Abstract
The explosion of interest in automation in 1955–6 was as much concerned with office work as with manufacturing. The Office Management Association held its conference on office automation a month before the Institute of Production Engineers' conference on the automatic factory in June 1955. Leading US commentators had already suggested that automation would have far more impact on the office than the factory (Fairbanks 1952; Diebold 1952: 94). This chapter examines why office work was automated, how it was automated and the impact for management of the new ways of producing, storing and analysing information. Office work has been comparatively neglected by business and economic historians, though there have been some recent signs of interest.1 This has been a surprising omission, given business historians' interest in “the rise of the corporate economy” and “the managerial revolution”. Other social scientists have produced most of the detailed and authoritative work on clerks and the evolution of office work.
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