Farmers Deskilled: Hybrid Corn and Farmers’ Work DEBORAH FITZGERALD In recent years labor historians and, to a lesser extent, historians of technology have begun detailed studies of the ways in which skilled laborers have been supplanted by skilled machines. From the power loom to numerically controlled machine tools, machines have been invented with the express purpose of replicating the mental and manual abilities of craftsmen, a process that often renders such crafts knowledge obsolete. While many workers responded with anger and violence, others seemed to adopt a sort of false consciousness, identifying not with their peers but with managers who argued that the virtues of progress must necessarily, if painfully, include the seemingly inevitable drive to mechanization.1 As articulated by labor historians, industrial deskilling usually centers on issues of power, authority, and control. For skilled and semiskilled workers, some measure of power and leverage resides in their possession of specialized knowledge, which in turn allows them to perform work tasks that the untrained are not capable of doing. To deskill such a worker, whether by mechanization or the elaborate subdivison of one big task into many smaller tasks, is thus to Dr. Fitzgerald is the Class of 1956 Career Development Associate Professor in history of technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently writing a book on engineering and economic models in post-World War I American agriculture. She thanks the Technology and Culture referees for their critical analysis and Ruth Cowan who, in commenting on medical technology at a 1989 Sacramento SHOT meeting session, unwittingly gave her the idea for the article. 'There is an enormous literature on the general theme of technology as an agent of deskilling, especially in regard to artisans and factory workers. See, e.g., Harry Braverman’s seminal work Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974). This genre is also discussed in Philip Scranton, “None-too-Porous Boundaries: Labor History and the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 29 (1988):722-43; and in David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York, 1984). Jonathan Prude discusses the ambivalent responses to technology by some workers in his The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (New York, 1983).© 1993 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/93/3402-0001$01.00 324 Farmers Deskilled: Hybrid Corn and Farmers’ Work 325 disempower him or her. The special knowledge is usurped or discarded, as is the power and leverage that this knowledge provided; workers whose jobs require little or no skill are easily replaced and so are less likely to create problems. For labor historians—who are, after all, primarily interested in laborers—the central point of this is that such deskilling is imposed by a money- and power-hungry manage ment on a threatening and allegedly unstable work force. While this model has been of enormous value to labor historians in elucidating the relationship between workers and managers, it is problematic for historians of technology interested in the role of technology in work more generally. It is difficult to know how to use this model when the relevant users of technology are not positioned in an adversarial relationship or when the technology appears simply to change the way ajob is accomplished, but not the reality of the job itself or even the worker who does it.2 Yet it seems to me that the concept of deskilling, as a heuristic device for understanding work, is useful even when shorn of its political charge, and can reasonably be extended to work sites off the shop floor. Several recent works illustrate the way in which technologies change the way tasks are done in a style that might be considered deskilling. Ruth Cowan’s work on domestic technology suggests that deskilling may occur without malice from above or protest from below. Bruno Latour’s notion of “delegation,” in which artifacts of all sorts (e.g., door hinges) are viewed as the nonhuman delegates for human work and activity, likewise emphasizes the point that ordinary, individualistic technologies are deskilling even though their...