Pleasure, Power and Technology

Some Tales of Gender, Engineering, and the Cooperative Workplace

Sally Hacker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138245266
• eBook ISBN: 9781351995924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

How are the pleasures of making things work turned into processes of domination? Are there links between gender and military institutions? Does eroticism have something to do with engineering? In this book, first published in 1989, Sally Hacker explores the answers to these and other provocative questions about our attitudes toward work and leisure. Drawing from her broad experience as a sociologist, feminist and student of engineering, Hacker helps us to understand the impact of technology on our society and how feminist principles can be used to make work life more egalitarian and more humane. In the first part of the book, the author examines various examples of the masculinization of power, ranging from military institutions to the mechanisation of farm labour, computer technology and affirmative action. In the second part, Hacker presents the results of her research on Mondragon, the world's largest cooperative workplace, located in Spain. Hacker reaches surprising conclusions about gender and technology at Mondragon, where, in spite of the community's egalitarian philosophy, gender inequality was as pervasive as in capitalist and socialist systems.

Part I
Gender, Technology, and Work: Thought and Action

Chapter 1
Tools of Pleasure and Power

My older sister Sue and I helped some, but mostly squatted and watched, as Dad dug the foot-deep hole, filled it with cement, and eased the six-foot piece of plumbing pipe upright in the mix. When it set, he fastened an elbow joint to the pipe’s top. It held the horizontal bar whose other end lodged firmly into the old maple. He made two trapezes and a swing from lengths of chain, small pipes, and a slab of wood, and hung them from the bar. The dozen, or so kids in the backyard tribe gathered to see what he would do next. A lower horizontal bar off to the right supported the teeter-totter, a long, flat board nailed to iron circles the bar ran through. Then came the Tarzan rope, which swung from the maple’s largest limb, with a great knot at the bottom for a

Off to the left of the tree, another bar supported the two-seater ferris wheel. This bar ran through the middle of two ten-foot boards, held apart by a couple of two-foot iron pipes at either end. Dad hung a small swing seat on chains from each pipe. One person slid into the bottom seat; another climbed the latter to the platform built for this purpose, and (very carefully) got into the top seat. Thus balanced, each rider pumped it like a swing-back and up, then over the top and down again, as slow or as fast as we wanted. The pace of this muscle-powered machine was determined by mutual delight, or through a lot of hollering, threats, negotiating, or foot dragging when all else failed. Sometimes some of the boys dumped each other out on, their heads, then we kicked them out for a day.

My favorite was the trolley. Dad wrapped a cable high up around the old maple, above the platform, and winched it tightly around the other tree next to the house. He bolted the trolley to a pulley that ran along the cable. The trolley itself was an upside-down T. We drew it up to the platform with a length of twine, held onto the upright, climbed on, lifted off, and flew down the cable, angled so you could bash into the tree at the other end of the yard with just the right amount of force. Maximal excitement, minimal damage, although over the years, the maple near the house showed a shiny barkless circle from the battering by small feet.

In some ten years, there were only three injuries as I recall. Ruth Ann broke her wrist on the ferris wheel, getting into the top seat before the bottom was loaded. I chipped a front tooth on the trapeze bar from standing too close while I pushed Nicky. And Virginia, who liked to let the Tarzan rope swing down its pendulum arc until you could barely jump for it from the top of the platform, missed and plowed up several feet of southern Illinois soil with her chin; lost no teeth, broke no bones.

Sue and her friends organized a carnival at one or two cents a ride, complete with halloween horror shows in the basement. We sold half a carton of what we thought was dad’s homemade root beer for a nickel each before the discovery we’d grabbed the wrong box and were selling the homemade real stuff. All proceeds from the carnival were divided evenly among those who worked. In this one-shot venture, it never occurred to us to consider the ownership of the means of pleasure in this distribution process.

Other actions grew from our collective and individual interest in pleasure. All were not successful. Our town had no swimming pool. Once a month or so, Mom and Dad loaded the old Graham with kids and drove ten miles to the next town for a swim. One summer we learned that some of the townsmen, Dad included, planned a small airport, some said to enhance economic development. The backyard kids demonstrated through the three blocks of downtown, beating pans and lids, carrying signs demanding a swimming pool first. We got an airport.

