Computerization Movements:
The Rise of the Internet and Distant Forms of Work
 
 

Suzanne Iacono, National Science Foundation
Rob Kling, Center for Social Informatics
Indiana University

In : Information technology and organizational transformation : history, rhetoric, and practice / Joanne Yates, John Van Maanen, editors. Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Sage Publications, c2001   (Pp 93-136).

Publication Draft of July 1998
 

Introduction

 Recent surveys suggest that about one hundred twenty-two million people worldwide and seventy million people in North America currently use the Internet at home, work, school, libraries or community centers (NUA LTD, 1998). Since its inception in 1969 as the ARPANET, Internet growth has been explosive. When restrictions against commercial use were lifted in the late 1980s, Internet traffic, defined as data flow on the U.S. Internet backbone, doubled in size roughly each year (Guice, 1998). While numerous surveys have proliferated a wide range of user estimates and considerable controversy about how exactly to measure use, no one disputes the upward curve and fast growth. Public discourse has largely interpreted this phenomenon as the dawning of a new social epoch variously called the information age, the digital age or the age of cyber-space and cyber-media (Berghel, 1995). In this age, it is argued almost all forms of social life will be mediated by digital communications, distance will be overcome, a new social order will emerge and lives will be transformed. The Clinton administration (White House, 1993) has mobilized wide-scale support for this view by promising to further develop the Internet into a national information infrastructure (NII) which will “unleash an information revolution that will change forever the way people live, work and interact with each other.”

 What is most critical about these assertions of social transformation is not their fidelity (or lack of fidelity) to truth but that they selectively “frame” or provide an “interpretive schema” by which disparate social groups and organizations can understand and interpret the meaning of the Internet for their own social contexts and practices. Such frames are built up in many public debates, not just those about new technologies. For example, public debate about gender and sexuality issues in the U.S. and U.K. military establishments has developed contending frames such as “some institutions/tasks are not for everyone” and “everyone deserves an equal chance” (Fisher, 1997). These frames offer common sense notions about why things are the way they are or why they should be changed. In practice, they can also be persuasive and mobilize various constituencies to support one side or another.

 In public discourse about the Internet, frames have been built up to suggest that organizations will have “faster communications” or “closer relationships with consumers” if they connect to the Internet. Many organizations (e.g., Fortune 1000 firms, government agencies, educational institutions, health organizations and the like) have resonated with these frames and have been mobilized to get connected. What it means to “be on the ‘net” is an ambiguous concept, however. While numerous organizations today have web sites, some may lack the capability for two-way or multi-way interactions. Others may have both web sites and interactivity while still others may have email, but no web sites. But, increasingly, having some sort of “Internet presence” has become an obligatory part of doing certain kinds of business in the late 1990s.

 In this chapter, we argue that the meaning of the Internet is being built up or “framed” in macro-level discourses such as those of the government, the media and scientific disciplines. The spread of these frames across many layers of public discourse mobilizes large-scale support and suggests specific lines of action within micro-social contexts such as organizations restructuring themselves in order to implement and effectively use internetworking technologies in their routine activities. We call these processes computerization movements and suggest that they are similar to other social movements such as the labor movement or the woman’s movement in the ways that they reject dominant cultural codes and package alternative beliefs, values and language for new, preferred forms of social life.

 In the next section, we present the traditional conceptions of the social processes that have driven the rapid growth of the Internet over the past thirty years, and suggest an alternative social process based on computerization movements (CMs). Then, we describe the ways in which these movements draw on existing ideational materials to frame the key meanings of new technologies and mobilize societal support for them. Framing is a critical part of these processes because it allows ordinary people to gain deeper understandings about how new technologies are used in situations that may be foreign to them. Next, we illustrate computerization movements by focusing on historical shifts in the meaning of a specific movement, computer-based work, and the current set of discourses that have emerged around “new” distant forms of work. Since computerization movements advocate systematic changes in existing organizational arrangements, we should expect that some discourses and activists would emerge to oppose certain modes of computerization, forming a counter-computerization movement. We discuss counter-computerization discourses that have played key roles in defining and altering the meaning of internetworking and computer-based work. Finally, we conclude and suggest ways to incorporate a computerization movement perspective in further study.

Why are organizations rapidly connecting to the Internet?

 The Internet is typically defined as a network of networks or an internetwork. Internetworking means using special-purpose computers or hosts to connect a variety of autonomous networks for transmitting data, files, and messages in text, audio, video or graphic formats over distances. In 1995, the NSF backbone consisted of almost 51,000 networks (NSF, 1995). According to recent estimates, over sixteen million hosts are now connected to those networks (Press, 1997) with two hundred fifty-four million hosts projected by the year 2000 (Matrix Information and Directory Services, 1997). While any number of individuals and organizations routinely track Internet traffic and numerous national surveys have been administered by researchers and media organizations, there are no available statistics on the number of organizations connected to the Internet. Making such an estimate might be difficult, as choices about what counts as an organization would have to be made. For example, IRS tax filings might be used, but then subsidiaries might be overlooked as well as clubs and other non-profit organizations. We can only surmise from our reading about the Internet that, today, almost all Fortune 1000 firms, major federal and state public agencies, universities and colleges, other non-profits, and any number of small, entrepreneurial firms are currently connected.

