to let us learn too much about how this system operates...
...Thus, who becomes skilled and unskilled, subordinate and superior, are all intertwined questions...
...There's no trust, no respect...
...The major issue seems to be a struggle over the boundaries that define hierarchy...
...Harry Braverman, for example, forecast a kind of doomsday effect from impoverishment of the work experience—"deskilling" —and the increase of control over workers...
...Because modern technology and organization blur boundaries, there seems to be a considerable investment in reconstituting them...
...We are all struggling for our turf," one manager told Zuboff...
...There is a paradox here...
...For example, the upper managers of one bank told Zuboff that the lower managers and clerical staff once understood how the bank operated but that with the automation of the 1970s and 1980s most of that knowledge was now stored in a machine...
...For, as Zuboff points out, it is not technology but the managing of technology that results in deskilling or reskilling, exploitation or empowerment...
...Her vision is of an integrated, interdependent, fluid, "posthierarchical" workplace...
...As she reports: Books The signal to the organization is "reduce the number of people...
...There is no doubt that computers can be used to extend managers' knowledge of worker productivity, giving them greater power to appraise and scrutinize the behavior of employees...
...But such insights may lack the perspective that can be gained from a comparative and objective analysis...
...Yet the picture is complex...
...New York: Basic Books, 1988...
...In the words of one, "You want me to build skills in others that I'm not sure I have in myself, and my future is uncertain to boot...
...The voices of labor have always expressed caution at the introduction of new technology in the workplace...
...Zuboff suggests that a change in social system is precisely what is called for...
...No longer does the process have a material base...
...She ably employs keen analysis from hands-on research, historical comparison, and empathy for the minds and hearts of working people at all levels of the organization in this striking work...
...Others have been loud and organized cries against known or feared hazards: technological unemployment, dehumanizing routinization of the work process, and greater managerial control of the worker...
...This is true, no doubt, for most...
...The questions she raises have to do with the quality of working life, productivity, and the distribution of power...
...Their problem in assessing themselves is linked to their reluctance to share the knowledge base...
...Shoshana Zuboff, a sociologist at the Harvard Business School, has studied several workplaces: a telephone operating company, two paper and pulp mills, and a pharmaceutical company, all recently transformed by computer technology...
...Other theorists too, especially neo-Marxists, have expressed the belief that managers will control if they have the means...
...Lessons learned from the past have provided the basis for these concerns...
...Upper-level managers clearly have access to far more knowledge today than ever before...
...Zuboff does not consider how values and habits from outside the workplace intrude on the expectations managers and workers have about relationships at work...
...She sees workers engaged in an informating (her term) process based on relation ships in which the old rules about the distribution of knowledge are replaced...
...Control over their own jobs also motivates managers who mediate technology...
...With our automated systems, the clerks' tool became a terminal...
...And further, "They think we're kids and they know what's best...
...The question of intent is complex...
...Her work challenges some recent prophets...
...Some are interested only in the labor process...
...Managers admitted to Zuboff the degree to which their need for certainty and control determined their approach to employing technology...
...And workers were well aware of this...
...Some new research suggests that the outcome of technological change is mediated by gender relations and ideology, for example...
...Those scrutinized often suffer, not only from physical stress but from anxiety...
...For Zuboff the role of technology in the workplace is a product of middle managers' interpretations of top management's viewpoint...
...The computer gives managers the power to monitor work more extensively than ever before—but managers differ in their will to control, in the means they choose, and in the spheres over which they exercise control...
...others demand control over dress, demeanor, and attitude outside as well as inside the workplace...
...It is the problem of the Garden of Eden all over again...
...there is no "thing" to see or touch or kick "to make [the machine] hum...
...Not all of Zuboff 's insights are new, but they bear consideration...
...But clinging to tradition is not only a management prerogative...
...Thus, cultural views must also be changed if changes in the workplace that ennoble workers rather than degrade them are to be achieved...
...In the face of uncertainty, people cling to traditional roles...
...q WINTER • 1989 • 121...
...If workers can learn what managers know, the necessity for managerial authority is called into question...
...Thus, Zuboff suggests, managers have tended to measure their own worth by their ability to carry out this charge as the surrogate for the owners...
...The computer can be used to make knowledge available to workers and increase their capacity to make decisions, or it may be used to block their access to knowledge...
...Zuboff suggests that the age-old struggle over the control of knowledge is of supreme importance in an era in which the computer provides potential access to information across all strata...
...The more we know, the more we could sabotage it...
...The product of her research is a rich and complex picture of the consequences of technology for workers, managers, and society...
...Some have been muted responses from those willing to wait and see...
...Actually, however, at some workplaces, the number of jobs increases as a result of new technology, an issue not dealt with in this book...
...And, using the computer, most have swift access to a larger base of data with which to make decisions about clients' businesses or about guidance of the production process...
...Workers whose experience is replaced by data bases may find it difficult to make inferences from electronic text to physical processes...
...The technology will mean a change in our social system...
...But Zuboff observes that the same technologies have different effects on varying categories of workers—depending on managerial policies and the culture of the workplace...
...You don't need to think, because the machine makes the calculations and performs the control...
...Minorities and women tend to be assigned jobs that become most deskilled and controlled, while white male craft workers retain more autonomy even in jobs that are changing technologically...
...Sharing knowledge means sharing authority, and that causes concern...
...Workers using computers may be relieved of some of the worst drudgery and the dirty and dangerous aspects of their work, freeing them for other activities at work and for increased leisure...
...As Michael Harrington pointed out recently in a speech to celebrants of his 120 • DISSENT sixtieth birthday, the most important point of Zuboff 's book is the issue of values and the ways in which they are translated into the structure of control...
...IN THE AGE OF THE SMART MACHINE: THE FUTURE OF WORK AND POWER, by Shoshana Zuboff...
...Like the managers who understood that employees were working when they saw sweat on their brows but are less able to calculate the expenditure of energy when they observe employees sitting at a computer terminal, workers often report feeling ambivalent or "adrift...
Vol. 36 • January 1989 • No. 1
