New Worlds of Computer-Mediated Work

One day, in the 1860s, the owner of a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts posted a new set of work rules. In the morning, all weavers were to enter the plant at the same time, after which the factory gates would be locked until the close of the work day. By today’s standards this demand that they arrive at the same time seems benign. Today’s workers take for granted both the division of the day into hours of work and nonwork and the notion that everyone should abide by a similar schedule. But, in the 1860s, the weavers were outraged by the idea that an employer had the right to dictate the hours of labor. They said it was a “system of slavery,” and went on strike. Eventually, the owner left the factory gates open and withdrew his demands. Several years later, the mill owner again insisted on collective work hours. As the older form of work organization was disappearing from other plants as well, the weavers could no longer protest. In general, industrialization presented people with a fundamental challenge to the way they had thought about behavior at work. The employer’s desire to exploit the steam engine as a centralized source of power, coupled with the drive to closely supervise workers and increase the pace of production, resulted in a greater degree of collectivization and synchronization in the workplace. Employers imposed an exact discipline on workers that required them to use their bodies in specified ways in relation to increasingly complex forms of equipment. By the early 1900s, “scientific management” had given supervisors a systematic way to measure and control the worker’s body. Although most workers have accepted the work behavior that industrialization fashioned, the issues behind the New England weavers’ resistance lie at the heart of modern labor-management relations. Using collective bargaining, later generations of workers have developed elaborate grievance procedures and work rules that carefully limit an employer’s right to control a worker’s body. New forms of technology inevitably change the ways people are mobilized to work as well as the kinds of skills and behavior that are critical for productivity. These changes are rarely born without pain and conflict—nor do they emerge exactly as planners envision them. Instead, new conceptions of work organization and behavior emerge from an interaction between the demands of a new technology, its social organization, and the responses of the men and women who must work with the new technological systems. In this regard, the weavers’ example is doubly instructive. First, it illustrates that during a period of technological transition people are most likely to be aware of and articulate about the quality of the change they are facing. When people feel that the demands a new technology makes on them conflict with their expectations about the workplace, they are likely, during the initial stage of adaptation, to resist. Many managers maintain that employees are simply denying change when they cling to familiar patterns and complain as these forms of sustenance are threatened. But resistance can also reveal an eloquent appraisal of the quality of change—a subtle commentary that goes beyond a stubborn attachment to custom. Second, the weavers’ example shows that as a major technological transition recedes into the past, and with it the sense of psychological crisis, older sensibilities tend to become subsumed or repressed. However, original sources of resistance, if they are not properly resolved, can continue to influence the management-labor agenda for many years, even though employees may accommodate the demands of a new technology. Business is now witnessing a period of technological change that shares some important features with the first industrial revolution. Information technology is rapidly reorganizing the kind of work people do across industries and organizational strata. It is affecting clerical workers through the automation of high-volume back-office operations as well as with word processing and electronic mail. Managers are more frequently making use of computer conferencing, decision-support systems, sophisticated modeling procedures, and new on-line management information systems. Blue-collar workers are increasingly required to interact with computer technology in order to monitor and control a variety of manufacturing and continuous-process operations. During the past year, business people bought one million data terminals, worth $ 2.6 billion, to supplement the four million terminals already in use. The market for intelligent terminals is expected to grow 25 % annually during the coming decade. This increased use of information technology is altering the technological infrastructure of the workplace. More and more, production in office and factory depends on the computer and large-scale information systems that can control increasingly complex sets of data. And just as with industrial technology, people who are required to use information systems often resist their introduction. When managers allow employee discontent with new computer-based technology a voice, they can learn a great deal about the more subtle effects of this technology and the issues that are likely to challenge their practices in the coming decade. During the last few years I interviewed approximately 200 employees, supervisors, professionals, and managers from several different organizations in three countries to discover how people at distinct organizational levels respond to their work when it has been fundamentally reorganized by information technology. (See the sidebar, “The