 Why are these organizations rapidly connecting to the Internet?  One common answer argues that organizations connect to the Internet because of the assumed economic or strategic advantages resulting from changed buyer-supplier relationships. It is suggested that the Internet is a more efficient and effective marketing channel than traditional delivery mechanisms. With the advent of the World Wide Web in 1993-94, user-friendly browsers available on many desktops, the tremendous growth in the Internet and the low marginal costs associated with offering products or services to customers, there has been a stampede of businesses to the Net (Rao et al., 1998). Electronic markets should also benefit consumers. By lowering the costs of searching for alternative products, such markets are expected to encourage greater price competition and lower prices (Elofson and Robinson, 1998). Further, use of the Internet opens up new markets by moving organizations closer to their customers (Palmer and Griffith, 1998). For example, in education, as the competition for students increases, universities and colleges with small, local markets have expanded their programs to include those who are distant from their campuses. Students who are distant from centers of higher education will also benefit by obtaining degrees from home and by learning from distant experts. From this point of view, the trend for autonomous organizations to get connected is simply a byproduct of the availability of cost-effective telecommunications technologies coupled with benefits assumed through the interconnections. Decisions regarding these connections are based on the resource needs of the organization and expectations of reduced costs and improved capability.

 A variant of this answer focuses less on immediate economic gains and more on issues of long-term survival. In this view, connections to the Internet are seen as an essential part of the learning organization. Organizations can no longer learn all they need to know internally (Powell, 1996). New ways of gaining information are essential. For example, marketing information can be gained from electronic communities and on-line focus groups (Kannan et al., 1998). Commercial firms develop partnerships and maintain continuing communication with external parties such as research centers, labs and even former competitors. Educational institutions and households can also take advantage of the information and services available on the Web. These linkages are both a means of gaining access to new knowledge and a way of exploiting those capabilities for innovation and experimentation.  The outcome is long-term economic viability.

        A second type of answer focuses on major epochal social transformations and argues that the United States is shifting from a society where industrial activity and modernist systems and infrastructures dominate to one in which information, knowledge, and post-modern systems and infrastructures will dominate (Bell, 1979; Lyotard, 1984). Toffler, a popular writer about these ideas, argues that the Third Wave economy is based on information and that the central event of the past century has been the death of matter (Dyson et al., 1996). He and his colleagues argue for the inexorability of progress, asserting that the Third Wave economy will arrive. As a consequence, everyone should join the “growing millions” in cyberspace. According to this view, Internet connections are nothing less than the first step in the creation of a new civilization.

 The first answer depends on organizational or managerial rationalism and has a strong grounding both in conventional economic analysis of information flows along value chains (cf., Porter and Millar, 1985) and in the resource dependence view of organizations in American sociology (cf., Pfeffer, 1987). Connections to the Internet are conceptualized as organizational tools or prosthetic devices which enhance the performativity of an organization in its environment (Poster, 1990). From this point of view, organizations adopt the technologies that are best for them, and they are generally able to implement and use them to their advantage. The second answer depends on technological determinism and an assumed causal relationship between the technological artifacts and methods of an era (e.g., farm implements, factories, and computers) and the economies and societies that emerge. While each of these responses offers insight into internetworking processes, we believe that they ignore some of the broadly noneconomic dimensions of sociotechnical change in industrialized countries.
 In this paper, we argue for an alternative conception of the rapid growth of the Internet based in a socially constructed process of societal mobilization that we call computerization movements (Kling and Iacono, 1988; Iacono and Kling, 1996). The mobilization of support for the Internet and other internetworking technologies does not mean that these technologies are not useful or valuable for the organizations that adopt them. But, it does mean that there are important macro-social and cultural dimensions that are often neglected in discussions of the rise of these technologies and their implied consequences for organizational change. (See Winter and Taylor, this volume, for a similar discussion of the neglect of macro-social forces in understanding the relationship between new technologies and changes in worklife.)

 Our main thesis is that participants in computerization movements build up frames in their public discourses that indicate favorable links between internetworking and a new, preferred social order. These frames help legitimate relatively high levels of investment for many potential adopters and package expectations about how they should use internetworking in their daily routines and how they should envision a future based on internetworking. Within organizations, meaning-making processes are ongoing as members attempt to restructure themselves around these new technologies. The symbolic struggle over these new technologies socially constructs the organizations that adopt them. Organizational change, then, is determined neither by the imperatives of the technology, nor by the planned changes of organizational management (Orlikowski, this volume). Instead, changes in worklife are shaped (but not determined) by the prevalent discourses informing new technologies and the practices that emerge around them in actual workplaces.

Computerization Movements

 Sociologists have used the concept movement to refer to many different kinds of collective action.  The most common term found in this literature is social movement, often used in a generic way to refer to movements in general. Lofland (1995:194) defines social movements as “amorphous, sprawling, and far-flung conglomerations of organizations, activists, campaigns, and the like that are construed to share social or personal change goals.” But sociologists have also written about professional movements (Bucher and Strauss, 1961), artistic movements, and scientific movements (Aronson, 1984; Star, 1989). What analyses of these movements share is a focus on the rise of loosely organized, insurgent action to displace or overcome the status quo.

 Today, the dominant theoretical perspectives for explaining the emergence, recruitment processes and eventual success or failure of social movements are undergoing a paradigm shift.  Structural explanations based in resource mobilization (McCarthy and Zald, 1977) and political process (McAdam, 1982) have been criticized as too mechanistic and limited by their natural science framework (Mueller, 1992). Early social movement theories took seriously the presumed dualism between words and deeds and excluded ideas, beliefs, values, and identity, for example, as critical explanators of collective action.

 Recently, however, social movement theory has become more sensitive to the semiotic, meaning sciences and has placed culture at the center of its concerns (cf., Morris and Mueller, 1992; Johnston and Klandermans, 1995). For example, Snow and colleagues (1986) have focused on the struggle over the production and counter-production of ideas and meanings associated with collective action.  From their point of view, social movements are deeply involved, along with the media, local governments and the state, in the "politics of signification." Within such social intercourse, attributions of blame and transformational goals do not emerge from a void nor are they developed anew each time participants talk to each other, a politician gives a speech or a journalist writes about the movement. Instead, “collective action frames” serve as relatively stable interpretive media by which new members are recruited, the collective meanings of social movements maintained, and oppositional discourses developed (Snow and Benford, 1992).

