The Machine at Work

Technology, Work and Organization

Keith Grint, Steve Woolgar

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745609256, 9780745609249
• eBook ISBN: 9780745669175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This highly topical book is a concise and accessible account of the relationship between technology and work. Firstly, it reviews and critically assesses a variety of recent approaches to the social and cultural dimensions of technology. Secondly, it examines the implications of these new approaches for existing ideas about the nature of technology and work organization.

At the core of much thinking about technology is the assumption that the technical character and capacity of artefacts is given. The enduring image of deus ex machina captures the idea that it is the essential capacity 'within' a technology which, in the end, accounts for the way we organize ourselves, our work and other life experiences. Recent work in the sociology of technology, by contrast, sets out relativist and constructivist accounts of technology, which begin to challenge this central assumption.

The Machine at Work includes a reinterpretation of the Luddites; a review of the social processes of development in information technology; a reassessment of theories of the role of technology in work; and an analysis of the common limitations of some constructivist and feminist perspectives on technology. The book argues that only a commitment to a particular conception of constructivism enables the kind of radical rethinking about technology and work relations that is needed.

This engaging and informative text will be of interest to students in a range of subject areas - from sociology, organizational theory and behaviour, to industrial relations, management and business studies.

1

Theories of Technology

The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847

Introduction

It is commonly said that technology is consequential for the way we organize our lives. This book sets out to interrogate this aphorism. We take issue with its implicit assumption that some inherent property or characteristic of technology accounts for the impact of technology on our lives. We propose instead that myriad other aspects of our relation with technology must be taken into account if we are to achieve a useful understanding of its consequences. These other aspects include: our attitudes towards technology, our conceptions of what technology can and cannot do, our expectations and assumptions about the possibilities of technological change, and the various ways in which technology is represented, in the media and in organizations. We aim to provide a critical exploration of the view that these latter aspects of technology are pre-eminently consequential for the ways in which we organize our work, institutions, leisure and learning activities. This approach requires us to understand different ways of thinking about and representing technology at least as much as differences in the technology itself. Indeed, in what follows we argue for the need to treat the very idea of ‘the technology itself with considerable caution.

This chapter reviews existing perspectives on technology and explores the nature and implications of approaches which promote scepticism about ‘the technology itself. We start by examining a variety of definitions of technology in order both to illustrate their wide diversity and to note the implications of these definitions for attempts to understand technology. In particular we note the central importance of assumptions about the capacity and capability of technology – what it is and what it does. We then consider some of the more significant perspectives on, or theories of, technology, starting with technological determinism. This perspective holds that humans (human behaviour and even the course of history) are largely determined by, rather than having influence over, technology. It is a position which has acquired the status of a shibboleth. But, although ‘technological determinism’ has become the target of widespread criticism, it is difficult to find many who admit to holding this position.

We then proceed to examine various responses to technological determinism: socio-technical systems theory, the social shaping approach, socio-technical alignments and actor-network theory. It turns out that many of the more popular current approaches to the topic rescue technology from the clutches of technological determinism, only to reaccommodate it as one among several independent variables which determine action and behaviour. Although pluralist approaches no longer treat technology as the single (or even necessarily predominant) determining variable, it is still usually treated as a variable which stands outside social analysis. Thus, whereas in recent years many traditional sociological variables such as class, gender, organization and power have been increasingly treated as social constructions, many pluralist approaches continue to treat technology as largely impervious to the interpretative activities of humans. In these pluralist treatments, technology is assumed to have objective effects which can be measured and predicted and which are largely unaffected by the human actors involved. We refer to this tendency as ‘technicism’.¹ We suggest that despite disavowals of technological determinism – in the sense that technology is no longer treated as straightforwardly facilitative or constraining – many recent accounts retain elements of technicism because they do not regard the capacity of the technology as analytically problematic.

This then enables us to examine the possibilities of pushing the sceptical line further. We consider what benefits accrue from a perspective which tries to maintain a sceptical stance with respect to technology as well as to all other actants, human or non-human. The possibilities of sustained scepticism are developed and refined throughout the rest of the book in order to demonstrate how this approach might be fruitfully employed in areas beyond the conventional remit of technology studies.

