From: Rob Kling <kling@ics.uci.edu>
Subject: Re: Controversies about Computerized Work
Newsgroups: comp.society
Date: 24 Jul 92 15:39:31 GMT



File 3 of 5:


                        Key Controversies About
               Computerization and White Collar Worklife

                    Rob Kling* and Charles Dunlop**
             *Department of Information & Computer Science
                  University of California at Irvine,
                         Irvine, CA 92717, USA
                           kling@ics.uci.edu

                      ** Department of Philosophy
                     University of Michigan - Flint
                            Flint, MI 48502

        =======================================================

                      July 24, 1992 --  Draft #2C

To appear: Computer-Human Interaction Ronald Baeker, John Buxton and
Jonathan Grudin (Ed.). Morgan-Kaufman, San Mateo, Ca. 1992.

[Copyright: Rob Kling, 1992]

        =======================================================

Control and Coordination of Work Processes

An important aspect of worklife that recurs in social realist studies is the
issue of who controls the way that work is organized, the way that people
coordinate and communicate, and workers' levels of skills. Some of the
debate centers explicitly on questions of control. However, part of the
controversy is between analysts who emphasize control and those who ignore
(or pay little attention to ) to control issues.

For example, many people who write about "computer supported cooperative
work" write as if workgroups are primarily cooperative and that elegant
groupware will certainly improve their performance (cf. Bullen and Bennett,
1991). In the 1988 CSCW Conference, Pelle Ehn took the position that all
group work required cooperation and that cooperation is a dominant element
in work groups. Kling (1991) criticized this position and wrote:
      Most workplaces are much less coercive than chain gangs. But the
      primary  alternatives are not simply limitless cooperation, as
      if these are all-or-nothing characteristics of group relations.
      As Grudin points out in the case of group calendars, most
      professionals are not so eager to cater to their managers'
      preferences that they will continually inconvenience themselves
      and lower their productivity in order to help their manager's
      secretary  schedule meetings. They are somewhat cooperative, but
      also somewhat autonomous and self-oriented. Further, some kinds
      of conflict in groups is critical for identifying alternative
      lines of action and avoiding groupthink, as long as conflicts
      are resolved constructively and with dignity. In practice, many
      working relationships can be multivalent, mix elements of
      cooperation, conflict, conviviality, competition, collaboration,
      commitment, caution, control, coercion, coordination and combat
      (just to stay with some "c-words"). They also involve attention
      to substantive tasks, managing the organization of work, genuine
      sociability, and even play.

In the 1980s, many professionals became enamored with microcomputers. They
became the new electronic typewriter for writers of all kinds. Engineers set
aside their slide rules and electronic calculators for software which
mechanized their calculations and produced graphical data displays.
Accountants helped drive the demand for micros with their passion for
computerized spreadsheets. And so on. Many professionals became hooked on
the relative ease and speed of their computer tools, and dreaded any return
to manual ways of working. They often adopted and adapted computers to their
work in ways that enhanced their individual control. Work still remained
labor intensive, since the working week did not diminish in length (Schore,
1991). Work sometimes became more fun, or at least less tedious. However,
there is major controversy about the extent to which the romance between
professionals and computing might be short lived.

First, the individualism which allows each person to select software and
configure systems to the preferences often increases coordination costs when
people work together. Standards, even if local, are a kind of constraint
which undermine the utopian romances of enhanced freedom in the world of
electronic work.

But there are issues of managerial control as well. In Giuliano's account,
managers organized "industrial age" offices for efficiency, and they will
organize "information-age" offices in a way that enhances the quality of
jobs as well.  But some observers argue that managers will not give up
substantial control to their subordinates. Andrew Clement, for example,
argues that the close monitoring of employee behavior represents the logical
extension of a dominant management paradigm -- pursuit of control over all
aspects of the business enterprise.  Indeed some believe that to manage is
to control.  ". . . [M]anagement may be called 'the profession of control'"
(Clement, 1984:10).

Some authors argue that the industrialization of clerical work sets the
stage for the industrialization of professional work as well.  In "The
Social Dimensions of Office Automation" Abbe Mowshowitz (1986) summarizes
his sharp vision in these concise terms:

Our principal point is that the lessons of the factory are the guiding
principles of office automation.  In large offices, clerical work has
already been transformed into factory-like production systems.  The latest
technology -- office automation -- is simply being used to consolidate and
further a well-established trend.  For most clerical workers, this spells an
intensification of factory discipline.  For many professionals and managers,
it signals a gradual loss of autonomy, task fragmentation and closer
supervision -- courtesy of computerized monitoring.  Communication and
interaction will increasingly be mediated by computer.  Work will become
more abstract . . . and opportunities for direct social interaction will
diminish.