 Similarly, Ann Swidler’s (1995) conceptualization of “culture as tool kit” of rituals, symbols, stories, and world-views demonstrates how activists borrow concepts, understandings, language, and values from existing cultural repertoires to construct new understandings, attribute blame for current problems, and prescribe the actions that should be taken to ameliorate them. She argues that during periods of change, old cultural models are rejected and new ones are articulated and constructed from existing ideational materials. Taken together, these views suggest that social movements are socially constructed through the ideational and cultural materials currently available to societal members.

 A separate stream of research -- on sociotechnical change (Bijker, 1997; Bijker and Law, 1992) -- has also focused on the social construction of meaning, but around the development of new technologies. Similar to Snow and Benford’s attempts in social movement theory to use “collective action frames” to explain how meanings can be collectively shared and acted upon, Bijker (1997) uses the concept of “technological frames” to describe the ways that social meaning is attributed to technical artifacts -- tying together relevant social actors and the particular ways in which they understand a technology as “working.” A critical insight in Bijker’s conceptualization of frames is that they are built up and “exist” only in discourse. Technological frames are not just cognitive elements -- in people’s heads -- nor do they attain some sort of superstructure status -- above people’s heads. Instead, technological frames are constituted when interactions among relevant actors begin about a particular artifact.

 We base our understanding of computerization movements (CMs) in these larger debates about the role of culture, and specifically discourse and frames, in the mobilization of collective action and the development of meaning around a focal technology. Most research on information technology and organizational change has focused on adoption and change within single organizations. Macro-social and cultural elements are assumed to be unproblematic constants and the issue of why so many organizations at similar points in time attempt to implement the same technologies with varying levels of success is left unexplained. (For some notable exceptions, however, see Orlikowski, 1992; Orlikowski and Gash, 1994; Yates, 1994). The opposite problem can be found in the literature on social and cultural movements. While it focuses on the wide-scale recruitment of constituents for broad social change, it typically fails to examine how organizations are sites for social action and change. Our research brings these bodies of study together.

 Our analysis focuses on a process of societal mobilization with three primary elements. The first element is technological action frames. These are multi-dimensional composite understandings -- constituted and circulated in language -- that legitimate high levels of investment for potential users, and form the core ideas about how a technology works and how a future based on its use should be envisioned. The second element is public discourses. These are the discursive practices -- the written and spoken public communications -- which develop around a new technology. Public discourse is necessary for particular understandings about new technologies to widely circulate. The third element is organizational practices -- the ways in which individuals and organizations put technological action frames and discourses into practice as they implement and use technologies in their micro-social contexts.

 These three elements -- technological action frames, public discourse, and organizational practices -- are related. Technological action frames shape and structure public discourse while public discourse shapes and structures organizational practices. For example, Foucault (1972:168) demonstrates how a shift in medical discourse in the early 1800s during a cholera epidemic “put into operation such a body of rules that a whole domain of medical objects could then be reorganized, that a whole group of methods of recording and notation could be used, that the concept of inflammation could be abandoned and the old theoretical problem of fevers could be resolved definitively.” He argues that during this period medical organizations restructured themselves based on these new scientific discourses, altering their traditional practice of medicine and the outcomes for patients (e.g., their chances of actual survival).

 These relationships are non-deterministic, however. People’s technology practices are usually much more complex than the more restricted public discourses about practices. For many practitioners, there is often a gap between their own discourse and practice. For example, in a recent conversation with a university professor about her class of online students spread across multiple time zones, she enthused about how the class eliminated time and space. But then, she went on to say that she had to be available on Saturdays because many students worked during the week and she had a rule against email on Sundays to give herself a break. Her course did not eliminate time and space although it did restructure her time and practices. However, she did not know how to talk analytically about these shifts. As a consequence, there was a gap between her discourse about online classrooms and her actual practice.

 Relationships among the three elements can also be recursive. People may enrich their discourses and even modify their frames as they struggle to discuss the actual complexity of their practices. As a consequence, practices can generate new discourses and new discourses can build up new technological frames. In addition, various social groups can attribute differential meaning to new technologies, developing contending discourses as they implement and use new technologies in their own organizations. However, influence and change up the levels of analysis -- from local practices to public discourse to far-flung understandings of what a technology is good for (its framing) -- are more difficult. As with the university professor, private talk about use of a new technology often reflects the dominant public framing -- despite the material reality of divergent practices. Much of local practice with new technologies is tacit -- at least until users are prompted by an outsider to explain their actions. But even when new understandings become part of local discourse, they often remain local rather than being widely or rapidly circulated across other organizations and social settings. It is for this reason that public discourse about new technologies and the technological frames embedded in them can remain relatively stable and misrepresent actual practice for long periods of time.
 Not all technological frames or the discourses in which they are embedded are equally persuasive or mobilizing, however. Computerization movements rise and fall in their influence, and some CMs seem to be much livelier at particular times. Further, computerization movements are not monolithic. Blumer (1969) distinguishes between specific and general social movements. Specific movements are the various wings or submovements of broader, general movements. Many movements, like those that advance feminism, civil rights, systematic management, quantification in the sciences, or computerization, are heterogeneous. These distinctions help us characterize the relationship between a general computerization movement around internetworking, and a specific or distinct wing around its intersection with computer-based work. Below, we discuss in some detail two elements -- technological action frames and public discourses -- and their role in the emergence of a general computerization movement around the Internet. In a later section on computer-based work, we will focus on the third element -- practices -- as they are informed by technological frames and discourses and carried out by organizational members.