Research Sites,” for a description of the organizations and their information systems.) In this article, I outline the principal themes that emerged repeatedly from my interviews and observations, both as they pertain to employees’ experiences of information systems and as observable, often unintended, consequences for the organization. Finally, I identify some of the implications of these findings for human resource management policies. The Research Sites The data reported in this article are principally based on research in three kinds of organizations—banking, retail, and consumer goods. Each of these applications had been in place from six months to one year before I began the interviews. The information systems in the bank included: 1 a decision-support system in the credit analysis department that was able to perform “routine” calculations for analysts; 2 information systems for account officers that provided overviews and analyses of account activity in relation to the key business criteria of a company; 3 information systems that converted front-end processes such as foreign exchange, letter of credit, and current accounts to an on-line real-time basis, thus altering the work of both back-office employees and a range of managers. The retail application was the automation of collections activities in the back office of a large discount store chain. Before automation, collectors functioned as entrepreneurs, each with an individual tray of accounts to be collected. The automated system pooled all accounts that were then automatically queued in order of priority and randomly distributed among collectors each day. In the consumer goods organizations, professionals and managers coordinated and communicated their activities through the use of computer conferencing and electronic mail. Management Policies Toward Automation In many ways, management policies can determine the effectiveness of automation and the quality of the workplace culture that emerges. In this regard, my discussions with employees and managers reveal two primary concerns. Substitution & deskilling of labor The purpose of the intelligent technology at the core of a computer system is to substitute algorithms or decision rules for individual judgments. This substitution makes it possible to formalize the skills and know-how intrinsic to a job and integrate them into a computer program. As decision rules become more explicit, the more they are subject to planning, and the less they require a person to make a decision at each stage of execution. For some jobs the word “decision” no longer implies an act of human judgment, but an information processing activity that occurs according to rules embedded in a computer program. At present, most programmed decision making has been limited to the most routine jobs in an organization such as high-volume operations where tasks can be simplified and rationalized to maximize outputs and minimize skill requirements. For example, partly by limiting a collector’s discretion regarding how or in what order he or she should work on an account, an automated collection system makes it possible to increase production goals and reduce the time spent on each account. Thus for that activity the key to revenue generation becomes volume instead of collection skills. Collection managers I interviewed believe that the system enables them to recoup more funds while reducing their dependence on skilled collectors. One collection manager described the value of the system. “It gives us a tighter lock on the collector, and we can hire less skilled people. But there’s a real loss to the job of skills and know-how. You are being told what to do by the machine.” But job deskilling is not exclusive to the most routine jobs in the organization. A decision-support system installed for a bank’s 20 credit analysts was supposed to free them from the most mechanical and boring aspects of the job. Six months after the system was in place, not a single analyst had used it. As one analyst explained it, “I think, then I write down my calculations directly. I know the company and the problem. With this system, I am supposed to type into the machine and let it think. Why should I let it do my thinking for me?” Automation of managerial assumptions Information systems can embody management’s assumptions and values about its employees, especially about their commitment and motivation. The automated collection system provides an example of how this happens. Bill Smith had managed collection activities for 30 years, and management considered his perspective invaluable. In creating the system, designers spent long hours debriefing Smith, and he helped them make many important design decisions. Senior managers explain key design decisions by saying: “We tried to build Bill Smith’s brain into the computer. If we did not build it into the system, we might lose to the competition.” When I talked to Bill Smith, some of the reasons the system eliminated most discretion from the job became clear. As Smith put it. “I like to see people work. I’m a good worker. I don’t like to see people take time off. I don’t do it.” The depth of memory and extent of communications that computer systems are capable of mean that managerial biases can surround the employee as never before. The cost of Smith’s managerial assumptions in the collections operations system was high. A year after the system was in place, turnover had reached almost 100 % , and the corporate personnel and employee counseling offices were swamped with complaints from replacements. The new and less-educated collectors presented a different set of problems for management and training. Even