Andrew Clement (1988) follows up on Mowshowitz's theme in "Office Automation
and the Technical Control of Information Workers". He examines the way that
IBM has attempted to require mainframes as intermediaries for PC-to-PC
communication via its Systems Network Architecture (SNA).  He notes:
      ....the prospect is that personal computing will be steadily absorbed
      into a subordinate role within the central hierarchy of
      corporate computing systems. . . .  If this comes about, then
      the current wave of PCs can be seen as Trojan horses.
      Introduced under the guise of tools offering autonomy to users,
      they will be turned into extensions of the central computing
      systems and as the means of extending managerial control.
      (Clement, 1988, p. 241).

Authors like Clement, Giuliano, and Mowshowitz make powerful arguments which
gain some of their force identifying systematic conflicts between managers
and their subordinates. But they treat organizations as if they are all
alike with similar strategies of managerial control.  They gain some of
their intellectual force by using the rhetorical strategies of technological
anti-utopianism and  suggesting how only one "social logic" can be dominant.
(Kling, in press). For example, Clement is correct in noting that central
systems offer more possibilities for tightened technical standards and
control over work. The controversial question is whether they require it.
For example, electronic mail DD one of the premier examples of
computer-systems which open new possibilities for flexible communication DD
requires some kind of shared communication system.  There is substantial
controversy about the extent to which new information technologies
necessarily tighten  managerial control, even when they offer the
possibility of giving workers more autonomy. For example, one argument
against stand-alone workstations is that they do not support electronic
communication, whether by person-to-person mail or group bulletin boards.
Some analysts have hoped that new computer-communication technologies, such
as electronic mail, would enable workers to bypass rigid bureaucratic
procedures (e.g., Hiltz and Turoff, 1978:142). We will discuss this issue
below.

Neo-Marxists divide the work world into two broad categories: owners and
their managerial representatives on the one hand, and workers of various
kinds on the other.  They assume that these two groups are often in
conflict: owners and managers seek to maximize their profits by reducing the
costs of producing goods and services by many means, including reducing the
costs of labor. An influential analyst, Harry Braverman (1974), argued that
the logic of capitalism requires owners and managers to relentlessly try to
enhance their control over workers to reduce labor costs. Braverman's theory
has been influential in shaping critical studies of technology in worklife.
In the images of Mowshowitz, Clement, and Perrolle (which follow Braverman's
argument), managers computerize so as to tighten control at every turn.

During the last decade, Braverman's labor process theory has been subject to
significant criticism (Attewell, 1987; Kuhn, 1989; Wood, 1989:10-11).
Critics of Braverman's labor processes theory fault him for treating workers
as purely passive agents. Further, Braverman's theory ignores the variety of
managerial approaches for improving productivity, such as those which
increase responsibility, pay and morale, rather than tightening control and
de-skilling (Jewett and Kling, 1990).  And Braverman's labor process theory
ignores the way that workers sometimes undermine managerial control systems.
There is a rich tradition of industrial sociology which examines the ways
that workers develop skill in undermining managerial incentive and
monitoring systems (e.g.,  Whyte, Dalton, Roy, Sayles and Associates, 1955
Part I).

Electronic Workplace Monitoring and Speedup

Analysts who fear that managers will use computer systems to tighten control
over workers have focussed on the issue of electronic monitoring (see the
quotes by Winner and Mowshowitz, above). Defenders of electronic monitoring
argue that managers have a right to know how effectively their subordinates
are working, and whether they are slacking. Further, when computerized work
is relatively private and reflected in shifting screens rather than lines of
people or stacks of paper, managers need new ways to learn how their
subordinates are working. Critics of electronic monitoring argue that it is
often oppressive because it is unobtrusive and pervasive. The manager who
walks around to see how her staff are working can talk with them about the
nature of the work, the organization, and their personal lives. They can
build solidarity in their work groups, although much depends upon their
abilities to develop rapport and communicate. In contrast, the supervisor
who stays at a distance from her subordinates and has frequent measures of
activities such as keystrokes, transactions or phone calls can create a
pervasive judgmental presence. Further, they have fewer occasions in which
to build workgroup solidarity and motivate people through commitment rather
than fear.