Technological Action Frames

Theoretical Background

 Bijker (1997) suggests that new technologies are interpretively flexible. Different social groups don’t see different aspects of a single technology. Instead, they attribute different meanings and constitute different artifacts. For example, the field of cryptography has traditionally received little public attention. Recently, however, debate over a hardware encryption device, the Clipper Chip -- now called Skipjack due to a trademark conflict -- has become national news. In this debate, the government argues for the widespread use of this device because it would allow them to unencrypt the coded messages of people or organizations that use the Internet for illegal purposes. Computing activists like John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on the other hand, argue that use of this device would increase the government’s electronic surveillance capabilities on ordinary citizens and the commercial enterprises that also use the Internet. These activists have framed the device as one that endangers citizen privacy and gives the government a backdoor for electronic eavesdropping (Barlow, 1993). For them, the Clipper Chip is yet another instantiation of Big Brother while for the government, it is a Criminal Catcher.

 The opposing meanings about encryption in the example above can be conceptualized as  “interpretive schemas” or “technological frames” developed by different social groups, in this case, the U.S. government and computer activists, to pinpoint the technology’s potential significance to them and to mobilize others to see things their way (Bijker, 1997; Orlikowski and Gash, 1994). Technological frames are useful because they simplify and condense elements of complex technologies and their potential use and thus enable groups of people to interact about what they might mean. Technological frames are conceptual or analytic lenses that are built up within and between social groups as they struggle over the meaning of a technology and constitute it in their discourses. Bijker (1997) lists the major dimensions of technological frames as goals, key problems, problem-solving strategies, requirements to be met by problem solutions, current theories, tacit knowledge, perceived substitution function, user practices and exemplary artifacts. Taken together, these dimensions constitute the meaning of a particular technology and frame it in specific ways.

 Similarly, social movement theorists have articulated dimensions of their related concept, collective action frames. Snow and Benford (1992) suggest that collective action frames serve to punctuate and attribute meaning. Punctuation singles out some existing social condition as intolerable or focuses attention on certain values, such as equality or freedom, which may be at risk. Attributions have two parts: diagnostic, i.e., focusing the blame for current wrongs or problems; and prognostic, i.e., developing beliefs about what should be done to ameliorate a situation and assigning the responsibility for those actions. In our analyses of technological action frames, we will focus primarily on goals, diagnostic and prognostic attributions (including beliefs), current theories, expected user practices and exemplary artifacts.

 Both streams of research -- social movements and sociotechnical change -- argue that at specific points in time, a particular frame can become dominant. In the development and diffusion of new technologies, dominant frames can stabilize the meaning of technologies for indefinite periods -- until they are contested. Social movement theorists suggest that many narrow collective action frames encouraging certain lines of action can surface and co-exist early in a movement’s cycle. However, at certain points, within specific social movements, master frames develop in their discourses. For example, Snow and Benford (1992) report that the proposal for a freeze on the development and deployment of nuclear weapons in 1980 energized and renewed peace movement activity that had been dormant for several decades. The idea of a nuclear freeze constituted a new master frame that mobilized previously passive citizens to organize and protest the development of new nuclear weapons. While this new framing may seem to narrow the more expansive peace movement frame, Goffman (1986) suggests that the act of framing does not so much introduce restrictions as it opens up new possibilities. In other words, framing allows for more people and social groups to explicitly target current social problems and understand more clearly what they should do about them. Framing serves to enhance action, not dampen it.

 When master frames develop in movement discourse, large-scale social action and mobilizations are more likely. But dominant or master frames can also wither as their meaning becomes less potent to social groups due to the rise of competing, new frames or as cultural conditions change (Snow and Bedford, 1992). In our own conceptualization of technological action frames, we will use the terms dominant and master frames to mean the same thing, that is the rise and relative stabilization of a set of key meanings for a focal technology.

Framing the Internet

 A Short History. Guice (1998) points out that the common view of the development of the Internet is based in an engineering perspective and straight path between the ARPANET of the late 1960s and today’s Internet. He quotes Vinton Cerf, the “father of the Internet” and co-author of the TCP/IP protocol (the Internet’s data communication standard), as saying that the Internet is “the direct descendant of strategically-motivated fundamental research begun in the 1960s with federal sponsorship....” (Cerf, 1995). Guice argues that this account glosses over the many conflicts, twists and turns that have actually taken place during its development. For example, the ARPANET depended on other protocols for a decade before TCP/IP emerged as an innovation and alternative. Other alternatives still exist. IBM’s Systems Network Architecture and OSI (Open-Systems Interconnections) were both developed in the 1970s and the latter has emerged in the 1990s as a European alternative to TCP/IP.  Pfaffenberger (1996) makes a similar argument about the development of Usenet, “the poor man’s ARPANET,” by focussing on its lengthy and often traumatic history as designers and administrators struggled to conceptualize and control the growing network.

 But, it is not only the artifacts that have changed over the years. The meaning of internetworking has had similar shifts. Initially, the objective of the ARPANET was to allow for resource sharing. Grand scientific challenges could not be resolved by one government agency, university or research lab alone. The goal was to harness distributed resources (e.g., knowledgeable people and computers) to solve complex problems faster. Much of the discourse surrounding this frame focused on the power of computation to displace human muscle power from work tasks and extend the reach of the human brain (cf., Ginzberg, 1982).

 But there was a gap between the dominant frame of the technology and its actual use. In practice, electronic mail among distributed colleagues emerged as the key use of the ARPANET. Being on the ‘net primarily meant having access to email for long-distance communication and collaboration. Many information technology and science-oriented firms were the first private organizations to get connected, primarily so that their scientist and engineering staffs (e.g., in R & D departments) could have access to email. By the early 1990s, many universities, large public agencies, civic organizations and for-profit technology firms had connected to the Internet. Aside from email, they began to use gopher (an Internet service) to publish documents such as catalogues, white papers, and reports. Being on the ‘net began to take on other dimensions such as information sharing with external organizations, customers and the general public.