with the new staff, turnover remained about three times higher than in the rest of the back-office organization. Computer Mediation of Work As the Bill Smith example illustrates, managerial assumptions can easily get embedded in information systems. But what impact do the new systems have on the organization of work and what actually happens to the people who interact with them? Work becomes abstract When information technology reorganizes a job, it fundamentally alters the individual’s relation to the task. I call the new relationship “computer mediated.” Usually, this means that a person accomplishes a task through the medium of the information system, rather than through direct physical contact with the object of the task. Computer mediation can be contrasted to other forms of task relationships in terms of the way in which one knows about the object of the task. The potter who turns a pot with his or her own hands has direct experience of the task’s object through continual series of sights and tactile sensations. These sensations form the basis for moment-by-moment judgments regarding the success of the process and any alterations that the potter should make. Machines, such as a press or a welding torch, usually remove the worker as the direct source of energy for the labor process, but leave the task’s object within sensuous range. Those who work with paper and pencil usually feel “in touch” with the objects of their tasks through the activity of writing and because they are the sources of what they write. With computer-mediated work, employees get feedback about the task object only as symbols through the medium of the information system. Very often, from the point of view of the worker, the object of the task seems to have disappeared “behind the screen” and into the information system. The distinction in feedback is what separates the linotype machine operator from the clerical worker who inputs cold type, the engineer who works with computer-aided design from one who directly handles materials, the continuous process operator who reads information from a visual display unit from one who actually checks vat levels, and even the bill collector who works with an on-line, real-time system from a predecessor who handled accounts cards. The distinctiveness of computer-mediated work becomes more clear when one contrasts it against the classic image of work from the nineteenth century in which labor was considered to be the transformation of nature by human muscle. Computer-mediated work is the electronic manipulation of symbols. Instead of a sensual activity, it is an abstract one. Many employees I spoke to reported feeling frustrated because in losing a direct experience of their task it becomes more difficult to exercise judgment over it. In routine jobs, judgment often becomes lodged in the system itself. As one bill collector said. “In our old system, come the end of the month, you knew what you were faced with. With the automated system, you don’t know how to get in there to get certain accounts out. You have to work the way the system wants you to.” People in even more complex jobs can also lose direct experience of their tasks. The comptroller of a bank that was introducing information systems to a variety of functions commented:. “People become more technical and sophisticated, but they have an inferior understanding of the banking business. New people become like systems people and can program instructions that don’t necessarily reflect the spirit of the operation.” The auditor at one bank is working with a new information system that frees him from traveling to regional branches. The branches feed financial data directly into the information system that he can access in real time. He described his job this way. “The job of auditing is very different now. More imagination is required. I am receiving data on-line. I don’t go to the branches if I don’t want to. I don’t see any books. What do I audit in this situation? I always have to be thinking about what is in the system. I may be auditing, but it doesn’t feel like it.” The auditor now has access to a new level of complexity in his data. He has the possibility of comparing branches according to criteria of his choice and searching out new relationships in the data. But in order to do this, he must now develop a theory of the auditing process. He needs to have a conceptual framework that can guide him through the mass of available information. Theoretical insight and imagination will be the keys to his effectiveness on the job. By creating a medium of work where imagination instead of experience-based judgment is important, information technology challenges old procedures. Judging a given task in the light of experience thus becomes less important than imagining how the task can be reorganized based on new technical capabilities. In the banking industry, for example, planners are not automating the old, but inventing the new. While working through information systems seems to require a more challenging form of mental effort, it can also induce feelings of frustration and loss of control. A collections supervisor described the difference between the manual and computer systems. “If you work with a manual system and you want to see an account on a given day, you have a paper file and you simply go to that particular section and pull out the file. When you’re on the computer system, in a sense all your accounts are kind of floating around in space. You can’t get your hands on them.” Some people cope with this frustration by creating physical analogues for their tasks. In one bank branch, an on-line system had been installed to