Management and the Abstraction of Knowledge into Information Technologies

Posted on | August 30, 2010 | No Comments

Understanding information technologies (IT) in the workplace requires some scrutiny of work processes and the role of management. In particular, how has worker’s understanding of their laboring activities been transformed into knowledge that could be collected and used by managers? Subsequently, how has technology assisted in this process? And what are the implications of this abstraction of labor and its transformation into technology-assisted management?

The simultaneous growth of industry and bureaucracy at the turn of century created new demands for skills, machinery and control mechanisms that could be implemented in the workplace. Work and workers became objects of intense study so that their skills and knowledge could be abstracted and translated into new work procedures and technologies. This process also created a growing class of managers whose job it was to study, refine and supervise these processes.

Frederick Taylor emerged as the leading figure in the trend towards observing, describing, and then systematizing worker’s skills so that they could be “re-engineered”, to use a modern day buzzword. Taylor’s minute studies of worker activity lead to “time studies” designed to refine muscular movement in work activities and to “provide the quantitative empirical basis for a more rationalized control of industrial production.”[1] In Zuboff’s phenomenological terms: “Taylorism meant that the body as the source of skill was be the object of inquiry in order that the body as a source of effort could become the object of more control. Once explicated, the workers know-how was expropriated to the ranks of management, where it became management’s prerogative to reorganize that knowledge according to its own interests, needs, and motives. The growth of the management hierarchy depended in part on upon this transfer of knowledge from the private sentience of the worker’s active body to the lists, flowcharts, and other systems of measurements in the planner’s office.”[2] Taylor’s work was published as The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) and his ideas were a major inspiration for the efficiency movement of the Progressive Era in the US.

Taylor’s “scientific management” ideas were never implemented by any one company without some modification. Henry Ford in particular was able to simplify the process with his moving assembly line for automobile production. He implemented a series of conveyor belts, overhead rails, and planned sequences which would keep production in constant flow. Based on the Midwest’s great meat-packing “disassembly” lines, Ford aspired to the ease in which oil and other liquids and gases could be moved and processed.[3] By further reducing the need for physical effort and skill, Ford was able to develop economies of scale and create a gigantic new industry that could grow and include new unskilled immigrants and rural laborers. One of the costs involved however was the loss of skilled labor. Worker’s skills became “congealed” in the machinery and one working body could be replaced easily by another. Often the benefit was an easier job for the worker in terms of physical toil but it came at the price of the autonomy and negotiating power mentioned earlier.

Managers facilitated the movement of bodily effort and skill into the machines and industrial techniques and then expanded into the intellectual areas of the owner/executive. Workers and managers for the most part operate with different types of literacies. Workers have been generally body-oriented and privilege the action-centered skills developed in physical labor. They are implicit knowledges gained through performance and learned by observation and imitation. Zuboff called the activities when laborers use their bodies to work on materials and tools “acting-on”. Whether stirring paper pulp, operating a forklift or typing on computer keyboards, their major concern is with working with things rather than people.

Conversely, white-collar workers use their bodies in significantly different ways. Although differences occur between top managers and middle managers, she uses the term “acting-with” to distinguish managers’ main responsibilities from the “acting-on” activities that monopolize workers’ activities. Top managers are also very much engaged in bodily activities, but primarily those that call on their abilities to interact with other people. Bodily presence, manifested primarily through the voice but also through dress and non-verbal behaviors are key to their success. Face-to-face verbal interchanges culling gossip, opinion, hearsay, and physical cues while transmitting in a way that heightens their personal charisma and sociability is a primary responsibility of top managers. Zuboff returns to the word “sentience” to describe the way top managers develop a “feel” for people and situations.

[1] Beniger, JamesThe Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. 1986; p. 294.

[2 Zuboff, S. In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power1988; p. 43.

[3] Beniger, 1986; p. 298-299.

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