Defining the issues

What is technology? The answer carries a huge array of conceptual baggage that colours our assumptions about the significance of technology. The term technology derives from the original Greek ‘tekhne’ meaning art or skill. According to Collins English Dictionary (1979), technology is (1) the application of practical or mechanical sciences to industry or commerce; (2) the methods, theory and practices governing such application; (3) the total knowledge and skills available to any human society for industry, art, science, etc.

Several authors have emphasized the need to distinguish different aspects of technology. For example, Jayaweera (1987) suggests that ‘technology’ should first be distinguished from ‘invention’. ‘Inventions’ in themselves are neutral; ‘technologies’ are inventions which are organized expressions of a particular culture’s productive structures. Thus, developments such as gunpowder and the printing-press were Chinese in origin but since, according to Jayaweera, they did not affect the way the Europeans used them to expand their empires, they should be considered (neutral) inventions rather than technologies. Technologies only occur where ‘within that society there is a particular meeting of economic, social and political circumstances which automatically guarantees its exploitation and conversion into an instrument of economic and social power’ (Jayaweera, 1987: 202). This approach thus advances a model of technology based on the realization of technical potential through the operation of conducive structures and circumstances. Notably, it is not that the technical potential of an artefact is perceived differently by various actors. Instead, the take-up and exploitation of the (actual) artefact depends upon (extraneous) social factors. We shall meet a similar form of argument later when discussing the ideas of Habermas and Hill.

Penn (1982) proposes a distinction between ‘technology’ and ‘technicality’. ‘Technology’, for Penn ‘does not simply mean machinery around which there is a given “logic” of working or pyrotechnical relations; it involves negotiated structures of producing.’ Technology, as opposed to ‘technicality’, is dependent upon ‘the conflict between agents of capital and representatives of sections of workers’ (1982: 108). Although he underlines the importance of linkages between machinery and humans, Penn appears to substitute the independent nature of technology with the independent nature of ‘technicality’, which remains undefined.

Kaplinsky (1984) distinguishes between technology and technique. Technology refers to the general material content or process, such as microelectronics; technique refers to the way in which the general technology is developed for a specific purpose, often in conjunction with other technologies or work processes. A numerically controlled machine tool, therefore, is a technique. This distinction, between the broad technology and its particular application within a technique, allows Kaplinsky to resolve what he calls ‘the paradox of technology’: ‘the very technology which has the potential to liberate human beings has in fact had the consequence of making life considerably more uncomfortable for the mass of the population’ (1984: 170). For Kaplinsky, the movement from technology to techniques is the result of social rather than technical factors. These social factors include class relations which ensure the technology is refined into a technique that deskills workers, furthers the division of labour and supports a hierarchical system of control. They also involve the ‘military imperative’ which secures research funding for technological research, especially that leading to greater levels of sophistication. Finally, Kaplinsky notes the role of gender relations, especially the role of patriarchy in stimulating militarism and its associated techniques. As he concludes:

Neo-Luddism – the response drawn by many whose jobs are being destroyed by the technology’s diffusion – is not just futile ... but also seriously misspecifies the analysis. The problem lies not with the technology, but in a form of social organization which misuses its potential to produce frighteningly destructive weapons, inappropriate products and undesirable work processes. (1984: 180) (our emphasis)

Note here the assumption that technology has both an actual (inherent potential) capacity and a ‘normal’ form of deployment which is distorted (misused) as the result of contemporary social circumstances. This is a point to which we return below.

By contrast, Winner (1977) notes that definitions of technology alter through time and place. Thus, for the ancient Greeks, technology meant ‘practical arts’, as opposed to science or even art itself. Then, during the twentieth century, the term was expanded to include the tools, the process of work and even the total work organization. Relatedly, MacKenzie and Wajcman (1985: 3) note three different meanings: physical objects; objects in conjunction with related human activities; and knowledge. Winner’s proposed solution to the conceptual confusion is to describe the physical, inanimate devices, tools and so on as ‘apparatus’; technical activities, that is, those involving human action such as the application of skill, the use of procedures and so on, he calls ‘technique’; the social arrangements that combine ‘apparatus’ and ‘technique’ he labels ‘organization’; while ‘networks’ are ‘organizations’ that link ‘technique’ and ‘apparatus’ across space.