Mom was the first of a farm family, a family with many children but few acres, to move into town and take a job in the Kodak shop. Sue and I once found a purple velvet fringed and sequined dress in the back of her closet. Much to our surprise, we learned this fairly staid couple had a past. In the days of flappers, speakeasies, and big bands, they tooled around the countryside on a two-chain-driven Indian motocycle, or in an old Model T, held parties in the backyard and picnics in the country. They followed the stories of Mother Jones, whose tomb is ten miles away in Mt. Olive, with some interest.

Mom-solid, strong, and fun-loving-managed the backyard with a firm hand but usually let us solve our own problems. She fixed lemonade or cocoa depending on the season, cleaned and labeled a small drinking can for each of us, and lined the tins up on the sill outside the kitchen window. Now-homemaker, wife, and mother, yet she encouraged an exuberant equality among the children, discouraged gender differentiation with a cold look or a sharp word. She admonished: “Be fair!” “Take turns!” and “No running that trolley between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m.!” (Dad worked as a clerk in the post office starting at 4:00 p.m., and napped afternoons.) She enjoyed the backyard most, I think. Dad liked to make her laugh, and it was a kick.

Technology is defined as the organization of material and energy to accomplish work. Raising children is work, and surely the social and machine technics of the backyard helped accomplish it. Work has bad press these days, and for good reason. Some oppose it to leisure. But technology is strongly related to pleasure. It has its sensual and erotic dimensions, one of the themes of this book. Technology is, however, also gendered and thus reflects differences in power between men and women. The liberation of technology, work, and pleasure in general requires the elimination or diffusion of gender. Structured differences in power between men and women are the stuff of gender, from which it emerges, and which gender helps maintain (de Laure tis 1987). Work also can be a pleasure. Rather than the onerous tasks men dream of automating, work can be thought of as an opportunity to express ourselves most fully. I take Marx’s more hopeful definition as a goal, that work can be an expression of human creativity and a source of freedom (Street 1983). When I talk about technology and work, I’m thinking about the backyard.

Some Terms and Definitions

Most of us do not live and work consistently within a fully developed theoretical framework. In fact, most of us hold some notions that are quite contradictory to other notions we believe just as strongly. Sometimes we say one thing in theory and do another in practice. This is perhaps unavoidable. But contradictions are not randomly distributed through social life, nor are they of equal severity. They appear today with striking force in the three areas of concern I address-gender, technology, and cooperativism. My hope is that the stories in this book will help clarify some of the contradictions within and between our theory and practice. As Cynthia Cockburn (1983) puts it in her analysis of gender and the printing trades, we are limited by our social positions and characteristics. Each makes conflicting demands on our thoughts and feelings and alliances, such as traditional notions of gender and strong beliefs in equality of opportunity. These contradictions are painful. They continually demand new decisions to be made, alliances be maintained or ended, sides taken, new syntheses discovered.

Such elaborations of paradox and confusion are painstaking and often painful. But it is precisely out of the process of bringing such contradictions to consciousness and facing up to illogicality or inconsistency, that a person takes a grip on his or her own fate. Politically it is of vital importance that we understand how we change. (Cockburn 1983:13)

First, a brief explication of terms. We can think of a social theory as an explanation, on a fairly general level, of why things happen as they do. Perhaps a man joins an office or workplace and advances faster than a woman who helped train him, or women with more education and training than he. Black or Hispanic women do not move up as rapidly as do Anglo women. Or, you do not see as many women over 45 in high-level positions as you do men. Perhaps among men or women, those who have passed courses in calculus, have a degree in engineering, or have had military experience are considered the best people for upper-level management positions. Or, the workplace structure is a very tall pyramid: Those at the top work with their minds and make broad-ranging decisions; those at the bottom work with their hands at repetitive tasks, or do lots of “face work” to please other people. Some people, firms, industries, and countries can’t find the resources they need for social projects, while others can. How did things get that way? How do we explain these patterns? Who benefits? And at whose expense?

