In The Age Of The Smart Machine
In The Age of the Smart Machine offers a study of information technology in the workplace, with introduction to the major concepts relating to knowledge, authority, and power in the information workplace. A noted Harvard social scientist documents the pitfalls and promise of computerized technology in business life, believing that the need to maximize efficiency will motivate most companies to involve employees in a collective process of discussion and problem-solving. Of particular interest, this book introduced the concept of Information, the process through which digitalization translates activities, events, social exchange, and objects into information.
In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power won instant critical acclaim in both the academic and trade press, including the front page review in The New York Times Book Review.
This book is widely considered the definitive study of information technology in the workplace.
Harvard social scientist Shoshana Zuboff warns that advanced information technologies present us with a fateful choice: to continue automation at the risk of robbing workers of gratification and self image, or to information and empower ordinary working people to make critical and collaborative judgments.
The Age of the Smart Machine discusses the following:
Duality of information technology as an informative and an automating technology
Abstraction of work associated with information technology and its related intellectual skill demands
Computer-mediated work
The "information panopticon"
Information technology as a challenge to managerial authority and command/control
Social construction of technology
Shift from a division of labor to a division of learning
The inherently collaborative patterns of information work
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Dilemmas of Transformation in the Age of the Smart Machine
Knowledge and Computer-Mediated Work
The Laboring Body: Suffering and Skill in Production Work
The Abstraction of Industrial Work
The White-Collar Body in History
Office Technology as Exile and Integration
Mastering the Electronic Text p.
Authority: The Spiritual Dimension of Power
What Was Managerial Authority?
The Dominion of the Smart Machine
The Limits of Hierarchy in an Informed Organization
Technique: The Material Dimension of Power
The Information Panopticon
Panoptic Power and the Social Text
Conclusion: Managing the Information Organization
The Scope of Information Technology in the Modern Workplace
Notes on Field-Research Methodology
Notes