In "Big Brother and the Sweatshop" Paul Attewell (1991) examines the five
theoretical approaches to help understand the typical uses of computerized
workplace monitoring.  He notes variations in the way that business firms
and public agencies organize work and technology.  Attewell examines the
differing predictions which one would make by using  five different
theoretical approaches: corporate culture, neo-Marxism, product lifecycle,
contingency theory, and industrial sociology.  He argues that managers have
tremendous incentives in principle to learn about and control the work of
their subordinates.  But he observes that many practical conditions weigh
against their using computer systems as instruments of surveillance in the
vast majority of workplaces. Attewell's article is specially important
because of the care with which he examines a variety of supervisory
strategies and the ways that managers work with and without computerized
monitoring systems. He observes that managers are concerned with controlling
many resources, not just labor. For example, it's likely that the manager of
a work group which manages multi-million dollar investments will pay most
attention to the quality of decisions being made rather than a few thousand
dollars in salary costs. In contrast, the manager of a work group where
labor is the most costly resource and where judgmental errors are unlikely
to be catastrophic may be very concerned to shave a few thousand dollars off
of the payroll by having people work to their maximum. Attewell (1991:252)
develops an alternative model which integrates elements of the
organizations' environment, culture, business strategy, work organization
and labor market conditions.

Kling and Iacono (1984) take a very different approach to workplace
monitoring and the control of work. Their empirical study examines the ways
in which computerization alters social control and coordination in
workplaces. Most analysts who examine the use of computer-based systems to
tighten social control employ a model of managerial authority, even those
who criticize Braverman's labor process theory. Their study introduces a new
(``institutional") model of social control in which information can flow in
any direction (up, down, and laterally) and in which people in different
organizational units can try to enforce organizational norms for people in
other units. Kling and Iacono observe complex patterns of negotiation and
control that go beyond the traditional hierarchy. They rigorously examine
the explanatory power of the institutional model compared with two other
models: managerial authority and lateral negotiations. The institutional
model is an important model of social control because it indicates that
social behavior can be controlled through information flows and agents which
extend beyond the immediate behavior setting in which workers use
computer-based information systems. Kling and Iacono conducted focussed
their study on complex inventory control systems in manufacturing firms. But
their points pertain to groupware or any other computerized system where
peers can see each other's work performance through the system.

Control Over the Location of Work

Managers often computerize work with several competing logics.  They may be
concerned with maintaining some control over their subordinates time and
pay, but also with allowing sufficient flexibility and self-direction to
insure good quality work and retain good employees. In fact, some
organizations try to pay less by offering attractive working conditions. One
of the interesting possibilities of computerized work would allow full time
workers to work at home part of the work week. But it is relatively rare
because of dilemmas of workplace control. Many self employed people work at
home. Futurists like Alvin Toffler have been specially excited by the
possibilities that people who normally commute to a collective office could
elect to work at home. In The Third Wave, Toffler portrayed homes with
computer and communications equipment for work as "electronic cottages".
There have been several studies of the pros and cons of firms giving their
employees computer equipment to use at home while communicating with their
shared offices via electronic mail (Kraemer & King, 1982; Olson, 1983;
Olson, 1989; Huws, Korte, and Robinson, 1990).  Some analysts hoped that
work at home will decrease urban congestion during commuting hours, give
parents more opportunity for contact with young children, and allow people
to spend more time in their neighborhoods.  However, people who work a
substantial fraction of the time at home may be unavailable for meetings,
may be less visible to their peers and (therefore) passed over for
promotions, and may be difficult to supervise unless they work on a
piece-rate system.  And some employees may lack sufficient self-discipline
for work at home.

Many popular accounts focus on the way that home can be a less distracting
place to work than the collective office. Both of us authors do a sgnifcant
fraction of our work, especially reading and writing, at home. We see homes
as a different kind of place to work -- with its own privacies and
distractions. Homeworkers report a different set of attractions and
distractions at home: sociable neighbors may expect to be able to drop in
any time; the refrigerator may beckon others too frequently, and so on. Some
parents choose to work at home because they can spend time with their babies
and pre-school children, but they often get much less done than at their
collective offices. Olson's (1989) study of full time work at home by
computer professionals exemplifies some of the empirical studies. She found
reduced job satisfaction, reduced organizational commitment and higher role
conflict in her sample. She also wonders whether work-at-home practices can
exacerbate workaholism. Forester (1989) recently critiqued the visions of
full-time work at home via telecommuting as a romantic preference.  After
coming to appreciate the social isolation reported by several people who
worked at home full time, he speculates that many analysts who most
enthusiastically champion full time work at home with computing have never
done it themselves. It is still an open question whether many organizations
will allow substantial fractions of their workforce to work at home with
computing part time (1-3 days a week), for reasons of personal flexibility
or to reduce commuting. Few homes are designed for significant home offices,
and there are many important questions about the pros and cons of part time
work-at-home with computing (and fax) for those who prefer this option.
(Also, see Vitalari and Venkatesh (1987) for an assessment of in-home
computing services that examines work-oriented technologies among other
systems.)

