From: Rob Kling <kling@ics.uci.edu>
Subject: Re: Controversies about Computerized Work
Newsgroups: comp.society
Date: 24 Jul 92 15:38:19 GMT


File 1 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]

Acknowledgements: Production of this paper was partially funded by NSF
grant IRI 90-15-497. The paper gained considerably from discussions with
Jonathan P. Allen, Robert Anderson, Joey George, Suzanne Iacono, Kate
Kaiser, John Leslie King, Wanda Orlikowski, Karen Ruhleder, Sang-Min Whang
and Mary Zmuidzinas.

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

The Importance of Work

This article examines some key controversies about the extent to which work
with computer-based systems is organized to enhance or degrade the quality
of working life for clerks, administrative staff, professionals, and
managers. These controversies are sometimes explicit in the literature, as
when one author explicitly criticizes a specific study or theoretical
position. However, many of the key debates are implicit in the body of
research and professional literature, even though researchers and
professionals sometimes debate them verbally with colleagues. If you try to
read a broad sampling of books or articles about computerization and
changing work, you will find that groups of authors seem to writing about
completely different universes. Some focus on older technologies while
other focus on the promise of the latest technologies. Some writers focus
upon those professionals who have significant influence over the
organization of their activities and the technologies which they use while
others focus on workers who have little discretion in the work they do, and
the way they do it. Some examine managerial practices explicitly while
others write as if technology itself creates new forms of work. Some
examine gender differences, while most authors ignore issues of gender when
discussing computers and worklife. Anyone who tries to make sense of this
complex cacophony of alternatives stories about computerization and work
will find numerous important differences in the popular, professional and
scholarly literatures. This paper will help sort out some of the key areas
of conflict. Since a full treatment could easily be book-length, we do not
pretend that this article is a complete or systematic survey of all the
major controversies, the approaches to them, the balance of evidence today,
and the open issues.

While this article focuses upon areas of controversy, there are some
important tacit agreements among the scholars and professionals who write
about computerization and changes in work. Perhaps the most important point
of agreement is that some kinds of computer technologies have important
potentials in changing the content, experience, organization, and even the
meaning of work. Writers differ in their claims about which technologies
are most likely to catalyze major changes. Some hold that special
technologies, such as PCs, networking, groupware, or notebook computers
with cellular modems will create more flexible and interesting work. Others
emphasize special forms of interfaces, such as windows, pens or voice
recognition. And some writers argue that a wide variety of computer systems
can be used to restructure work in ways that improve or degrade its
quality.

A second tacit agreement is that the quality of working life is an
important aspect of social life. The relative importance of the quality of
work as a major topic in the information systems field is itself
controversial. For example, many information systems scholars and
managerial writers focus on the economic effects of computerization, such
as efficiency, productivity and competitiveness, and ignore the quality of
working life as a topic worthy of explicit and serious attention (e.g.,
Cash, McFarland, McKenney, and Applegate, 1992). We do not share this
economic view and will begin with identifying some key reasons that the
quality of worklife should be a central topic in discussions of
computerization.

The quality of people's working lives is important for at least three
reasons. First, work is a major component of many people's lives.  Wage
income is the primary way that most people between the ages of 22 and 65
obtain money for food, housing, clothing, transportation, etc.  The United
States' population is about 250,000,000, and well over 100,000,000 work for
a living.  So, major changes in the nature of work DD the number of jobs,
the nature of jobs, career opportunities, job content, social relationships
at work, working conditions of various kinds DD can affect a significant
segment of society.

Second, in the United States, most wage earners work 30 - 60 hours per week
-- a large fraction of their waking lives.  And people's experiences at
work, whether  good or bad, can shape other aspects of their lives as well.
Work pressures or work pleasures can be carried home to families.  Better
jobs give people some room to grow when they seek more responsible, or
complex positions, while stifled careers often breed boredom and resentment
in comparably motivated people.  Although people vary considerably in what
kinds of experiences and opportunities they want from a job, few people
would be thrilled with a monotonous and socially isolated job, even if it
were very well paid.

Third, many of the arguments advanced for the economic value of new forms
of computer technologies make tacit assumptions about how people will work
with them. In the late 1980s, an array of PC-based applications have become
popularly known as productivity tools. We have mostly anecdotal data about
the value of the packages, and the ways that some people find them too
complicated to be worth learning to use skillfully. How much the use of
these applications actually increases the overall productivity of people or
groups that use them is not really known. It is clear that the productivity
of North American office workers has been growing very slowly in the 1980s
during a period of intensive computerization (Dunlop and Kling, 1991
Section 2; Strassman, 1990).  While some computer applications might
improve productivity by decreasing the number of jobs, most systems are
used by people and support the remaining number of workers. It is becoming
increasingly important to understand the relationship between computer use
and organizational productivity. People's work practices and
(dis)satisfactions are a key part of that picture.

