From: Rob Kling <kling@ics.uci.edu>
Subject: Re: Controversies about Computerized Work
Newsgroups: comp.society
Date: 24 Jul 92 15:39:06 GMT



File 2 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]
           =================================================
File 1 or 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]

Common Modes of Analysis: Utopian and Social Realist

Technological Utopianism and Anti-Utopianism

Every year thousands of articles and dozens of books comment on the meaning
of new computer technologies for people, organizations, and the larger
society. A large fraction of the literature about computing describes
emerging technologies and the ways they can expand the limits of the
possible. Faster, tinier computers can make it easier for people to access
information in a wider variety of places. Larger memories can make more data
accessible. Richer display devices can help people communicate more readily
with computerized systems through pictures and text. High speed networks,
such as Usenet and Internet, link thousands of computer systems and users
together in ways only dreamed of in 1970. The remarkable improvement in the
capabilities of equipment from one decade to the next generate breathless
excitement by researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs, as well as by the
battalions of journalists who document these events in the daily newspapers
and weekly magazines.

Accounts of the powerful information processing capabilities of computer
systems are usually central to many stories of computerization and social
change. Authors write about these changes in technology and social life with
different analytical and rhetorical strategies. Some authors enchant us with
images of new technologies that offer exciting possibilities of manipulating
large amounts of information rapidly with little effort -- to enhance
control, to create insights, to search for information, and to facilitate
cooperative work between people. Much less frequently, some authors examine
a darker social vision in which any likely form of computerization will
amplify human misery -- people becoming very dependent on complex
technologies that they don't comprehend, or computer systems taking over
interesting work while people do more routine work.  Both kinds of stories
often reflect utopian and anti-utopian themes -- genres of social analysis
which are about 500 years old, and which predate the social sciences by
about 350 years.

Technological utopianism places the use of some specific technology, such as
computers, nuclear energy, or low-energy low-impact technologies, as key
enabling elements of a utopian vision (Dunlop and Kling, 1991 Section I).
Technological utopianism does not refer to exotic technologies, like
portable pocket laser printers or voice recognition on wrist-size computers.
It refers to a kind of narrative that makes  technologies, even simple ones,
the key elements to ways of life that the author portrays as fundamentally
good.

An interesting example of technological utopianism is found in "The
Mechanization of Office Work" by Vincent Giuliano (1991). Giuliano examines
the shift of office technologies from pen and paper through typewriters and
mechanical devices, and again through interactive computer-based systems
available on every desk.  He argues that the social organization of office
work is evolving through three stages:  (a) an informal "preindustrial"
office;  (b) a highly regimented "industrial" office; and (c) a flexible
"information-age" office in which operations are much more integrated than
in the industrial office.  There are major technological differences in
Giuliano's illustrations of these archetypical offices.  His preindustrial
office relies on  telephones, paper, and organized files.  His industrial
office relies on batch-run computerized information systems, as well as
paper and telephones.  And his information-age office relies on desktop
computing linked to interactive data-bases on every desk.  Giuliano (1991)
characterizes the information-age office as one which

exploits new technology to preserve the best aspects of the preindustrial
office and avoid their failings.  At its best, it combines terminal-based
work stations, a continuously updated data base, and communications to
attain high efficiency along with a return to people-centered work rather
than machine-centered work.  In the information-age office the machine is
paced to the needs and abilities of the person who works with it. . . .  The
mechanization of office work is an essential element in the transformation
of American society to one in which information work is the chief economic
activity.

Giuliano portrays information-age office work in utopian terms DD flexible,
and efficient, cooperative and interesting.   His argument illustrates
technological utopianism because it assumes that better technologies
necessarily create better jobs. This does not mean that Giuliano is
completely "wrong".  But it can lead the critical reader to ask whether
advanced computer systems might not also be compatible with the informal
pre-industrial office or formalized and regimented industrial office
organizations. Giuliano's article also illustrates the typical confusion
between (a) information-oriented work and (b) the use of specific
technologies.  All of his illustrations refer to offices which are
exclusively devoted to information-handling in some form.  But there is no
substantive rationale for labeling any of these office forms as
"information-age" offices.  The label glamorizes the kind of office
technology that Giuliano would like to see widespread -- interactive
computer systems linked to integrated data bases.  Giuliano overlooks the
fact that there was a substantial information work force in the United
States by 1900, and it approached 30% of the work force by 1950 -- long
before electronic computer systems of any kind were routine fixtures of
white collar work (see Kling 1990).