A few firms have conducted pilot tests of the electronic cottage concept.
And the members of a few occupations, such as journalists, professors,
salesmen, and accountants sometimes take laptop computers on the road when
they travel.  But the vast majority of firms keep their office-bound work
force keystroking in the office rather than at home.  Some workers are given
computer equipment to use for unpaid overtime work.  To date, however, no
large firms have dispersed a large fraction of their full-time work force to
their homes or even satellite work centers to work with computer systems.

It seems that the desire to maintain control underlies many managers' fears
of having their employees work full-time at home.  It is much easier for
managers to be sure that people are putting in a fair day's work in an
office from nine to five, than to work out elaborate contracts about the
work to be done each week or month. Further, officeworkers often find it
easier to coordinate with people who are often wanted for meetings if they
are in their collective offices. Work at home surfaces  tensions about
control over work. This is clearest to us when some high technology firms
whose marketers promote the visions of bountiful technology for all refuse
to let a significant fraction of their professionals work at home part time
as an alternative to the daily grind of urban commuting.

Some technologists speculate that richer multimedia information systems,
such as those supported by Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), may
lead to more telecommuting because they would support more effective
conferencing. The controversy here pits a realist observation, that better
conferencing systems may facilitate conferencing but the control issues are
not resolved by the technology, against technological utopian dreams which
minimize the perennial importance of managerial control issues.

Skill and Support for Computerization

The Skilling Debates

There has been substantial debate about the extent to which organizations
will design or adopt new computer technologies which lead to a less skilled,
less professional workforce, with commensurate reductions in the interest of
their work, their autonomy and their pay. As with many other debates about
computerization and social life, the technological utopian analyses set some
of the background. In this debate, they portray computerization leading to a
workplace of contented workers, regardless of the simplicity of using
complex computing systems and the resulting complexity of jobs. The main
counterposition is informed by neo-Marxism.

In "Intellectual Assembly Lines" (1991), Judith Perrolle examines how
managers can use expert systems and other advanced computer technologies to
reduce the skill levels of professional jobs.  As an analyst of class
politics, Perrolle examines the work world in terms of structural conflicts
between owners and their managerial representatives on the one hand, and
workers of various kinds on the other.  In this analysis owners and managers
seek to maximize their profits by reducing the costs of producing goods and
services by many means, including reducing the costs of labor.

Perrolle draws on Harry Braverman's (1974) argument that owners and managers
relentlessly try to enhance their control over workers to reduce labor
costs. One major managerial strategy is reducing the skills required for
most jobs, thus enabling them able to hire less expensive workers.  Perrolle
illustrates this theme through the example of computerized "application
generators".  Some of these  facilities simplify the production of computer
programs so they can be written by clerks paid $20,000 per year.  A firm
that delegates a lot of programming to clerks  rather than to
university-trained programmers paid $40,000 per year might reduce labor
costs substantially.  But Perrolle argues that many expert systems will also
be applied in ways that reduce the skill levels required for professional
jobs.  As skill levels of jobs are reduced, so is their pay, autonomy,
status, and perhaps their intrinsic interest. Perrolle also argues that as
intellectual skills lose their status, the criterion for being human will
shift from an emphasis on intellect to an emphasis on feeling. (She cites
research from Sherry Turkle that indicates that this shift has begun.)

The debates about up-skilling and de-skilling are complicated by the ways in
which a de-skilled job can be up-skilling for a person who takes it after
leaving a much less skilled job.  For example, a law firm might organize
some of its routine document production so that secretaries, rather than
lawyers can do it.  That set of tasks -- put into a full-time job -- might
bore a skilled lawyer.  But the same tasks might be fascinating for someone
who was previously typing correspondence and who is eager to enter a new
paralegal line of work.

Workers have often had no systematic voice in the direction of large
computerization projects. Sometimes jobs appear to have been upskilled when
managers haven't paid direct attention to skill issues (Danziger and
Kraemer, 1986). A few firms have attempted to involve workers in redesigning
their own jobs as part of computerization projects (Levering, 1988; Jewett
and Kling, 1990). But many organizations appear much more authoritarian or
paternalistic. Unions have been the primary means by which workers have
tried to counter the preferences of management with their own interests. But
white collar workers are relatively un-unionized. And professionals, the
subject of Perrolle's article, are particularly hostile to unions.