update information on current accounts. Instead of making out tickets that would be sent to a data center for overnight keypunching, operators enter data directly into terminals; the system continuously maintains account information. Despite senior management’s efforts to persuade them to change, the branch manager and his staff continued to fill out the tickets. When asked why, they first mentioned the need for a backup system. The real reason came out when the branch manager made the following comment: “You need something you can put your hands on. How else can we be sure of what we are doing?” People are accustomed to thinking of jobs that require employees to use their brains as the most challenging and rewarding. But instead, the computer mediation of simple jobs can create tasks that are routine and unchallenging, while demanding focused attention and abstract comprehension. Nevertheless, the human brain is organized for action. Abstract work on a mass scale seems likely to create conditions that are peculiar if not stressful to many people. While it does seem that those who shift from conventional procedures to computer-mediated work feel this stress most acutely, it’s impossible to forecast what adaptation to the abstraction of work will do to people over the long term. Social interaction is affected Doubtless, once information technology reorganizes a set of jobs, new patterns of communication and interaction become possible. In time, these patterns are likely to alter the social structure of an organization. When resources are centered in the information system, the terminal itself can become employees’ primary focus of interaction. This focus can lead people to feel isolated in an impersonal situation. For example, because functional operations in the back office of one bank have been reorganized, a clerical worker can complete an entire operation at his or her “professional” work station, rather than repeat a single procedure of it before passing the item on to someone else. Although employees I talked to were split in their attitudes toward the new back-office system, most of them agreed that it created an uncomfortable isolation. Because they had few remaining reasons to interact with co-workers, the local social network was fragmented. Decades of research have established the importance of social communities in the workplace and the lengths to which people will go to establish and maintain them. Since people will not easily give up the pleasures of the workplace community, they tend to see themselves at odds with the new technology that transforms the quality of work life. The comments of one employee illustrate this point. “I never thought I would feel this way, but I really do not like the computer. If a person makes a mistake, dealing with the computer to try and get that mistake corrected is so much red tape. And it’s just taken a lot of feeling out of it. You should have people working with people because they are going to give you what you want, and you’re going to get a better job all around.” In a very different kind of application, professionals and managers in the R&D organization of a large consumer goods company find the range of their interaction greatly extended with computer conferencing. While there is some evidence of reduced face-to-face interaction, the technology makes it relatively easy to initiate dialogues and form coalitions with people in other parts of the corporation. Clearly, information technology can offset social life in a variety of ways. It is important to realize, however, that this technology has powerful consequences for the structure and function of communication and social behavior in an organization. New possibilities for supervision & control The dream of the industrial engineer to create a perfectly timed and rationalized set of activities has never been perfectly realized. Because face-to-face supervision can be carried on only on a partial basis, employees usually find ways to pace their own activities to meet standards at a reasonable rate. Thus, traditionally, supervision depended on the quality of the relationship between supervisor and worker. If the relationship is a positive one, employees are likely to produce quality work without constant monitoring. If the relationship is adversarial, the monitoring will be continual. But because work accomplished through the medium of video terminals or other intelligent equipment can be recorded on a second-by-second basis, the industrial engineer’s presence can be built into all real-time activities. With immediate access to how much employees are producing through printouts or other visual displays, supervisors and managers can increase surveillance without depending on face-to-face supervision. Thus the interpersonal relationship can become less important to supervision than access to information on the quality and quantity of employee output. One bank supervisor described this new capability. “Instead of going to someone’s desk and physically pulling out files, you have the ability to review peoples’ work without their knowledge. So I think it keeps them on their toes.” Another variant of remote supervision involves controls that are automatically built into systems operations, as in the collections system described earlier. These rules are substitutes for a certain amount of supervisory effort. Because the system determines what accounts the collector should work on and in what order, a supervisor does not have to monitor collectors’ judgments on these issues. Managers also see automatic control as the organization’s defense against the potentially massive pollution of data that can