Chasing scale: the pasts and futures of mobility in electricity and logistics

Abstract

In this article, I theorize the long arc of scaling as an enduring business logic in capitalism. I suggest that scaling concerns the creation of new distances in economic operations and the management of mobility for goods, services, and people. I further argue that automation indexes a continuation of scaling as the management of mobility—a practice that industrialists have inherited from the 20th century. While the scholarship on scalability has recently focused on Big Tech, I center my analysis on two older and less public-facing industries—electricity service and maritime logistics—both of which have been scalability’s pioneers and innovators from the 20th century onwards. Today, like many others, both industries look to automation to take scale to greater heights, as can be noted in the examples of energy aggregator technologies and automated guided vehicles used in unloading containers. For contemporary scaling industries, automation appears as a suitable ‘scalar device’ (Ribes 2014) especially where obstacles to the smooth mobility of goods, services, and people are perceived to occur due to human limitations in cognition and action. However, automated technologies, despite the sense of novelty they may impart, perpetuate old corporate ambitions of action-at-a-distance.