Common to all these definitions of technology is the attempt to distinguish between its human and non-human elements. ‘Non-human’ tends to be associated with the material, intrinsic, technical content whereas ‘human’ tends to connote the (merely) circumstantial context (social factors). The former category tends to correspond to an essential inner core of technical characteristics, whereas the latter is portrayed as merely transitory and epiphenomenal. However, despite the implicit tendency of many authors to fashion their discussions of technology in terms of this dichotomy, it is difficult to sustain the boundary between human and non-human, if only because humans do not act without some form of ‘artificial’ (i.e. humanly constructed) construction (clothes, tools, buildings, machines, etc.), and non-humans of this ‘artificial’ form do not act in the absence of humans. As we shall discuss, this mutual dependence of elements has led some sociologists to reconceptualize the link between technology and humans as a network rather than as parallel but separate systems. That is, they argue that we should consider the unity of human and non-human actors in terms of a ‘seamless web’ (Hughes, 1979) or as ‘heterogeneous engineering’ (Law, 1986). For others, however, the conflation of human and non-human undermines the procedures by which the real significance of technology can be assessed, for this is to ‘extend the definitions [of technology] so widely that it becomes virtually impossible to assess its independent influence on work and organization’ (Clark et al., 1988: 13).

However, much recent research has taken issue with the notion of the ‘independent influence’ of technology. For example, in broad terms, ‘social constructivism’ contends that technology does not have any influence which can be gauged independently of human interpretation. Instead, the influence of technology is constructed through human interpretation. Just as ‘facts’ neither speak for themselves nor exist independently of some agency which constructs them, technologies neither speak for themselves nor exist independently of human interpretation. Technologies, in other words, are not transparent; their character is not given; and they do not contain an essence independent of the nexus of social actions of which they are part. They do not ‘by themselves’ tell us what they are or what they are capable of. Instead, capabilities – what, for example, a machine will do – are attributed to the machine by humans. Our knowledge of technology is in this sense essentially social; it is a construction rather than a reflection of the machine’s capabilities. Of course, not any construction is possible; the construction of technological capacity is not itself unconstrained.² However, the important point at this juncture is to resist the idea that constructions result from some imagined intrinsic properties of the technology. (As we shall see below, the constructivist literature is admittedly ambivalent about the nature and range of sources from which constructions result). Certainly, some constructions turn out to be more resilient and robust than others. Not every construction carries equal authority. Indeed, a central aim of social constructivism is to ask how and why this is so. Given that accounts of technological capacity are not a reflection of an inherent property of the technology, why do we believe some people’s accounts but not others’? How is it that some accounts are so convincing that we end up treating them as a direct reflection of the ‘actual capacity’ of technology, finally, and ironically, convinced that we never have been convinced? Before returning to these questions, we need to retrace our steps in the quest for that elusive and mythical beast: technological determinism.

Technological determinism as myth

As MacKenzie and Wajcman (1985) suggest, since not all technical ‘advances’ are enacted, since the same technology appears to have different ‘effects’, and because this implies that the specification of cause is an extremely complex task, models of technological determinism are suspect. However, as we have already indicated, it turns out to be difficult to identify straightforward examples of technological determinism which are susceptible to this knock-down argument.

At its simplest, technological determinism portrays technology as an exogenous and autonomous development which coerces and determines social and economic organizations and relationships. Technological determinism appears to advance spontaneously and inevitably, in a manner resembling Darwinian survival, in so far as only the most ‘appropriate’ innovations survive and only those who adapt to such innovations prosper. This perspective has a long history as well as an apparently radical future, from Saint-Simon and Comte (Kumar, 1978), to the rather more recent arguments of Leavitt and Whisler (1958), Bell (1960, 1973), Kerr et al. (1964) and Blauner (1964).