Similarly, Perrolle ignores some key aspects of the computerization of
professional jobs in the U.S..  Spreadsheets, like Lotus 1-2-3 and
Microsoft's Excel, have been one of the primary kinds of software that
fueled the market for PCs in businesses in the mid-1980s.  While it is
possible to regiment and de-skill jobs with spreadsheets, the majority of
applications seemed to open up new ground for professionals and sometimes
even for their clerical assistants.  It is possible that professionals and
managers, rather than clerks, may become the major users of application
generators when they seek new information systems faster than local
programmers can devise them. Many organizations and work groups standardize
on software, such as word processors, databases, and spreadsheets; but this
does not necessarily regiment the overall character of work.

In a rich and provocative field study, Wanda Orlikowski (1991) examined how
a large international computer-consulting firm used Computer Assisted
Software Engineering (CASE) tools to reorganize work. The firm hires college
graduates and MBAs with no significant professional computing experience and
trains them in its own methods. It reviews the newer consultants with tough
"up or out" hurdles every two years. Orlikowski account of this firm's use
of customized CASE tools has some important parallels with Perrolle's (1991)
characterization of intellectual assembly lines. The CASE tools were
designed to enforce a specific sequence of design activities, for example by
requiring that data tables be fully defined before they are used in a
program. The firm spent less effort in training newer recruits than they
spent on similar cohorts of previous years. She reports that the younger
consultants didn't realize that their jobs required less skill for them than
for consultants who had worked without the CASE tools.  In fact, they liked
the windowed CASE tools with nifty menus and the ability to easily edit
changes without rewriting whole documents. Some of the intermediate level
consultants had found key ways to work around some of the CASE tools'
restrictions when they were working in a time crunch, but their own managers
frowned on these workarounds. In addition, managers reported that the CASE
system allowed them to bill the work of its users at higher multiples than
the work of previous cohorts who used system paper-based design methods.

The Integration of Computing into Work

The vast majority of articles and books about computerization and work are
written as if computer systems are highly reliable and graceful instruments.
There are relatively few published studies of the ways that people actually
use software systems in their work -- which features do they use, to what
extent do they encounter problems with systems or gaps in their own skills,
how do they resolve problems when difficulties arise, how does the use of
computerized systems alter the coherence and complexity of work?

There does not seem to be single simple answers to these questions. Some
organizations computerize some jobs so as to make them as simple as
possible. An extreme example is the way that fast food chains have
computerized cash registers with special buttons for menu items like
cheeseburgers and malts so that they can hire clerks with little math skill.
Kraut, Dumais, and Koch (1989)  report a case study of customer service
representatives in which simplifying work was a major consequence of
computerization.

In  "The Integration of Computing and Routine Work", Les Gasser (1986)
examined the way in which anomalies are common in the daily use of computing
systems.  Anomalies are discrepancies between the way one expects a computer
system to behave and the way that it actually behaves. Anomalies include
system bugs, but they go much farther. For example, in 1990 the State of
Massachusetts billed the city of Princeton, Ma one cent in interest after it
paid a bill for a ten cent underpayment of taxes. Each of these transactions
cost a postage stamp, as well as several dollars in staff time and computing
resources. The Wall Street Journal reporter viewed the situation as
anomalous because one would not expect organizations to routinely invest
many dollars in attempting to collect a few cents. However, the computer
program was probably working as it was designed -- to compute interest on
all underpayments and produce accurate bills for interest due to the State
of Massachusetts.

Gasser views computer use as a social act rather than as an individual act.
He discusses computerized information systems which are developed, used,
maintained, and repaired, by teams of people DD people who pass beliefs to
their co-workers about what the systems are good for, how to use them, and
their limits or problems on the jobs.  In addition, the individuals in
Gasser's study depend upon other groups in their organization for key
resources such as data, training, and equipment fixes. Some of the anomalies
occur because of the interactions between these busy groups, which are not
organized like firemen to race to each other's aid at a moment's notice.

Gasser argues that anomalies are widespread.  The anomalies of computing can
sometimes be reduced by improved equipment, but they cannot be eliminated.
Gasser's argument sheds some light on the question of why computerization
may not enhance productivity as readily as many analysts expect. It also
sheds light on why some jobs become more complex with computerization --
since computer users sometimes have to account for anomalies and work around
them.