Our discussion last week highlighted the importance of control in organizations. We learned that while the mechanisms of control have changed — for instance, from direct surveillance and supervision to peer control — the role of control has not. The role is simply to deal with uncertainty and to make sure that people do their job according to expectations (We will talk about “uncertainty” next week). This week, we continue that discussion based on Zuboff’s account of an “informated organization” — that is an organization where data and information instead of humans and their bodies have turned into the focus, where “the data base takes on a life of its own” (Zuboff, p. 393). In these organizations, “managers themselves are also captive to a wide range of impulses and pressures”:
Even where control or deskilling has been the intent of managerial choices with respect to new information technology, managers themselves are also captive to a wide range of impulses and pressures. (p. 389)
To describe this organization, Zuboff first uses the metaphor of a “kaleidosope,” where turning the rim easily changes the pattern and configuration of the design. Managers can think of themselves as the hand rotating the rim, with technology enabling the changing design of the organization, but as a matter of fact they are not because human beings are not simple pieces of glass — they have “choice” and agency. This gives rise to the two dimensions of organizational change: “the intrinsic and the contingent.” These two dimensions are closely related because the same technologies that abstract work and enable learning also become the source of control and divisiveness, seducing managers “to fulfill a dream of perfect control and heal egos wounded by their needs for certainty” (p. 390).
Dilemmas
This ambivalent character of computing creates three dilemmas of transformation: knowledge, authority, and technique. Very briefly, the dilemmas have to do with the need of learning in the organization, which then might threat managerial control and authority, which, in turn, may entice managers to hardly share knowledge. Therefore, “techniques of control that are meant to safeguard authority create suspicion and animosity” (p. 392). The big lesson is:
The interdependence among these dilemmas means that technology alone, no matter how well designed or implemented, cannot be relied upon to carry the full weight of an informating strategy… Technological developments, in the absence of organizational innovation, will be assimilated into the status quo. (p. 392)
Even worse, “when managers increase their engagement with electronic text, they also risk a new kind of hyper-rationalism and impersonalization, as they operate at a greater distance from employees and customers.”
The textualization process moves away from a conception of information as something that individuals collect, process, and disseminate; instead, it invites us to imagine an organization as a group of people gathered around a central core that is the electronic text. Individuals take up their relationship toward that text according to their responsi bilities and their information needs. In such a scenario, work is, in large measure, the creation of meaning, and the methods of work involve the application of intellective skill to data. (p. 394)
In this condition, “work organization requires a new division of learning to support a new division of labor,” which, in turn, “requires another vocabulary — one of colleagues and co-learners, of exploration, experimentation, and innovation” — instead of the language of manufacturing and military. In the informated organization “learning is the new form of labor” (p. 395).
The Concentric Organization
To portray this organization, Zuboff introduces the image of a “concentric circle around a central core, which is the electronic data base” (p. 396). According to this image, on the innermost ring are those who interact with information on a real-time basis. These people are responsible for the daily operation, and utilize the most detailed and immediate data. Further from the core, there are four domains of managerial activity:
i. intellective skill development to create an environment of learning
ii. technology development to maintain the reliability of data while improving its breadth and quality
iii. strategy formulation
iv. social system development
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