Other analysts who examine computerization and work articulate visions whose
bleakness contrasts strongly with Giuliano's technological utopianism.
Technological anti-utopianism is almost a mirror image of technological
utopianism. In a technologically anti-utopian narrative, technologies are a
key cause of human suffering. For example, Langdon Winner portrays newer
forms of office automation in these vivid terms:

   To enter the digital city one must first be granted access.  Having
   "logged on," one's quality of participation is determined by the
   architecture of the network and its map of rules, roles and
   relationships.  Technical professionals are usually greeted by a
   computerized version of the social matrix, an organizational form in
   which there is at least superficial equality and ready access to
   information and one's coworkers.  They experience computer networks as
   spheres of democratic or even anarchic activity.  Especially for those
   ill at ease in the physical presence of others (a feeling not uncommon
   among male engineers), the phenomenon of disembodied space seems to
   offer comfort and fulfillment.  Here are new opportunities for
   self-expression, creativity, and a sense of mastery!  Some begin to
   feel they are most alive, most free when wandering through the
   networks; they often "disappear" into them for days on end.

   Ordinary workers, on the other hand, typically face a much different set
   of possibilities.  As they enter an electronic office or factory, they
   become the objects of top-down managerial control, required to take
   orders, complete finite tasks, and perform according to a set of
   standard productivity measures.  Facing them is a  structure that
   incorporates the authoritarianism of the industrial workplace and
   augments its power in ingenious ways.  No longer are the Taylorite
   time-and-motion measurements limited by an awkward stopwatch carried
   from place to place by a wandering manager.  Now workers' motions can
   be ubiquitously monitored in units calculable to the nearest
   microsecond.  For telephone operators handing calls, insurance clerks
   processing claims, and keypunch operators doing data entry, rates of
   performance are recorded by a centralized computer and continuously
   compared to established norms.  Failure to meet one's quota of phone
   calls, insurance claims, or keystrokes is grounds for managerial
   reprimand or, eventually, dismissal.  A report issued by the Office of
   Technology Assessment revealed that by the late 1980's, four to six
   million American office workers are already subject to such forms of
   computer-based surveillance.  Such systems do not, as utopian dreams
   of automation prophesied, "eliminate toil and liberate people for
   higher forms of work."  .... For those who manage the systems of
   computerized work, the structures and processes offer a wonderfully
   effective means of control. (Winner 1992, pp:57-58 ).

Technological utopian and anti-utopian analysts suggest that the changes
they foresee are virtually certain to happen if a technology is developed
and disseminated. Their arguments gain rhetorical force through linear
logics and the absence of important contingencies. This causal
simplification is, in our view, a fatal flaw of utopian and anti-utopian
speculations. They explore the character of possible social changes as if
they were the only likely social changes.

Clear and fairly coherent stories sometimes don't match important patterns
of computerization.  For example, the information-age office is the only
office type that Giuliano associates with computer terminals; and computer
terminals are located on virtually every desk.   It is also the only office
that his diagram depicts as having plants.  There is one photograph of a
computerized office in Giuliano's article.  It is an insurance claims office
which combines an industrial work organization of a matrix of desks in an
open area with the information-age elements of a terminal on every desk . .
. and plants! Oddly, Giuliano doesn't comment on the way that this glimpse
of the world undermines his clean topology of three ideal types.

Utopian and anti-utopian analysts share important common conventions. Their
narratives are usually future oriented, universalize experiences with
technologies, homogenize experiences into one or two groups, and portray
technologies as totalizing elements which dominate important social
interactions. They take extreme, but different, value positions. They
portray computerization with monochromatic brushes: white or black. The
technological anti-utopians' characterizations of the tragic possibilities
of computerization provide an essential counterbalance to the giddy-headed
optimism of the technological utopian accounts. The romances and tragedies
are not all identical. For example, some anti-utopian writings examine the
possibilities of computerized systems for coercion, while others emphasize
alienation.

Although utopian and anti-utopian analyses often purport to offer visions of
where computerizatio is taking us, it is worth noting that their literatures
are not merely descriptive.  Rather, they often seek to stimulate or inhibit
their respective future scenarios (Kling and Iacono, 1991). Attractive
alternatives to utopian analysis should be more credible in characterizing
conflict in a social order, the distribution of knowledge, the ways of
solving problems that arise from new technologies, and resting upon less
deterministic logics of social change. Most important, they would also
identify the social contingencies which make technologies (un)workable and
social changes benign or harmful for various social groups.

