The Process of Technological Change: New Technology and Social Choice in the Workplace by Jon Clark, et al

Abstract

152 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE by Harry Braverman and Richard Edwards, among others. Even though labor considerations were not central to management, many readers may conclude that Braverman and Edwards still have a leg to stand on. The authors also find that unions that are already effective in dealing with management on other issues are also more effective in protecting their members, or even improving their members’ position in relation to skill and autonomy, when new technology is adopted. Sometimes our research findings, though a necessary confirmation of the obvious, remind us of the princess who couldn’t cry. When someone did draw her tears by peeling an onion in her presence, everyone else said, “I could have done that!” But, of course, they hadn’t. Frieda Shoenberg Rozen Dr. Rozen, an assistant professor in the Department of Labor Studies and Industrial Relations at Pennsylvania State University, is completing a book on the effects of changing technology in the airline industry. The Process ofTechnological Change: New Technology and Social Choice in the Workplace. By Jon Clark, Ian McLoughlin, Howard Rose, and Robin King. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp. xiv + 250; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, appendixes, index. $49.50. The last two decades have been especially challenging ones for the British Post Office. Indeed, it is arguable that during this period the institution has experienced more change than in any comparable period since the generation that included the establishment of the Penny Post in 1840, Post Office Savings Banks in 1861, and the nationalization of the telegraphs in 1870. Interestingly, in both cases the Post Office was affected by a complex set of ideological and technological changes that fundamentally altered the department’s direction. In the first case the effect of “economical reform,” inevita­ bly epitomized by Sir Rowland Hill, and a growing confidence among civil servants such as Frank Ives Scudamore in the ability of the state to undertake business responsibilities previously left to private initia­ tive, combined with new technologies, such as the railway, to spur the Post Office on to a record of remarkable expansion. The history of the department from the late 1960s to the present has been rather different. Again technology has forced this bureau­ cracy to reexamine the manner in which it carries out its business operations. However, the recent effect of ideology on the department has had a rather different result. Unlike their Victorian counterparts, late-20th-century politicians and administrators have grown increas­ ingly skeptical of the state’s capacity to manage complex commercial functions and at the same time balance social concerns against profit TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 153 requirements. Thus, successive governments have modified and dis­ mantled what was in 1914 the largest employer in the United Kingdom. This process of restructing began in 1969 when the Post Office ceased to be a department of state and became a public corporation instead. It continued in 1981 when the posts and tele­ communications functions were split into separate units. In 1984 the pattern was carried one step further when 51 percent of British Telecom was sold to private investors. Without question, then, Jon Clark, Ian McLoughlin, Howard Rose, and Robin King have chosen a propitious moment for their investi­ gation of The Process of Technological Change. Over the course of four years, the authors—three social scientists and one engineer—studied the modernization of British Telecom’s exchange system. More spe­ cifically, they examined the shift from the Strowger step-by-step switching system invented in 1889 by a Kansas City undertaker to the TXE4 system that features common control and matrix-switching principles. Adopting the case study approach, the authors systemati­ cally focused their collective attention, not on this process at the national level, but rather in the workplace in three different locales— termed Town, Coast, and Metro. This strategy, of course, has the advantage of allowing the authors to understand crucial issues— management policies, industrial relations, maintenance, supervision, and work organization—in the context of what actually happened, instead of what those at the top thought was happening. This is not to say that the book’s analysis is not informed by a solid command of...