There are other patterns in social behavior. Many women have similar complaints about the men they date, with whom they live or work, or merely pass in the streets. People “gender” the social and physical world (Mother Nature), thinking some things are masculine, some are feminine. We gender most experience, from tools and their use to erotic styles. Women everywhere still do most of the housework and child care. Concerns about sexuality and family are considered private and personal, rarely analyzed along with technology and work. The stories we tell to explain these patterns are nascent social theories.

Technology is not simply machines. Technology can be defined as the organization of materials and energy to accomplish work. Work is a preparation, a making, a shaping, something upon which labor is expended. The area of leisure studies indicates how difficult it can become to draw the line between work and leisure. We most often think of military and industrial technology, but we can also think of technologies of child care or housework, leisure or education. The important point is that technology is both mechanical and social.

Machines and systems are designed, developed, and applied by people. They do not fall from the sky. They are designed and used with a great deal of passion (Levy 1984; Keller 1985; Kidder 1981). Technology also comprises highly complex systems of social relations. So, by the term technology, I mean the machines and the social relations (Rothschild 1983; Noble 1984).

Most often we think of the social relations of production as the way institutions and people arrange for and accomplish work. Some of those social relations are sensuous-appealing to or derived from the senses. This is a special aspect of technology. Some relations are also sensual, pleasurable in a more specific way, appealing to sexual desire in particular. Later, I explore the relationship between technology and eroticism, the erotic being that which is designed to arouse sexual desire.

I use gender to mean the set of beliefs and expectations considered appropriate to males or females.

Generally, we react against injustice when we see it, and often try to do something about it. Sometimes we simply pursue our own personal goals within the system. But the system rests firmly on its patriarchal base.

This path, then, does little to change the organization of gender, technology, or work that constrains our lives. At other, better times, we join together to create new social forms.

This book addresses the relationships among gender, technology, and work, at a time when major social changes appear imminent in all three. Usually these changes occur within the dominant patriarchal framework of civilized societies, but there are always such counter tendencies as feminism, appropriate technology and environmental movements, and the movement for democratic workplaces and communities. Only in the most comprehensive movements for social change do we find these tendencies combined. A second theme of this book is that of the relationships between military institutions and gender, technology, and work. Military institutions and their technical arm, engineering, are among the foremost yet most often overlooked patriarchal institutions. They provide us with some of the first instances of structured gender hierarchy, and provide hierarchical models for the organization of technology and work. Military institutions have a beginning, as discussed in Chapter 4. This makes it easier to imagine life without them.

A Brief Overview of the History of Technology

Lewis Mumford, eminent historian and ace storyteller, captures images of creativity and freedom in his accounts of the human experience with technology and work. According to Mumford (1967–1970), tool-making is less central to our nature than symbol-making, linguistic symbols in particular. The nonmaterial parts of our culture enhanced our technology more than the reverse. Our most important tool, Mumford (1972) says, is our “own mind-activated body,” with “its extraordinary lability and plasticity” (p. 78), allowing us to use the environment and our own inner resources so effectively. Life-enhancing cultural work such as song and ritual, dance and play are more important than merely utilitarian manual work, which is but a piece of our biotechnics, our total equipment for living.

Mumford’s radical proposal is that our need for a common symbolic culture, our need to shape and channel the “tumultuous energy of our psycho-social expressive capacity,” had more to do with technological transformations than did our need to increase the food supply or otherwise control the forces of nature. “Foraging called less for tools than for sharp observation… wide experimental sampling… and a shrewd interpretation of the effects… upon the human organism” (1972:80). Taste and formal beauty, he notes-color and form of flower, perfume, texture and spiciness-along with nutrition, played their role in horticultural discoveries. The Neolithic domestication of plants and animals owed much

to an intense subjective concentration of sexuality in all its manifestations …. Plant selection, hybridization, fertilization, manuring, seeding, castration were the products of an imaginative cultivation of sexuality, whose first evidence one finds tens of thousands of years earlier.… The Neolithic garden, like gardens in many simpler cultures today, was probably a mixture of food plants, dye plants, medicinals, and ornamentals-all treated as equally essential for life. (1972:81)

Even the classic concept of technics did not distinguish as we do today “between industrial production and art,… one side respecting objective conditions and functions, the other responding to subjective needs and expressing sharable feelings and meanings” (1972:80).