Social Realism

One approach with these features is social realism. Social realism uses
empirical data to examines computerization as it is actually practiced and
experienced. Social realists write their articles and books with a tacit
label: "I have carefully observed computerization in some key social
settings and I will tell you how it really is." The most common methods are
those of journalism  and the social sciences, such as critical inquiries and
ethnography. Social realism gains its force through gritty observations
about the social worlds in which computer systems will be used.

Social realists do not all agree on the basic categories for conceptualizing
technology and work: they differ in some key theoretical assumptions, such
as the role of conflict in workplaces (Kling, 1980). In "Reading 'All About'
Computerization (in press), Kling examines the strengths and weaknesses of
social realism as an approach. In the following sections, we will emphasize
controversies which are anchored in social realist accounts of
computerization and changing work.

Control and Coordination Issues

Gender and the Organization of Work

The controversies about gender differences, computerization and work are not
explicit in the literature. Those analysts who are most interested in gender
issues write about them or focus on female-dominated occupations. But the
majority of books and articles about computerization and changing work
ignore gender differences. The debates about gender differences focus on two
kinds of issues: (1) occupational structures in which a majority of women's
jobs are more routinized and in which the men have disproportionate
opportunities to be offered the best jobs; (2) gender differences in
cognitive and social style which lead men and women to prefer different
software designs. We will focus on the first issue.

Discussions of women and computing often focus on clerical work because
about one-third of the women in the work force are clerks.  (Clerks are
amongst the heaviest users of computerized systems.) Conversely, about 80%
of the 18 million clerks in the United States in 1988 were women.  Women
work in every occupation from janitors to Ambassadors for the Federal
government, but they are not equally represented in the higher status and
better paid professions.  Less than 30% of the nation's one million
programmers and systems analysts were women in 1988.  But the nation's 14.6
million female clerks vastly outnumbered the nation's 300,000 female
programmers and systems analysts in 1988.  The typical female computer user
today is a clerk who processes transactions -- payroll, inventory, airline
reservations, etc.

Iacono and Kling (1987) examine how the dramatic improvements in office
technologies over the past 100 years have sometimes made many clerical jobs
much more interesting, flexible and skill-rich.  But the authors also
observe that these changes, especially those involving increased skill
requirements, have not brought commensurate improvements in career
opportunities, influence, or clerical salaries.   They examine the actual
changes in clerical work that have taken place over the last 100 years, from
the introduction of the first typewriters through whole generations of
office equipment -- mechanical accounting machines, telephones, and
photocopiers.  Each generation of equipment has made certain tasks easier.
At the same time, clerical work shifted from a predominantly male
occupation, which provided an entry route to higher levels of management, to
a predominantly female occupation which has been ghettoized.  Iacono and
Kling criticize Giuliano's technological utopianism by arguing that a new
generation of integrated computer-based office systems will not
automatically alter the pay, status, and careers of clerks without explicit
attention.

These observations take on more force when one remembers that the vast
majority of working women are concentrated in a  few occupations (Stromberg
and Harkness, 1988).  Between 1950 and 1980, the fraction of women's jobs in
clerical work rose from 27.4% to 33.8%.  The fraction of women's jobs
labelled "managerial" increased at a disproportionately much more rapid
rate, from 4.3% to 6.8%.  In 1980, one working woman in three was a clerk,
and one in 15 was a "manager".

Between 1950 and 1980, more women entered various professions.  The change
in professional employment rose from 12.2% of women's jobs in 1950 to 15.9%
in 1980.  About one working  woman in seven was in a professional
occupation, but women were most highly concentrated in nursing, social work,
library jobs,  and school teaching.  Women have become much more visible in
technical professions in the last 25 years.  In 1966, about 0.4% of the B.S.
engineering degrees were awarded to women, while in 1981 about 10% of
engineering degrees were awarded to women.  In 1981, about one third of the
B.S. degrees in computer and information science were awarded to women.
However, one should keep in mind that the clerical work force is about 15-20
times as large as the segment of the work force devoted to professional
engineering and computer work. Consequently, the way that clerical work is
computerized affects a huge percentage of working women.