 At about this time, the U.S. government began debating the development of a more extensive, higher bandwidth national information infrastructure (NII) and the various goals and purposes it would serve. Two opposing goals emerged in these policy debates -- universal public access versus grand scientific computing (Guice, 1998). With the announcement of the National Research and Engineering Network (NREN) in 1991, it appeared that public spending would support the building of  an infrastructure for scientists and engineers -- continuing the traditional focus of internetworking -- rather than give access to the general public. Between 1991 and 1993, however, the proponents of universal access pushed for their goals as a greater common good and the central idea behind the NII shifted away from the solution of scientific problems toward societal and economic transformations that could potentially benefit everyone.

 A number of alternative technological infrastructures were considered for the NII.  Proponents and vendors of cable TV and wireless telephony, for example, struggled unsuccessfully to have their infrastructures selected as the model for the NII. While differences between the histories and cultures of these industries and internetworking (e.g., differences in scope, access ethics, economic orientation and extent of technological development) can partially explain the selection of internetworking (cf., Press, 1994), Bijker (1997) argues that the stabilization of an artifact is a political process subject to interests and values.

  In 1992, the World Wide Web (WWW) was released by CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. In the next several years, Internet browsers were developed and the WWW became the easiest part of the Internet for ordinary people to use. By 1995 to 1996, many private organizations had created Web sites to advertise their products and, hopefully, sell them to a larger audience. By the late-1990s, for most organizations, being on the ‘net means having a Web site.

 The Death of Distance. This shift in the goals of internetworking toward universal access not only mobilized more people and organizations to get connected, but it also generated a discourse that assumes societal and global transformation will follow. In particular, geographic distance is said to no longer be relevant. A new dominant technological action frame has emerged -- the death of distance: “The world has become a smaller place in the 20th century.... [T]elecommunications technology made terrestrial distances insignificant. The transformation of the world into a global village caused revolutionary changes in the physical and social infrastructure, rivaling those of the industrial revolution” (Adam et al., 1997:115).

 In this frame, the key problem to achieving full-scale, world-wide integration is distance and internetworking provides the solution -- distance will be “obliterated” (Dyson, 1997). The major scientific theories used to explain these transformations are based in technological determinism. For example, because new information and communications technologies are available at low costs to many people and institutions, Bell has argued for a shift to a post-industrial society while Toffler has argued for the emergence of a Third Wave economy. The targeted users of internetworking technologies include everyone, i.e., governments, civil societies, commercial, health and education institutions, and consumers, in general. In practice, these users are expected to get connected to the Internet and extensively use it to communicate and share information. The Internet is envisioned as the major integrating architecture of the world at the end of the 20th century.

 This framing of distantiation as central to the meaning of new technologies is not new, however. It has a history that goes back well into the late 18th century. We are not cultural historians and can only indicate a few of the more interesting ways that this frame has been culturally robust over that period. The discourses that embed the death of distance frame typically focus on those technologies that have so vastly increased the speed of travel or communications that the lives and work of people who use them have fundamentally changed. For example, a non-stop jet that allows one to have breakfast in London and dinner in New York on the same day illustrates this idea in a contemporary and prosaic way.

 In the late 18th century, the “first victory over time and space” according to Mattelart (1994) was the semaphore telegraph developed in France to establish communication among its armies. Over a period of about fifty years, a network was developed that connected Paris to its provincial cities and consisted of 534 semaphore stations covering 5000 kilometers. In the U.S., from the late 18th to the 19th centuries, a number of systems were developed: postal, railroad, canal, electricity, and telegraph. With the arrival of each new system, communication was progressively touted as eliminating space and time through increased reach and speed. For example, a journalist writing in the Madison Daily Tribune  in 1851 heralded the arrival of the railroad to local hog farmers (quoted in Windle and Taylor, 1986:12):

  Before the railroad era it required two weeks and oftener three to drive hogs from  Hendricks County to Madison. A drove of hogs loaded on the cars at Bellville on  Thursday was landed at North Madison the same afternoon. This is annihilating space and time.

 With the arrival of the railroad, distances would no longer be a significant obstacle in the distribution of products to their markets and the east coast of the U.S. could be united with its western boundaries. The mobilization of support for the development of the telegraph was framed in a similar way. Davis (1997:10) reports how a U.S. congressman tried to convince colleagues to give startup money to Morse for the telegraph circa 1847:

The influence of this invention on the political, social and commercial relations of the people of this widely extended country will of itself amount to a revolution unsurpassed in world range by any discovery that has been made in the arts and sciences. Space will be, to all practical purposes of information, annihilated between the states of the Union and also between the individual citizens thereof.

More recently, Marshall McLuhan (cf., McLuhan and Powers, 1989) envisioned the growth of broadcasting systems and the ubiquitousness of the television set in households around the globe as a mechanism for the attainment of a “global village.” His argument centered on the significance of the medium as an interconnecting mechanism over whatever value specific broadcast content might have for certain groups of people.

 Over the past several hundred years, then, enthusiasts and analysts of various new technologies have proclaimed the death of distance and have employed it in their rhetoric about the expected social transformations. Mattelart (1994) argues that a concern with rapid communications and transportation systems grew out of Enlightenment philosophies. Before the Enlightenment, space simply evoked the idea of an empty area. But after Descartes,  mathematicians began to appropriate space. They made it part of their domain and invented a variety of different types of spaces (e.g., curved spaces, non-Euclidean space, etc.) (Lefebvre, 1991).  Some historians argue that this working out of space through various transportation and communication systems was heightened in North America as part of the Westward expansion of the U.S.-- enabling the creation of one national democratic government in a vast continent. Others, including Mattelart, also observe that annihilating distance was not simply a matter of realizing democracy on a grand scale, but was also a product of readily identifiable economic and military interests. In short, the ability to reach across space and time with new technologies has had a strong cultural resonance in many industrial societies.