Fourth, computerization has touched more people more visibly in their work
than in any other kind of setting -- home, schools, churches, banking, and
so on.  Workplaces are good places to examine how the dreams and dilemmas
of computerization really work out for tens of millions of people under an
immense variety of social and technical conditions.

In the next section, we sketch some ways that work and technology have
changed in the last 150 years. We then examine some common approaches to
the analysis of technology and changing work -- technological utopianism
and anti-utopianism.  These two discussions set the stage for our
examination of some key controversies about computerization and the quality
of worklife.

The Relevance of Historical Perspectives

A Second Industrial Revolution?

The past isn't over, because our images of previous periods shape our
evaluation of the present and our perceptions of future possibilities. When
specialists discuss computerization and work, they often appeal to strong
implicit images about the transformations of work in the last one hundred
years, and the role that technologies have played in some of those changes.
Stories about the industrial revolution and the nature of factories play an
important role in the discourse about computerization and worklife. In 19th
century North America, there was a  major shift from farms to factories as
the primary workplaces.  Those shifts -- associated with the industrial
revolution -- continued well into the early 20th century.  Industrial
technologies such as the steam engine played a key role in the rise of
industrialism.  But ways of organizing work also altered significantly.  The
assembly line with relatively high-volume, low-cost production and
standardized, fragmented jobs was a critical advance in the history of
industrialization. It also is a guiding image, as when someone says that
"the design of the factory of the past will shape the office of the future"
(cf. Garson, 1988).

During the last 100 years, farms increasingly mechanized as their owners
bought motorized tractors, harvesters and other powerful equipment replacing
horse-drawn plows and hand-held tools.  The farms also have been
increasingly reorganized.  Family farms run by small groups have been dying
out, and have been bought up (or replaced by) huge corporate farms with
battalions of managers, accountants, and hired hands.

Our late 20th century economy has been marked by the rise of service
buinesses such as banking, insurance, travel, education, and health.  many
of the earliest commercial computer systems were bought by large service
organizations such as banks and insurance companies. (By some estimates, the
finance industries bought about 30% of the computer hardware in the US in
the 1980s.) During the last three decades, computer use has spread to
virtually every kind of workplace, although large firms are still the
dominant investors in computer-based systems.  Since offices are the
predominant site of computerization, it is helpful to focus on offices in
examining the role that these computer systems play in altering office work.


Today, the management of farms and factories is frequently supported with
computer systems in their offices.  Furthermore, approximately 50% of the
staff of high tech manufacturing firms are white collar workers who often
use such systems -- engineers, accountants, marketing specialists, etc.
There is also some  computerization in factory production lines through the
introduction of numerically controlled machine tools and industrial robots.
And certainly issues such as worklife quality and managerial control are
just as important on the shop floor as in white collar areas.  (See Shaiken,
1986; Zuboff, 1988.)  While  this paper examines white collar work, we
invite the reader to consider the parallels between the computerization of
blue collar work and white collar work. Many of the studies of the
computerization of blue collar work focus on factories (e.g., Noble, 1984;
Shaiken, 1986; Weekley, 1983, Zuboff, 1988). Factories employ a significant
fraction of blue collar workers, but not a majority. Some of the major blue
collar occupations which are not factory jobs include bus and truck drivers,
heavy equipment operators, construction workers, appliance repair personnel,
automobile and airplane mechanics, gas station attendants, dockworkers,
gardeners and janitors. Factories have been the site of some major
computerization projects, as in the use of robots for welding and painting,
the use of numerically controlled machinery, production scheduling and
inventory systems. Ironically, factories are increasingly sites of white
collar employment, especially for the specialists who organize or use some
of these applications.

The Transformation of Office Work

Office work has always involved keeping records.  We don't have many
detailed accounts of the earliest offices -- which date back before the
Middle Ages.  Today, offices with dozens of clerks carrying out similar
tasks are commonplace.  Before the 20th century, the majority of offices
were small and were often the workplace of a single businessman or
professional who kept informal records (Delgado, 1979).  The character of
offices DD the way work is organized, the role of women in their operation,
the career lines, and office technologies DD has been radically transformed
in the last 100 years.