Such is the significance of technology that it provides a whole new battery of metaphors to interpret ourselves: the steam age helped us to ‘let off steam’ and to become mere ‘cogs in a machine’; the current computer technologies provides us with ‘default positions’ and ‘interfaces’, while the notion of technology out of control is perfectly encapsulated by Shelley’s Frankenstein (Badham, 1990; Edge, 1973; Turkle, 1984; Winner, 1977). Yet, for Veblen, technology is not wild and irrational but amoral, cold and rational; it is in, not out of, control:

The machine throws out anthropomorphic habits of thought. It compels the adaptation of the workman to his work, rather than the adaptation of the work to the worker ... the machine process gives no insight into questions of good or evil, merit or demerit, except in point of material causation, nor into the foundations or the constraining force of law and order as may be stated in terms of pressure, temperature, velocity, tensile strength etc. (Veblen, 1904: 310–11)

A familiar theme is evident here: mechanization generates mechanical cultures and routinized life-experiences. The long-term result is a decline in the ‘pecuniary’ or ‘business’ spirit of capitalism, based, as it is for Veblen, on individualism and private property. In effect, technology determines the shape and content of society. The relationship is isomorphic: society mirrors technology.

It is important here to highlight the modernist foundations of this approach to technology: in the Enlightenment tradition the machine, and the absorption and refining of human reason into the machine, lead to the most rational forms of human institutions. Moreover, since the design principles are themselves nurtured in the scientific laboratory of objective truth and reason, the organizational results should be universally applicable. Thus science, rather than human ‘needs’, prevails in organizations; and since technology is the carrier of human reason, organizations should be driven by technological requirements. The traces of scientific management (see Grint, 1991: 184–97), and indeed of many of the arguments grounded in models of economically rational behaviour, are easy to detect here. This contrasts markedly with models of organizations entrenched in notions of universal human needs, such as human relations, or rooted in psychoanalytic theories, like those emanating from the Tavistock Clinic (see Gergen, 1992; Stein, 1992).

In the literature on the sociology of work, technological determinism has a similarly ambivalent status. For example, although Woodward (1958) and Blauner (1964) are frequently cited as supporters of technological determinism, neither are cast-iron devotees of the approach. Woodward’s later work (1965) shifted away from this perspective towards socio-technical systems approaches. At one point, even Blauner seems to suggest something other than straightforward technological determinism: ‘modern factories vary considerably in technology, in division of labour, in economic structure, and in organizational character. These differences produce sociotechnical systems in which the objective conditions and the inner life of employees are strikingly variant’ (1964: 5). Nevertheless, he still maintains that ‘the most important single factor that gives an industry a distinctive character is its technology’ (1964: 6).³

Heilbroner (1972), regarded by many as an arch-determinist (see Bimber, 1990), actually calls for a ‘ “soft determinism” with regard to the influence of the machine on social relations’ (1972: 35). By this he means that technology is itself the result of social activity, that the direction of technological advance is responsive to social influences and that it must be ‘compatible’ with existing social conditions. For example, Heilbroner argues that labour-saving devices are of little significance for societies with plentiful labour. Thus technology should be relegated from ‘an undeserved position of primum mobile in history to that of a mediating factor’ (1972: 37). That said, Heilbroner goes on to argue that under certain conditions technology can become autonomous and can determine advance. However, this is ‘peculiarly a problem of a certain historical epoch – specifically that of high capitalism and low socialism – in which the forces of technical change have been unleashed, but when the agencies for the control or guidance of technology are still rudimentary’ (1972: 38–9). In other words, technology is sometimes allowed to determine the future as a result of inadequate social controls; by default, humans sometimes allow technology to become autonomous.

This is close to Winner’s (1977) sense of the term ‘autonomous technology’: politics become inscribed in technology in such a way that the technology appears neutral. Its apparent neutrality, according to Winner, then encourages us to adopt somnambulist habits: we are unaware of our real situation; we think we take choices but actually we make responses to a situation preordained by politically impregnated technology – the ‘technological imperative’.

Winner (1977) and Lewis Mumford (1966) assert that Marx, as the quote at the beginning of this ch...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Deus ex Machina
• 1 Theories of Technology
• 2 The Luddites: Diablo ex Machina
• 3 Configuring the User: Inventing New Technologies
• 4 Some Failures of Nerve in Constructivist and Feminist Analyses of Technology
• 5 Technology and Work Organizations
• 6 What’s Social about Being Shot?
• Notes
• References
• Index