 For the Internet, the significance of the death of distance is typically theorized in two ways. First, space will be structurally transformed and consolidated so that geography, borders and time zones will become irrelevant (Cairncross, 1997). Rather than pockets of civilization such as industrialized cities and regions being separated or even isolated by vast distance, new spatial forms and practices based on a near frictionless, information economy will prevail. A new technological infrastructure based loosely on the current Internet will define this space, open up new markets and information flows, and civilize it into a global, networked society (Castells, 1996).

 Second, social relationships will be culturally transformed and democratized. Those on the periphery of society (e.g., in rural areas, workers of night shifts, home workers and schoolers, retired people, etc.) can become more involved and receive the same types of education, medical services and work opportunities that other centrally-located actors currently enjoy. Further, people and organizations can directly connect with other people,  places, organizations and real-time world events without the mediating influence of government agents or media organizations. New transnational communities will be forged and institutional power based in geographic centrality and control will be reduced; decentralized social action and perfect information sharing will prevail.

 From our research and reading of the discourses associated with internetworking, we have found five recurring beliefs that inform this master frame around internetworking. (See Table 1).

TABLE 1: Five Beliefs about Internetworking
 

1. Internetworking is central to a  new world order. CM activists argue that internetworking is the dominant mechanism for creating and structuring the world that they prefer. Visions of a future, perfect world supplant the imperfect world in which we currently live. The new world will be more participative and democratic, more open and accessible, more diverse and information-intensive because of the central role of internetworking. Use of the Internet will revolutionize the way we do business, educate our young and conduct our lives. This belief gives proposals for change a peculiarly technocentric character: Internetworking is central to all socially valuable behavior and the panacea for many social problems. Everyone will be closer to everyone else and no one will be excluded. 2. Improved internetworking can further revolutionize the world order.  This argument is tied to the notion that the continuous calvacade of new technologies and the inevitable march toward the future are inextricably linked to the achievement of social progress.  Like people who purchase a new car or stereo with every model change, the heroes of this vision invest heavily and endlessly in new computer technologies. When the current social arrangements fail to produce the promised results, rather than be disillusioned or try other alternatives, they place their investment hopes in the next generation of technology.  CM activists push hard on two fronts: (1) people and organizations ought to use state-of-the-art internetworking equipment; and (2) state-of-the-art internetworking technologies should be universally available. Beliefs about the importance of state-of-the art technologies have become so wide spread that people are invariably embarrassed by the presence of older equipment or by less than universal access to machines and networks in their own workplaces, schools, and homes. When organizations perceive themselves to be less networked than other similar organizations, they institute planning committees and point to their plans and the progress they have made in achieving more extensive internetworking. 3. Internetworking pushes the conceptual limits of time, space, and the known world.  While the first two beliefs focus on the legitimation of aggressive acquisition of internetworking technologies and their central place in a more ideal social world, this belief focuses on the purpose of that investment and what it is good for. Time and space, our own human frailties, and the often-unmanageable aspects of bureaucratic institutions currently limit us. Communications networks and related technologies are said to embody transcendent qualities that will push the limits of the known world. We will no longer be bothered by distance and time differences; all needed information will be available on-line; and our organizations will become more flexible and nimble and less hierarchical.   CM activists imply that there are no limits to meaningful internetworking by downplaying the actual limits of new technologies and the continuing benefits of current technologies. In addition, they fail to balance internetworking activities against competing social values. The Internet mediates the most meaningful activities -- the only real learning, the most important communications, or the most meaningful work. Other media for learning, communicating or working are treated as less important. The most important aspects of life occur when on-line. The physical world is relegated to IRL (in real life) or life off-line (Rheingold, 1993).  4. No one loses from internetworking. The implementation and use of internetworking technologies are portrayed as inherently apolitical activities. CM activists rarely acknowledge that systematic conflicts might follow from the restructuring of major social institutions. Many activists ignore social conflict in their discussions of internetworking or they imply that it will reduce conflict if it already exists. Some authors explicitly claim that connected organizations will be less authoritarian and more cooperative than their less connected counterparts.  The belief that internetworking fosters cooperation and collaboration allows CM advocates to gloss over deep social and value conflicts that social change can precipitate. In practice, organizational participants can have major battles about what kind of equipment to acquire, how to organize access to it, and what standards should regulate its use.   At the societal level, internetworking is portrayed as consistent with all major societal goals. Conflicts among social groups such as labor, government and higher education, between workers and their managers, or between teachers and administrators are ignored. Any short-term sacrifices that might accompany the attainment of these goals, such as displaced workers, are portrayed as minor unavoidable consequences. 5. Irrational resistance is the only obstacle to success. The only obstacles to achieving these visions are obsolete regulatory laws and people who “cling irrationally to their old ways” (Lewis, 1998). Examples of stereotypic beliefs about resistant or naive users are not difficult to find in the literature on internetworking. In organizations, MIS staff routinely report that resistant users undermine the implementation of new technologies (Kling and Iacono, 1984). Even when CM activists are advocating increasingly complex technologies, the major impediments to success are technophobic, uncooperative people, and not problems in the computerization strategy or the extent to which activities or organizations must be reorganized to accommodate large-scale changes.

