In this episode, we discuss Shoshana Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power that examines several cases of organizations introducing information technologies in the workplace hoping to improve organizational performance, transparency, and collaboration but instead dehumanized the workplace and ushered in new ways of managerial surveillance. The book was based on ten years of field study in multiple organizations from a variety of industries, but the themes were essential the same. The promises of such technologies were unfulfilled because of the changes they demanded of the organizational power structures.

The studies were done in the early 1980s as mainframe computers – machines that could fill a whole room and that only the largest companies could afford – gave way to the early desktop computers. Rapid advances in software promised opportunities to automate the management of industrial processes, hoping to make it easier to spot and correct troubles and creating records of organizational activity that could be examined and used for training and coaching. Workers could use the information to collaborate and work together better and satisfaction would improve.

Alas, in too many cases the results were the opposite. At first, workers may have benefited from the technologies, but too many quickly found themselves losing touch with the job. Moreover, managers found that the increased transparency and democratization of information threatened their sense of power and underlying assumptions behind managerial authority. Managers would soon undermine the benefits of such systems and instead cause their evolution into employee surveillance systems, hoping to increase worker efficiency and reasserting power distance between the supervisors and the supervised.

Fast forward to present day, and many of Zuboff’s findings ring true, as she shows in her follow-on work Surveillance Capitalism. But In the Age of the Smart Machine showed that the current day was far from pre-ordained, and in her conclusion she offered strategies for combating the reassertion of power structures and creating organizations that informate – that use the technology to its fullest to benefit workers, managers, and the organization. Could such strategies work even today?

Read with us:

Zuboff, S. (1988). In the age of the smart machine: The future of work and power. Basic Books.

Other Talking About Organizations Podcast episodes referenced:

Episode 95. Labor-Management Relations — Tom Lupton

Title Image Credit: Unsplash.com; creative commons license.