Overview
Professor Zuboff has been called “the true prophet of the information age”. Her much celebrated classic In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) won instant critical acclaim in both the academic and trade press—including the front page of the New York Times Book Review—and has long been considered the classic study of information technology in the workplace.
According to London School of Economics Professor Jannis Kallinikos’s analysis in “Smart Machines", written for the book’s twenty year anniversary, In the Age of the Smart Machine is “a profound study of the work implications associated with the extensive involvement of information technology in organizations. The book rapidly gained recognition across a wide spectrum of social science disciplines, including management and organization studies, information systems, social psychology, and sociology, and has been debated and quoted extensively. Twenty years may seem an awfully long time in this age of speed and rapid technological change. But, the Smart Machine, as perhaps every great work, holds out remarkably. The central themes of the book are equally if not more relevant today. Key insights the author develops concerning the nature of information and its relation to reality can be brought to bear on the analysis of phenomena such as the emergence and diffusion of the Internet that were not yet manifest at the time she conducted her study. Indeed, later and significant works on the social and organizational implications of information technology draw in one way or another on the legacy the Smart Machine has left…
The distinctive flavor of the book and its enduring significance are inextricably bound up with the masterly ways Zuboff managed to navigate between the potent but tidy worlds of theory and the inspiring yet messy reality of the workplace. Her work represents long-standing evidence of the fact that theory and concepts if skillfully used may sharpen observation, disclosing aspects of reality that might otherwise have escaped attention...
Written in superb prose, the Smart Machine deserves to be described as a landmark contribution to the cross- disciplinary field of the history and social psychology of work. While a book about information and its significance in restructuring and redefining the patterns and meaning of work, the Smart Machine is much more than a treatise on this subject. Out of the pages of this remarkable book emerge with evocative force the history of work as the bodily struggle to master the resistant materiality of the world through skill but also exertion and toil; the mixed blessings of technology and the forms through which technology liberates, enables, and enslaves at the same time; the stratified character of the workplace and the social struggles that have underlain its formation and its persisting role as an institutional pillar of modern societies; the history of administration and the different social connotations white- and blue-collar work came to embody; the developments of managerial methods and techniques and the relentless discipline they impose in the factory and the office; and, finally, the allure of technology in general and information technology in particular to construct a more fulfilling workplace and the rather disappointing outcome in which automation, driven by the dominant elites and their will to control, erodes and undoes the promise of a transparent and multivalent workplace in which information could have played an enlightening role...
It would be reasonable to conjecture that a book written in the pre-Internet age might well be outdated and no longer relevant. This holds undeniably true for many issues, ideas, or debates that took place during the 1970s and 1980s. However, the case of the Smart Machine is rather different. The central theme of the book concerning the hot issue of whether information technology is or will be used as a means to automation and control or as a way to construct new, less hierarchical, and more rewarding forms of collective engagement and an enlightened workplace is equally, if not more, relevant today. The widely diffused fear of the Orwellian big brother is just an indicator of this, as is the debate of how personal data produced from our online habits and Internet site trajectories will be used. Another highly crucial issue evolves around copyright and the efforts of the culture industry to control and shape the growth of the Internet and the patterns of exchanging ideas and culture. To some degree, time has supported Zuboff’s rather gloomy predictions of the appropriation of the promise of information technology by powerful groups and its concomitant use in ways that, by and large, accommodate the interests of these groups. It is thus more than urgent to revisit that issue...
Another central and highly interesting theme of the book evolves around the relationship of information to reality in general and work reality in particular. The production of information is never an innocent description, a literal, point-by-point mapping of a pre-existing world. The comprehensive rendition of work states and processes to information constructs new realities in the workplace, lifts up factors or processes that have gone unnoticed, raises new problems and opportunities, and defines priorities and relevancies that were not there prior to computerization. By the same token, comprehensive computerization samples and assembles reality in a variety of ways and thus shapes the forms of perceiving and acting upon it. The central and timely character of these issues provides evidence of the persistent relevance of the Smart Machine. One could indeed go as far as to claim that in some respects the book is even more relevant and timely today than it was at the time of its publication.”
Read more about this topic: Shoshana Zuboff, In The Age of The Smart Machine