   They circulate in many discourses and engender the taking of certain lines of action in micro-social contexts, (e.g., individuals subscribing to on-line services or signing up for on-line courses, or organizations adopting the newest internetworking equipment). These beliefs are a foundation for social transformations that include the extensive use of internetworking. Technological progress is emphasized and competing beliefs are deflected. In this moral order, the users of the most advanced technologies are the most virtuous. And, as in melodramas where the good triumphs in the end, only developers and users of advanced internetworking technologies will conquer the unknown and achieve the good life.

 Beyond the Rhetoric. While increased access to information, more inclusionary practices and dis-intermediated relationships may certainly be laudable goals for an internetworking movement, their actual attainment in a purely positive form is hardly certain. In contradiction to the utopian image of a peaceful and inclusive “global village,” at the end of the 20th century, various ethnic identities all over the world are fighting for their independence and exclusion from national societies. The rhetoric of time and space elimination is totalizing. It assumes that because internetworking is technically feasible people everywhere will want to get connected and be able to benefit similarly. But, in practice, actual improvements from new technologies are more narrow (e.g., time savings on airplane flights, access to the latest stock transactions) and may only benefit a small elite segment of society. And as Poster (1990:72) has noted, “ruling powers, hegemonic cultural patterns and individual fear” can make it difficult for members of specific groups to interact with each other, let alone with outsiders, regardless of the technology in use. Women in Saudi Arabia and students in the People’s Republic of China, for example, have been the focus of their governments’ attempts to control their communications.

 Further, if global electronic connections displace local interactions and relationships, some geographic regions may suffer. In Bangalore, India, the influx of multi-national software development firms has created regional disparities between the highly-skilled people who work for those firms and others still mired in poverty and substandard living conditions (Madon, 1997). As entire segments in the region identify with a cosmopolitan global society, their attention to and identification with local civic issues and needs diminishes and the region suffers. Those in the region not connected risk being seen as irrelevant (Castells, 1996).

 Social transformations from global internetworking may have similar disruptive effects on local relationships throughout the world. But even if universal access were available and everyone was connected to this more cosmopolitan network, more comprehensive electronic surveillance becomes increasingly possible. The “gridding of space” (de Certeau, 1984) through global networks makes its occupants and their actions and interactions increasingly available to observation, surveillance and information gathering. The vision of a global networked society -- where everyone knows what everyone else is doing -- can also be fearsome. But, today, most people are enthralled with the idea that space and time may be eliminated through internetworking.

Public discourses

Theoretical Background

 Public discourse is essential to the spread of computerization movements. Technological action frames circulate in public discourses and act as a form of currency whose structure and meaning remain relatively constant across a variety of discursive practices. Social agents borrow the technological action frames that they find in public discourse, use them in their own contexts and discourses and, in so doing, often  embellish or extend them. As a consequence, the widespread circulation of dominant frames in discourse at macro-levels of analysis (e.g., in that of the government, the media or professional associations) can influence and shape micro-level discourse and practices -- across similarly situated organizations. For example, Foucault (1977), in his research on prisons, discovered connections among macro-level discourse in relevant scientific disciplines, micro-level discourses within the prisons themselves and the practices of  prisons, i.e., the ways in which they restructured themselves. Poster (1990:90) points out that Foucault depended on at least three “layers” of discourse to develop his history of prisons and the motivations for their restructuring: 1) the texts generated in the science of criminology; 2) the tracts of reformers; and 3) the paperwork required for the operation of prisons. Organizational re-structuring is often related to the discourses to which that organization pays attention.

Four layers of public discourse

 We have uncovered four layers of public discourse that are critical to the campaigns of computerization movement activists: 1) government discourses (Poster, 1990); 2) the discourses of scientific disciplines (Poster, 1990); 3) media discourses (Gamson, 1995); and 4) organizational and professional discourses (Yates, forthcoming). While we have distinguished these discourses for analytical reasons, they should not be construed as separate in practice. For example, the discourses of governments are widely covered by the media. But media discourse often amplifies and popularizes government discourse. For example, the U.S. government’s National Information Infrastructure has become more widely known in the mass media as the “Information Superhighway.” The media can also build up contending discourses, for example, by pointing out the “speedbumps” on the Information Superhighway or by covering stories about downsizing and the impacts of new technologies in work organizations. Some combinations of discourse can be powerful. Poster (1990:39) notes that, “When government acts ‘technically,’ on a ‘scientific’ basis, to solve a problem its action is automatically legitimate.” The combination of government and scientific discourses lends authority, legitimacy, and a rational basis for organizations to take action. To the extent that a master technological action frame about internetworking technologies -- the death of distance -- is widely circulating, we would expect to find its pervasive use in a variety of public discourses.

 Government Discourse. By 1993, internetworking had moved into national discourse and the Clinton White House had published the pivotal text for the internetworking movement, the NII: Agenda for Action (White House, 1993). Since that time, government discourse has been essential in the development of its meaning.  From State of the Union and commencement speeches to the formation of new agencies, task forces and programs to the production of reports by the Department of Commerce, the National Science Council and the White House, all incorporate the master technological frame of this computerization movement: distance is the problem; electronic integration, connections, and internetworking are the solutions; the goals are better education, health services, work environments, and transformed lives; everyone should be a user in many of domains of life (e.g., work, learning, leisure, and shopping) and over the course of a life -- from childhood to old age. With this document, Bill Clinton and Al Gore promised to link innovation and growth in internetworking with a transformed and reinvigorated society.  If developed, the NII “can ameliorate the constraints of geography and economic status, and give all Americans a fair opportunity to go as far as their talents and ambitions will take them.” This document established funding for research and development for an NII modeled on the current Internet. By stabilizing the meaning of the NII around a particular set of focal technologies, devices, and transmission protocols -- those used in internetworking -- and by encouraging the further development of these technologies, the government has, in part, contributed to a major upheaval in the nation’s telecommunications infrastructures and industries.