occur through access by many people to an on-line real-time system. Remote supervision, automatic control, and greater access to subordinates’ information all become possible with computer-mediated work. In some cases, these capabilities are an explicit objective, but too often management employs them without sufficiently considering the potential human and organizational consequences. With remote supervision, many employees limit their own risk-taking behavior, such as spotting an error in the data and correcting it, developing a more effective approach to the work than the procedures established by the information system, or trying to achieve quality at the expense of keeping up with new production standards. One reason the initiative to design a custom-made approach to a particular task has become too risky is that many people have difficulty articulating why their approach might be superior to other alternatives. Usually, management has developed a clearly articulated model of the particular task in order to automate it, and if employees cannot identify their own models with equal clarity, they have little hope of having their views legitimated. Another reason for decreased employee initiative is that the more an information system can control the details of the job, the less even relatively trivial risk-taking opportunities are available. Finally, the monitoring capabilities increase the likelihood that a supervisor will notice a deviation from standard practice. As one bank employee noted. “Sometimes I have a gut feeling I would rather do something another way. But, because it is all going to be in the computer, it changes your mind. If somebody wouldn’t listen to the reason why you did it that way, well, it could cause you quite a problem.” Another frequent response to the new relationships of supervision and control involves perceptions of authority in the workplace. Employees can tend to see technology less as an instrument of authority than as a source of it. For instance, one group of bank employees with an especially easygoing manager described the work pace on their computer-mediated jobs as hard-driving, intense, and at times unfair, but thought the manager was friendly, relaxed, and fair-minded. One collector told about the difference in her attitudes toward her work under the manual system and under the automated system. “When I worked with the account cards, I knew how to handle my responsibilities. I felt, ‘Hey! I can handle this!’ Now I come in every day with a defeatist attitude, because I’m dealing with the tube every day. I can’t beat it. People like to feel not that they are necessarily ahead of the game, but that they have a chance. With the tube I don’t have a chance.” While this employee knows that her manager is the actual authority in the office, and that he is in turn accountable to other managers, she has an undeniable feeling that the system, too, is a kind of authority. It is the system she must fight, and, if she wins, it is the system she vanquishes. In the Volvo plant in Kalmar, Sweden, a computer system was installed to monitor assembly operations.1 A feedback device was programmed to flash a red light signalling a quality control problem. The workers protested against the device, insisting that the supervisory function be returned to a foreman. They preferred to answer to a human being with whom they could negotiate, argue, and explain rather than to a computer whose only means of “communication” was unilateral. In effect, they refused to allow the computer to become, at least in this limited situation, an authority. Yet clearly, the issue would never have arisen in the first place were the technology not capable of absorbing the characteristics of authority. Finally, these capacities of information systems can do much to alter the relationships among managers themselves. A division or plant manager can often leverage a certain amount of independence by maintaining control of key information. Though a manager might have to present the data in monthly or quarterly reports, he or she has some control over the amount and format. With information technology, however, senior managers in corporate headquarters increasingly have access to real-time systems that display the day-to-day figures of distinct parts of the company’s business. For instance, a division vice president can be linked to the information system that transmits raw production data from a processing plant in another state. Such data can provide the vice president with a view of the plant that only the plant manager or mid-level managers in the operation previously had. This new access raises several questions for a corporation. First, some policy decisions must be confronted that address the kind of information appropriate to each level of management. Top managers can quickly find themselves inundated with raw data that they do not have the time to understand. It also creates a tendency for top managers to focus on the past and present when they should be planning the future. It would seem that this new access capability would expand top management’s opportunities to monitor and direct and, therefore, improve the performance of subordinate managers. But as the on-line availability of such information reaches across management hierarchies (in some companies all the way to board chairpersons), reduced risk taking and its effects begin to take hold. Managers are reluctant to make decisions on the basis of information that their superiors receive simultaneously. As one plant manager said to his boss in division headquarters: “I’m telling you, Bob, if you’re going to be hooked up to the data from the