Novelists like Charles Dickens have written some vivid descriptions of 19th
century English clerks.  They were often viewed as a dull bunch of sickly
men who had safe but tedious jobs.  In the 19th century, information was
recorded by clerks using pen and ink, and copies were also made by hand.
There were no powerful technologies for assisting one's hand in writing,
copying, or even doing calculations.  Filing systems were relatively
makeshift, and there weren't standardized sizes of forms such as 3 x 5"
cards or letter-size paper.  Clerical work was a man's job, and was a common
route for learning a business and becoming a potential owner.

JoAnn Yates (1989) documents how the technologies and organization of office
work underwent substantial change after the mid-19th century. Railroads and
large manufacturing firms with complex inventories and thousands of workers
were the leading adopters of these innovations in office technologies. The
earliest innovations focussed on standard-sizes of file boxes and forms. The
vertical file for storing masses of correspondence was devised in the 1890s
(Yates, 1989:56-63). By the early twentieth century, firms began to adopt
telephones and typewriters, which were both invented in the late 10th
century. Even today, many white colar worker share telephones. By the 1930s
and 1940s, many manufacturers devised electromechanical machines to help
manipulate, sort and tally specialized paper records automatically.  Some of
the more expensive pieces of equipment, such as specialized card-accounting
machines, were much more affordable and justifiable in organizations that
centralized their key office activities.

While managers often adopted new equipment to enhance the efficiency of
their offices, its use was tied to more widespread changes in the shape of
organizations: the shifts in control to central administrators, and an
increase in the number of clerical jobs that were mostly being filled by
women.  Women began to work in offices as typewriter operators and clerks,
and were typically viewed as short- term job-holders, working between school
and marriage during their twenties.  As larger firms hired professional
managers, many aspiring professionals turned to graduate schools rather than
apprenticeships to learn their craft.  Increasingly, specialized colleges
rather than on-the-job training became the key entry point for professional
and managerial careers.   And with these careers dominated by males,
clerical work became the province of women who were often discouraged from
seeking jobs in the upper cadres of the professions or managment.

This sketch indicates some of the key themes that permeate discussions of
computerization and the quality or worklife:  how efficient and flexible
work will be, who controls the work that is done and how it is organized,
how work is divided by gender, and who shares in the benefits of
technological and organizational change.

Changes in Computer Technology

Businesses such as insurance companies and banks, along with public
agencies, adopted computer-based information systems on a large scale in the
1960s.  Many of the early digital computer systems replaced
electromechanical paper-card systems.  The earliest systems were designed
for batch operation.  Clerks filled in paper forms with information about a
firm's clients, and the forms were then periodically sent to a special group
of keypunchers to translate the data onto cardboard cards.  These "Hollerith
cards"  each stored one line of data, up to 80 characters.  They were
punched with a series of holes for each character or number.  Keypunch
machines were clanky devices with a typewriter-style keyboard, a bin for
storing blank cards, and a holder for the card being punched.  There was no
simple way for a keypunch operator to correct an error.  Cards containing
errors (e.g., a letter "s" instead of an "a") had to be completely
repunched.   The punched cards were then taken to a data-processing
department for a weekly or monthly "run", during which time records were
updated and reports were produced.  Errors often took a few cycles --
sometimes weeks or months -- to identify and correct.  Using these early
computerized systems required immense precision and care, since inaccuracies
were detected and corrected very slowly.  In addition, the data from one
information system were usually formatted in a way that did not make them
accessible to other systems.  Professionals and managers often waited a few
months for a new kind of report, and reports that required merging data from
several separate systems were often viewed as prohibitively complex,
time-consuming, and expensive to create.  The earliest computer systems were
speedier than the hand in processing large volumes of highly specialized
transactions.  But they were also very rigid and cumbersome for many people
who used them.

Furthermore, the transaction-processing and report-generating programs were
usually written by programmers who were organized into specialized
data-processing departments.  Often, the large computer systems, their
operators, and their programmers were all located in basement offices --
isolating them from organizational life. During the last 20 years, most
organizations have reorganized their computer-based information systems to
be more responsive and flexible, and to support a richer array of
organizational activities.  Terminals connected to shared data-bases or
microcomputers are commonplace in today's organizations.  Further, many
computer scientists, management scholars, and journalists advocate whole new
families of computing technologies, such as groupware or voice recognition.
Have jobs improved in a way which is commensurate with the recent technical
improvements in computer systems? What roles are new technologies likely to
play in altering worklife?