What Machines Can’t Do: Politics and Technology in the Industrial Enterprise by Robert J. Thomas

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 207 and provides a broader view of the development of computing in the period covered for historians of information processing, business historians, and those who are interested in the successful transfer of technology from laboratory to market. Robert W. Seidel Dr. Seidel is director of the Charles Babbage Institute and ERA Land-Grant College Professor of the History of Technology at the University of Minnesota. What Machines Can’t Do: Politics and Technology in the Industrial Enter­ prise. By Robert J. Thomas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. xviii + 314; figures, notes, appen­ dixes, bibliography, index. $45.00 (cloth); $16.00 (paper). Manufacturing companies throughout the world are trying to adapt to the new requirements of a global economy. Robert Thomas, an organizational specialist and a member of the Leaders for Manu­ facturing program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues in this clear, perceptive, and subtle study of manufacturing organiza­ tions that reliance on a single, technological viewpoint will not and cannot provide the means to achieve the success they seek. He con­ tends that reliance on automation, reduction of “head count,” and the pursuit of rational, hierarchical control over the firm will be selfdefeating . Manufacturers need to accept that the relationship be­ tween technology and organization is mediated by the exercise of political power and that internal politics should be viewed as creative and conducive to innovation and change. To understand the nature of technological change we need to adopt what Thomas terms the power-process perspective, where tech­ nological change is viewed as a process and decisions within it are seen as complex and interactive. They depend on technologies being available or emerging, on the understanding of the nature of the technology by different groups (he warns that a given technology— flexible manufacturing systems, for example—might be implemented in very different ways), on the local strategic aims of the different groups, on the choice mechanisms within the organization, and on the political skills of the various actors. His methodology, which he sees as bridging the gap between other competing perspectives, in­ volves adopting a historical view, considering how the organization’s technological and social systems are coupled, focusing on the process of choice within the organization, and assessing the role of power and conflict at different stages of the process. He feels that previous work, whether from a technological-deterministic, strategic-choice, or labor-process viewpoint, has assumed static, unidirectional relation­ ships within the organization, whereas real organizations are dynamic and interactive. To test his approach Thomas carried out several detailed and ex­ 208 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tended case studies of change and innovation in four different com­ panies over a three-year period. These involved interviews with staff at all levels and access to a wide range of documents for manufactur­ ing methods in an aircraft company, printed circuit-board manufac­ ture in a computer company, wire manufacture in the aluminum industry, and parts manufacture for the automobile industry. The studies, fully reported in the book, are informative and revealing: they clearly show how limited and constricting it is to view organiza­ tions as “rational.” They also show that labor-process theories based on simple ideas of control and strategic-choice theories, like techno­ logical determinism, provide inadequate explanations of technologi­ cal change. To the historian of technology the methodological approach used is not new or remarkable: it is clearly encompassed within social con­ struction theory (of which Thomas seems to be unaware). This is not to detract from the excellence of the book, which fulfills its aim of informing both academics and engineers, managers, and union offi­ cials about the nature of industrial change. But why should a historian of technology read it? For although it deals with past events and uses a methodology not substantially different from that of the historian, it is not history. It is an off-the-record account with anonymous char­ acters: the information was gathered on the understanding that it would be confidential and nonattributable. Thomas is aware of the dangers this brings and draws attention to the need for careful cross­ checking, particularly with reference to the...