pumps, I’m not going to manage them anymore. You’ll have to do it.” Birth of the information environment Another consequence of information technology is more difficult to label, but its effects are undeniable. I call it the “information environment.” It refers to a quality of organizational life that emerges when the computer mediates jobs and begins to influence both horizontal and vertical relationships. In the information environment, people generally have greater access to data and, in particular, data relevant to their own decision making. The capacity for follow-up and reorganizing increases as information retrieval and communication can occur with greater ease and convenience than ever before. One effect of this immediate access to information is a rise in the volume of transactions or operations. This increase, in turn, compresses time and alters the rhythm of work. While people were once satisfied if a computer system responded in 24 hours, those who work with computers now are impatient if information takes more than five seconds to appear. Timely and reliable functioning of the system determines workers’ output, and these effects extend up the managerial ladder. Once managers become accustomed to receiving in two hours a report that once took two weeks to compile, they will consider any delay a burden. This speed of access, retrieval, and information processing is allegedly the key to improving the productivity of the organization, but few organizations have seriously considered the appropriate definition of productivity in their own operations. In the meantime, more transactions, reports, and information are generated in an ever-shorter amount of time. Responses to the information environment usually are accompanied by feelings about power and orderliness. To some people, the increased access to information enhances their power over the contingencies of their work. An account officer for one bank states: “I never had such a complete picture of a particular customer before. I can switch around the format of the base for my reporting purposes and get a full picture of where the bank is making money. This gives me a new power and effectiveness in my work.” While most people agree that the information environment makes the workplace more orderly, responses to this orderliness tend to be bipolar. Some see the order as “neat and nice,” while others perceive it as increasing the regimentation of the workplace. Responses of two collections managers illustrate these differences. The first described the system this way. “The computer simply alleviates a lot of paperwork. Everything is lined up for you instead of you having to do it yourself. If you are sloppy, the system organizes you.” Another manager in the same organization regards the collections system in a different way. “Things were a lot more relaxed before the tubes. Before, you scheduled your day yourself; now the machine lines it up for you. This means a more rigid environment because we can track things better.” Greater regimentation can also affect the environment of the professional. A vice president in one organization where professionals have come to rely heavily on electronic mail and computer conferencing puts it this way. “I used to make notes to myself on things I had to follow up. Now those notes go into my electronic mail system. The system automatically tracks these things and they are there in front of me on the screen if I haven’t followed up yet. Nothing slips through the cracks, but certainly for the way professionals usually operate, it’s more regimented.” Many of the managers and professionals I talked to are wary of systems that seem to encroach on their judgment, their freedom, or the “artistry” of their professional assessments. Instead of feeling that increased information augments their power, these people resist information systems that they see limiting their freedom or increasing the measurability of their work. At present, most professionals and managers function in fairly ambiguous environments. Information is imperfectly exchanged (often in corridors, washrooms, or over lunch), and considerable lag time usually occurs before the quality of decisions can be assessed. A continual flow of complete information, however, reduces ambiguity. For example, in the marketing area of one bank, an information system provides complete profiles of all accounts while it assesses their profitability according to corporate criteria. Top management and systems developers believed the system could serve as a constant source of feedback to account officers and senior managers, allowing them to better manage their account activities and maximize fee-based revenues. But some bankers saw the flow of “perfect” information as not only reducing ambiguity but also limiting their opportunities for creative decisions and resisted using it. Limited information may create uncertainty in which people make errors of judgment, but it also provides a “free space” for inspiration. This free space is fundamental to the psychology of professional work. The account officers in the bank had traditionally been motivated by the opportunity to display their artistry as bankers, but as increased information organizes the context of their work, the art in their jobs is reduced. Employees in back-office clerical jobs also tend to perceive the increased time and volume demands and the measurability of operations as limits on their opportunities to experience a sense of mastery over the work. To overcome these effects, many of the collectors keyed fictitious data into the system of account files. Their managers were confronted with high productivity