Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

In the 1980s two seminal historical works on the hard-to-define topic of information were published. In 1986 James R. Beniger gave us The Control Revolution. Three years later JoAnne Yates published Control through Communication. Beniger, a sociologist, took a sweeping view of information flows and goal attainment, with a focus on the United States. Yates, on a career path that led her to become the Distinguished Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School, narrowed her work to the role of information systems and information technologies in two major American industries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her effort was informed by Alfred D. Chandler Jr.'s views on the role of new management techniques in the success of the American corporation. Beniger continued his work but focused on practical, contemporary problems, such as information networks and drug cultures. Yates, while busy with management theory and its application, soon began a ten-year effort to move her historical work into the twentieth century. In her new project, the focus is on the service or white-collar sector during the first half of the twentieth century. The theoretical lenses she uses are theories of technological change and the more general “structuration” approach of Anthony Giddens.