The Machine at Work: Technology, Work and Organization

209 Pages·1997·18.665 MB·English

by  Keith Grint, Steve Woolgar

The Machine at Work

The Machine at Work
Technology, Work and Organization
Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar
Polity Press
Copyright © Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar 1997
The right of Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
First published in 1997 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grint, Keith.
The machine at work : technology, work, and organization / Keith
Grint and Steve Woolgar.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–7456–0924–4 (hardcover).—ISBN 0–7456–0925–2 (pbk.: alk.
paper)
1. Employees—Effect of technological innovations on. 2. Human
-machine systems. 3. Work—Forecasting. I. Woolgar, Steve.
II. Title
HD6331.G75 1997
331.25—dc21 96–37740
CIP
Typeset in 10 on 11½ pt Times
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Marston Lindsay Ross International Ltd, Oxfordshire
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Deus ex Machina 1
1 Theories of Technology 6
Introduction 6
Defining the issues 7
Technological determinism as myth 11
Socio-technical systems 14
The social shaping approach 18
Socio-technical alignments 25
Actor-network theory 28
Anti-essentialism 32
Conclusion 36
2 The Luddites: Diablo ex Machina 39
Introduction 39
Background 40
Competing traditional explanations of Luddism 44
The establishment perspective: rational technology,
irrational Luddites 44
The traditional anti-establishment perspective: rational
technology, irrational capitalism 47
The symbolic perspective: machine as metaphor 49
Anti-essentialist explanations of Luddism 53
An actor-network perspective on the Luddites 53
The entrepreneurs’ case: machinery as a Trojan horse 58
Conclusion 63
vi Contents
3 Configuring the User: Inventing New Technologies 65
Introduction 65
The technical/non-technical dichotomy 66
Technology as text 70
An ethnography of computer development 71
Configuring the user 72
Organizational knowledge about users 74
Difficulties of knowing the user from within 74
Alleged deficiencies in company knowledge about users 74
Stories about users 75
User singular and users multiple 76
Users don’t necessarily know best 77
Articulating the configured user: usability trials 78
Boundary work: the importance of the case 79
User documentation: correct readings of the manuals 84
Enacting the users’ context 85
Constructing natural users 87
Error and identity: the ‘wrong’ socket episode 89
The new machine meets its users 91
Conclusion 92
4 Some Failures of Nerve in Constructivist and Feminist
Analyses of Technology 95
Introduction 95
Technological determinism, essentialism and anti-essentialism 97
The metaphor of building in/embodiment 98
Specifying antecedent circumstances 99
Having effects 99
Technological determinism and textual determinism 100
Feminism and technology 101
Reproducing technology? 105
Computerized genders 108
Conclusion: Deus Ex Machina or Machina Ex Dea? 113
5 Technology and Work Organizations 116
Introduction 116
Assembling organizations: from Fordism to flexible
specialization 118
Organizations as consumers of technologies 126
Organizations as technological panopticons or empowerers? 130
Conclusion 138
Contents vii
6 What’s Social about Being Shot? 140
Introduction 140
‘Excessive’ relativism 142
The moral and epistemological case against scepticism 144
An onion model of the sociology of technology: between
Russian roulette and a ‘hard case’ 153
Conclusion: truth as the basis for political action 164
Notes 169
References 176
Index 195
Acknowledgements
Parts of the argument in this book evolved as the result of our teaching the
course ‘Work, Organization and Technology’ at Brunei University. Our
thanks to students on that course, and to colleagues in CRICT (Centre for
Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology), especially Donna
Baston, Chris Carne, Geoff Cooper, Clare Fisher, Rosalind Gill, Christine
Hine, Leslie Libetta, Janet Low, Janet Rachel and Stuart Shapiro. Further
afield many others have provided encouragement and assistance, including:
Olga Amsterdamska, Richard Badham, John Burnett, Mark Elam, Hans
Glimmel, David Held, Magnus Johansson, Nick Jardine, Oskar Juhlin,
Steve K, Mihaela Kelemen, Marianne de Laet, John Law, Val Martin, Ulf
Mellstrom, Russell Mills, Janet Moth, Adrian Randall, Howard
Rosenbrock, Leigh Star, Lynn Winkworth, Ray Thomas and Frank
Webster. Finally, we would like to thank Jacqueline and Sandra, Katy and
Alex, Madeleine and Beki, and Kris and Francesca for everything else.
An earlier version of part of chapter 3 appeared as S. Woolgar,
‘Configuring the User: The Case of Usability Trials’ in Law, J. (ed.): A
Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination.
Sociological Review Monograph 38 (London: Routledge, 1991), 58–100. A
version of chapter 4 was published as K. Grint and S. Woolgar, ‘On Some
Failures of Nerve in Constructivist and Feminist Analyses of Technology’
in Woolgar, S. (ed.): Feminist and Constructivist Perspectives on New
Technology, a special issue of Science Technology and Human Values, 20, 3
(1995), 286–310; and also in K. Grint and R. Gill (eds.), The
Gender–Technology Relation (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), 48–75.
We would also like to acknowledge the support of the ESRC’s
Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT) and
EASST (European Association of Studies of Science and Technology).
Introduction: Deus ex Machina
If there were no God, said the eighteenth century Deist, it would be nec
essary to invent him. Now this eighteenth century god was deus ex
machina, the god who helped those who could not help themselves, the
god of the lazy and incapable.
Shaw, 1946: 227
It is a truism that technology is increasingly central to modern life. Of
course, in a general sense, taken to include all kinds of objects, systems
and artefacts, life has always been organized around and in response to
technology. In more recent times, the fascination with and concern
about technology has become more intense. This is due, in part, to the
rate of emergence of new technologies and, in part, because the origins
(inception and design) of new technology have become increasingly
remote from everyday experience. Is technology now an indispensable
part of lives? Do we have adequate resources to understand technology
and to assess its relationship to our work and organizations?
This book evaluates various ways of thinking about technology. It
asks whether existing analytic perspectives give us sufficient guidance in
making decisions about its development and deployment. In particular
it develops a critique of conceptions of the essential characteristics of
technology. What is the basis of, what the consequences of and what, if
any, the alternatives to, the idea that technologies have an essence?
The concept of ‘the machine’ has long provided the focus of concern,
analysis, protest and speculation. Contempt for the machine has been a
‘stock literary attitude’ (Marx, 1964: 146), and provided the focus of
neo-Romantic critiques of science in the early nineteenth century
(Marx, 1988: 165). In the 1960s, radical protesters urged that we ‘rage
against the machine’. This kind of metaphorical usage deploys idealized
conceptions of machine without reference to the design, development
and deployment of technology. Like many similar invocations of tech
nology, it tends to be informed neither by considerations of how in fact
technology operates – the machine at work as opposed to the idealized
machine (see, for example, Button, 1993) – nor by what happens in