In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power by Shoshana Zuboff

Abstract

192 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE And even if peace should win out, international quarreling may become more rather than less shrill, since “the recent indecorous behavior of oil-producing countries against the well-armed West and of East Europeans against the wishes of their well-armed Soviet neighbor has been facilitated by the decline in the fear that big countries will use war to correct antics they find uncivil” (p. 265). Mueller is conscious that he risks being discredited by future events. This is what happened to Norman Angell, whose book The Great Illusion argued convincingly that war had become obsolete in 1911. Yet, short of that sort of refutation, one can point out a serious gap in Mueller’s model for human behavior. He takes no account of factors beyond and beneath consciousness. Population growth, for instance, is never mentioned; but human beings respond to growing and shrinking populations by resort to force—or, at least, have always done so in the past. Similar compulsions still prevail. After all, a major factor behind the Khomeni revolution in Iran that Mueller finds so threatening was runaway population growth and the displacement of peasants from the land that such growth invited or compelled. It seems clear to me that human minds are not completely auton­ omous, as Mueller seems to suppose. Circumstances sometimes invite or compel collective illusion. And human beings live with inherited propensities for organized violence that run far deeper than our consciousness. William H. McNeill Dr. McNeill is professor of history emeritus, University of Chicago, and author of The Pursuit ofPower: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since 1000 a.d. (Chicago, 1982). In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. By Shoshana Zuboff. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Pp. xix + 468; notes, appendixes, index. $19.95 (cloth); $10.95 (paper). In the plethora of recent computerization studies, Shoshana Zu­ boff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine stands alone: ground breaking, magisterial, and synthetically brilliant. Through more than five years of semiclinical interviews, small group discussions, and participant observation, Zuboff recorded the words and feelings of workers, engineers, and managers while their companies computerized oper­ ations as diverse as paper production, phone repair scheduling, and international banking. What she heard convinced her that “the people I had been interviewing were on the edge of a historical transforma­ tion of immense proportions” (p. xiii), nothing less than the poten­ tially disastrous collision between a two-centuries-old managerial mind-set and the new demands of the electronic data base. As her subtitle suggests, Zuboff sees corporate computerization’s central issue in terms of in-house power relationships. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 193 At the core of the study stands a conceptual dyad that permeates every chapter. Zuboff adopts an old term, automate, and contrasts it with her neologism, informate. Automation extends managerial con­ trol by preempting worker negotiating power: the computer algo­ rithm enforces Tayloristic work rules, while its data base permits drastically enhanced worker scrutiny. By contrast, informating re­ structures corporate power relationships by giving all in-house actors access to the data base. The concept stems from Zuboff’s insight that computerization revolutionizes work not only by transforming worker operations from physical skill to the abstraction of the computer console but even more by creating “an electronic text,” a data base rendering the operations so transparent that it promotes radical creativity (by workers and managers) and dramatically improved productivity. Thus, for Zuboff, management faces a stark choice between its ingrained penchant for hierarchical control and the nonhierarchical play of informating. Helped by her impressive command of labormanagement history and recent psychological research, Zuboff inter­ prets hundreds of quotations from workers and managers to hammer home the destructive consequences of automating and the revolution­ ary implications of informating. Briefly, her argument runs as follows: Workers respond to comput­ erization ambivalently. While it eases the bodily exertion that had characterized the workplace, it simultaneously destroys body-based skill and the oral culture in which it flourished. In situations where informating is encouraged, however, workers often adjust to the new nonsentient order and find their work at the computer screen creative and...