figures that did not match the size of monthly revenues. Many managers first respond to such a situation by searching out ways to exert more control over the work process. I am convinced that the more managers attempt to control the process, the more employees will find ways to subvert that control. This response is particularly likely when outsmarting the system becomes the new ground on which to develop and test one’s mastery. Managers may dismiss these subversive activities as “resistance to change,” but in many cases this resistance is the only way employees can respond to the changes they face. Such resistance can also be understood as a positive phenomenon—it is evidence of an employee’s identification with the job. Listening to the Resistance Critics of technology tend to fall into one of three camps. Some bemoan new developments and see them as a particular form of human debasement and depersonalization. Others are ready to applaud any form of technology as progress toward some eventual conquest of dumb nature. Finally, others argue that technology is neutral and its meaning depends on the uses to which human beings press its application. I have found none of these views sufficient. It is true that information technology provides a particularly flexible set of technical possibilities, and thus can powerfully embody the assumptions and goals of those whom it is designed to serve. Yet, while the value and meaning of a given application must be read, in part, from management’s intentions, beliefs, and commitments, this does not imply the ultimate neutrality of the technology itself. To say that information technology is neutral is like saying an airplane is neutral because it can fly to either Washington or Moscow. We know that airplanes are not neutral because we all live in a world that has been radically altered by the facts of air travel—the globe has been shrunk, time and space have collapsed. If one accepts that technology is not neutral, it follows that information technology must have attributes that are unique in the world view they impose and the experience of work to which they give shape. The flexibility, memory, and remote access capabilities of information systems create new management possibilities and, therefore, choices in the design of an application. This argument suggests three general areas for management deliberation and action in the deployment of new information systems. The first concerns policies that shape the quality of the employment relationship. The second involves attitudes toward managerial control, and the third concerns basic beliefs about the nature of an organization and the role of management. The quality of the employment relationship Because the computer mediation of work can have direct consequences for virtually every area of human resource management including skills training, career paths, the social environment, peer relationships, supervision, control, decision making, authority, and organization design, managers need to think through the kind of workplace they want to foster. They need to make design choices that reflect explicit human resource management policies. For example, consider the automated collections system I described earlier. Although the system minimizes individual decision making, most managers I interviewed in that organization believe that collector skill and judgment are critical variables in the organization’s ability to generate payments and have compelling financial data to support that view. A management policy commitment to maintaining skill levels, providing challenging jobs, and promoting collector loyalty and motivation could have resulted in an information system that preserves the entrepreneurial aspects of the collector’s job while rationalizing its administration with on-line recordkeeping. But to assess the likely consequences of an approach to automation that strictly rationalizes procedures, managers need to understand the human logic of a job. In many cases, this human logic holds the clue to the motivational aspects of the job that should be preserved in the conversion to new technology. What do managers do when faced with some of the more intrinsic features of information technology? First, they need to understand the kinds of skill demands that the computer mediation of work generates, and to construct educational programs that allow employees to develop the competencies that are most relevant to the new environment. If a more theoretical comprehension of the task is required for effective utilization of the information system, then employees should be given the opportunity to develop this conceptual understanding. If an information system is likely to reduce the sense (if not the fact) of individual control over a task, is it possible to redesign the job to reinvest it with a greater self-managing capacity? As elements of supervision and coordination are loaded into jobs that have been partially drained of challenge, new learning and career development opportunities can open up. The astonishing quantity of information that is available can be used to increase employees’ feedback, learning, and self-management rather than to deskill and routinize their jobs or remotely supervise them. New systems are often presented with the intention of providing “information resources” for more creative problem solving. Unless employees are actually given the knowledge and authority to utilize such resources in the service of more complex tasks, these systems will be undermined, either through poor utilization or more direct forms of resistance. The focus of managerial control Because of the many self-management