Over the centuries, Neolithic horticultural societies gave way to agricultural; children became economically and politically useful, and it became women’s role to produce them. In some societies, for reasons both economic and political, wives began to settle near their husband’s families, and the passing on of names and things was reckoned through fathers rather than through mothers. There, with men living near their kin, and women the relative outsiders, fraternal interest groups emerged. These men’s groups strengthened their solidarity through reproductive rituals such as circumcision, and enhanced control over women and children as resources through rituals of marriage and childbirth (Paige and Paige 1981).

In contrast to more egalitarian prestate societies, fraternal interest groups became small bands of soldiers, men living together and largely living off the work of women, children, and older folk who provided their food and comfort (Weber 1968). Unlike “warrior,” a tribal member who sometimes fought, “soldier” in time became a full-time role. It is our thesis (Hacker and Hacker 1987) that these military bands illustrate the beginnings of armies and other military institutions characterizing patriarchal societies, such as states and industries with the primary purpose of providing for equipment, weapons, and fortifications. Military institutions demand societies organized for their support. Separate, differentiated from society in general, military institutions emerged some 5000 years ago. They arose with, and depended upon, women’s structured subordination to men via the military. One might say the military is the oldest industry and soldiering the oldest profession. Strong bonds and behavior appropriate for hierarchical, unequal relations between and among men and women develop—the eroticism of power and powerlessness. The social energy of eroticism is thus caught, and shapes institutions, labor processes, the organization of work and of technology. Mumford refers to this hierarchical organization as “authoritarian technics,” as opposed to the life-centered “biotechnics” of the Neolithic era.

One might rather argue such a prominence for religious roles and institutions rather than for military. Indeed, the structure of these patriarchal societies both reflected and was reflected in their religions. Mumford describes not only the transformation to hierarchical state societies, but the accompanying, worldwide transformation to patriarchal religions, such as that honoring “Arum Re, the Sun God, who characteristically created the world out of his own semen without female cooperation” (Mumford 1972:81). The reigning deity of the dominant religion in our own culture was modest by comparison, using merely clay.

No institution, including military, is monolithic. Interaction between military and society produces change in each. Our argument for the exceptionally powerful influence of military institutions on gender, technology, and work in all civilized societies, however, is linked to the pervasive influence of military discipline and hierarchical structure on the organization of work, the labor process, the family, and all other major social institutions. As Weber (1968) put it, “Military discipline gives birth to all discipline.… It has always in some way affected the structure of the state, the economy, and possibly the family” (pp. 1153, 1155). A few older men with positions of power and authority commanded a hierarchical organization of people disciplined for performance of specialized pieces of a whole project. Engineering was also a military project, the term civil engineering coined in the eighteenth century to distinguish it from more typically military pursuits (B. Hacker 1986). The first engineering schools, as was West Point, were military academies. Graduates often reshaped workplaces after these military institutions. Work became a burden in patriarchal societies, hierarchical rather than cooperative, a single task separate from other biological and social activities. The ancient dreams of power and omnipotence, the elimination of work, says Mumford, are with us still.

It remained for feminists to suggest-and then, through women’s studies scholars in literature, history, and anthropology, to explicate-women’s active agency in technological transformation (Daly 1973; Boulding 1976; Stone 1976; Ortner 1972; Griffin 1978; Bernard 1981; Starhawk 1982; Stanley 1983; Lerner 1986). It is surprising, however, that so little feminist attention is directed toward military institutions. We puzzle over the “takeover,” the “worldwide subordination of women,” the “creation of patriarchy.” Yet we rarely analyze military institutions, primary models of patriarchal forms of social organization, which were most salient in these processes.

Thus, military institutions supported gender hierarchy, in times of challenge to it, in the first state societies. During the Middle Ages, state and military once again guided relations among gender, technology, and work; as the size of government, and the extent ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgment
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I GENDER, TECHNOLOGY, AND WORK: THOUGHT AND ACTION
• PART II MONDRAGON: GENDER, TECHNOLOGY, AND POWER IN COOPERATIVE WORKPLACES
• Raising Hell: A Sketch of the Sociologist as Intellectual and Activist
• References
• Index