New Technologies,New Skills

On the NC case, Noble has shown the possibility of de-skilling to have been an important motive for the development of NC and has also shown how recalcitrant the art of metalworking really is to the high degree of proceduralization that de-skilling would in fact require; Noble, “Social Choice in Machine Design,” in Zimbalist A. , Case Studies on the Labor Process (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1979); and Noble , Forces of Production (New York, NY: Alfred Knopf, 1984). Williams Williams , “The Impact of Numerically Controlled Equipment on Factory Organization,” California Management Review (Winter 1964), pp. 25–34, and Jones , “Destruction or Redistribution of Engineering Skills,” in Wood S. , The Degradation of Work (London: Hutchinson, 1982), the two studies which offer anything more than case studies, suggest that de-skilling has not been the typical effect of NC. If regional salary data is any guide to skill differentials, it is interesting to note that NC operators are on average paid class A Machinist rates; National Machine Tool Builders Association, Economic Handbook of the Machine Tool Industry (McLean, VA: NMTBA, 1982).

See the discussion on Hirschhorn L. , Beyond Mechanization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).

Flaver N. L. Kincaid Earl , “‘Oops’, said the NC Programmer,” American Machinist (June 1983).

See Bright James , “Does Automation Raise Skill Requirements?” Harvard Business Review (July/August 1958), where “responsibility” and “education” requirements are described as “increasing or decreasing [or nil]” as one moves to the highest level of automation. See too, a standard text like Roger Schmenner's Production/Operations Management (Chicago, IL: SRA, 1981), “Progressing from job shop to continuous flow process, it is more likely that … job contents diminish, although ‘art’ is more likely to be found at either end of the process spectrum,” p. 115.

See Abernathy W. Clark K. Kantrow A. , Industrial Renaissance (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1983).

I shall leave aside entirely the problem of automation and employment: The issues of skill distribution and employment levels are largely separable.

Field work for this research was conducted in France in 1981 (see Appendix 2). The technological evolution of French banks is quite similar to the U.S. experience, and the current technical levels are, if anything, more advanced in France: For a population of one-fourth the U.S., the French banking system currently conducts a higher number of electronic transactions.

See Matteis Richard , “The New Back Office Focuses on Customer Service,” Harvard Business Review (March/April 1979), for the description of the Citibank letter of credit department's parallel evolution.

See Bright J. , Automation and Management (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 1958).

There are some important degress of freedom here for astute managers to recruit programmers in-house so as to create a computer services department with the intimate acquaintance of processes that only former operators can have.

Wiener Earl , “Beyond the Sterile Cockpit,” Human Factors (February 1985), p. 83.

See Zuboff Shoshanah , “New Worlds of Computer Mediated Work,” Harvard Business Review (September/October 1982); and Sheil B. A. , “Coping with Complexity,” Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox, 1981.

Or, following Thompson, “reciprocal,” Organizations in Action (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1967).

See Hirschhorn Larry , op. cit.

These benchmarks may be implicit or, for organizations with job evaluation plans, explicit; in either case inappropriate points or reference will lead to suboptimal results.

It would therefore seem that technical change itself encourages the shift documented by George Lodge in The New American Ideology (New York, NY: Knopf, 1975), or, in a comparable endeavor, by Unger Roberto in Knowledge and Politics (New York, NY: Free Press, 1975), from “Lockean individualism” to “communitarianism.”