opportunities the information resource makes possible, managers may have to rethink some classic notions of managerial control. When industrial work exerted stringent demands on the placement and timing of physical activity, managers focused on controlling bodies and stipulating the precise ways in which they should perform. With the burgeoning of office work, physical discipline was less important than reading or writing and, above all, interpersonal behavior. Because people needed to learn how to behave with superiors, subordinates, and the public, managers began to control less what people did with their bodies and more what they did with one another—their communication, teamwork, meeting behavior, and so forth. With computer-mediated work, neither physical activity nor interpersonal behavior appear to be the most appropriate targets of managerial control. Instead, patterns of attention, learning, and mental engagement become the keys to effectiveness and high-quality performance. Obviously, people have always had to “pay attention” to their work in order to accomplish it properly. But the quality of attention computer-mediated work requires is essentially different. For instance, in almost all accounts of routine work, researchers report that employees are day-dreaming and bantering with one another while they accomplish their tasks. Of course, they must pay attention with their eyes, but not so much with their brains. In contrast, people concentrating on a visual display unit must pay a very different sort of attention. If employees are to understand and properly respond to information, they must be mentally involved. Managers can experiment to find how to make the most of people’s attending and learning qualities as well as their overall engagement in the information environment. One observation that emerges from my current field research is that imposing traditional supervisory approaches on the computer-mediated environment can create considerable dysfunction. Supervisors and managers who concentrate on the physical and interpersonal behavior of employees working with information systems simply exacerbate tensions instead of creating an environment that nurtures the kind of learning and attention computer-mediated work makes necessary and compensating for some of its less obvious but potentially negative attributes. The nature of organization & management With information technology, managers will do a variety of tasks that others once did for them. Because of this, we are likely to see a gradual shift in the overall shape of the organization from a pyramid to something closer to a diamond shape—with a diminishing clerical support staff, swelling numbers of professionals and middle managers, and a continually more remote, elite, policy-making group of senior managers. While these considerations should be of central importance to management policy in the coming years, as a society we are sure to see a continuing challenge to the salience of work and the workplace in our daily lives. The traditional importance of occupational distinctiveness may be further eroded as what it means to “accomplish a task” undergoes a fundamental change. When a person’s primary work consists of monitoring or interacting with a video screen, it may become more difficult to answer the questions, “Who am I?” and “What do I do?” Identification with an occupational role may diminish, while the transferability of on-the-job skills increases. Will this have implications for individual commitment to an organization and for the relative importance of work and nonwork activities? Information technology is also likely to introduce new forms of collective behavior. When the means of production becomes dependent on electronic technology and information flows, it is no longer inevitable that, as in the case of the weavers, work be either collective or synchronous. As long as a terminal and communications links are available, people will be able to perform work in neighborhood centers, at home, or on the road. At the same time, electronic technology is altering the traditional structure and function of communication within the organization. Who interacts with whom in the organization? Can the neat chain of command hierarchy be maintained? Should it be? What does it take to lead or influence others when communication itself becomes computer mediated? Finally, who is likely to gain or lose as we make the transition to this environment? These developments make it necessary to rethink basic conceptions of the nature of organization and management. What is an organization if people do not have to come face to face in order to accomplish their work? Does the organization itself become an abstraction? What happens to the shared purpose and commitment of members if their face-to-face interaction is reduced? Similarly, how should an “abstract” organization be managed? If information technology is to live up to its promise for greater productivity, managers need to consider its consequences for human beings and the qualities of their work environments. The demands for a thoughtful and energetic management response go deeper than the need for a “friendly interface” or “user involvement.” The underlying nature of this technology requires understanding; the habitual assumptions used in its design must surface. Managers’ ability to meet these demands will be an important determinant of the quality of work in future organizations. 1. “Social Effects of Automation,” International Federation of Automated Control Newsletter, No. 6, September 1978.

New Worlds of Computer-Mediated Work

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