 In addition, the NII: Agenda for Action was a strategic reformulation of the meaning of the Internet. With this text and the associated discourses that have since emanated from it, almost all societal organizations are encouraged to connect to the Internet. While the potential benefits of such connections are consistently articulated, the fact that most U.S. organizations may have to painfully restructure themselves in order to actually use and benefit from those connections is rarely mentioned. But government discourse has legitimized this new approach to the organization of businesses, educational institutions and households throughout the U.S. and many organizations are actively seeking to reorganize themselves around distant forms of social life.

 Discourses in Scientific Disciplines. Contrary to the ivy tower stereotype of much academic research and writing, the ideas and findings of many scientific disciplines today are instituted in practice in industry and government agencies (Poster, 1990). Most current discourse about internetworking, even within the hard sciences of engineering and computer science, borrows heavily from sociological conceptualizations of large-scale epochal transformations to explain what these new technologies might mean to the people who use them. While few would label themselves technological determinists, most analyses focus on the accelerated pace of technological innovation as the driving force for societal change (e.g., as costs go down and standards emerge, borders and barriers are broken down) (cf., Cairncross, 1997.)

 But the rhetorical strategy of most of these analyses is to stigmatize current infrastructures and systems in terms of the industrial or modern ideas they embed (Dyson et al., 1996) while casting new internetworking infrastructures and systems in utopian terms. (See Table 1.) Mass media communications systems such as broadcasting and newspaper distribution are characterized by their limitations and current physical infrastructures are vilified. Cities, as centralized hubs of social life, are characterized as decaying systems. While there are no doubt many problems in existing systems, this stigmatization process may actually turn public attention away from finding solutions and then funding them or from carefully reflecting on important social values that may be cast aside (e.g., cities as melting pots and broadcast journalism as a means to synthesize information and frame current events).

 Conversely, new communications systems and infrastructures based on internetworking are characterized in utopian terms. They are more direct, participative, democratic, socially engaging and community-oriented. These discourses invite public participation in the rejection of the past and uncritical identification with and acceptance of the ideological packaging of internetworking. While some research on electronic communications advances these notions, a growing body of research contends that social interactions over the Internet are not always so utopian. For example, research has found that gender biases can be perpetuated in many electronic groups (cf., Herring, 1996) and powerful participants can dominate a discussion and use it for their own strategic purposes (cf., Hert, 1996).

 Mass Media Discourses. The symbolic struggle over the meaning of the Internet is carried out daily in general-audience media discourses.  In Business Week, Fortune, and Wired magazines as well as on The News Hour, Nightline, Frontline, and CNN, legions of computer scientists, social scientists, entrepreneurs, journalists and participant observers outline the course of events which is expected to propel U.S. society from its current form into the next millennium. Gamson (1995) suggests that movement activists are media junkies. Internet activists are no different. Many have become mass media stars (e.g., Esther Dyson, Howard Rheingold, and Katie Hafner) with their popular books widely read and cited in many circles. These activists package an ideology about what the Internet means and frame relevant events, beliefs and actions in ways that make the unfamiliar technology more familiar. Their discourses are often indistinguishable from those of their scientific brethren (and sisters) as they, too, largely borrow from social science theory to attribute blame for current social problems and suggest positive guides based on internetworking to correct them. Their stories about new technologies and what they are good for are not socially neutral, however; they organize in advance how ordinary people and organizations should think about and perform work, engage in learning and spend their leisure time (de Certeau, 1984.)

  The media discourses of computerization movement activists are extremely rich.  Mainstream magazines as well as cyber-zines portray new social heroes and articulate new models for success. While few today may know the names of the heads of the world’s largest banks, everyone knows the names of computer industry luminaries and the places that are the current centers of action (e.g., Silicon Valley, the MIT Media Lab or CERN). Stories and characters from influential chat rooms, discussion groups or on-line communities like the Well or LambdaMOO have become part of popular lore and the foci of much discussion in bars and classrooms alike (cf., Dibbell, 1995; Hafner, 1997.) The passage-way to these new cultural and social practices requires the possession of new objects (e.g., Pentium-chip computers, light-weight lap-tops, 56k bps modems, Internet browsers, computer accounts, passwords and the local phone numbers of Internet Service Providers). Everyday language and activities are transformed as people “surf the net, “log-in,” “post” messages, “click on links” and recite “w-w-w dot slash dot com” web addresses.

 Media discourse is a cultural resource from which the general public can borrow to understand the significance of new technologies and the actions they should take to participate. These discourses are not just “out there;” they embed themselves in people’s every day discourse as they repeat common beliefs about these new technologies and struggle over their meaning at work, school, home or in their informal social networks (Gamson, 1995). One need only examine the extent to which these new words, phrases, people, places and ideas have seeped into one’s own daily conversations with co-workers, friends and family to understand how these discourses have become embedded in everyday life.

 Institutional and Professional Discourses. The last layer of discourse is that which emerges within individual organizational settings and specific professional associations.  These discourses add operational specificity to the technological action frames set up by the government, scientific disciplines and the media. The proponents, champions and enthusiasts of internetworking within specific organizations and professional associations establish committees to study the new opportunities and their associated costs, deliberate on the meaning of new technologies for their own organizations and professional members, develop and circulate white papers, invite knowledgeable experts to company or professional advancement forums and seminars, and generally educate their members about what these technologies might do for them. They identify current organizational or professional problems and suggest how these new technologies can alleviate those problems while simultaneously transforming them (e.g., allowing them to survive or expand as they enter the next century.) In practice, various social groups may develop contending discourses about what these new technologies mean to their organization or profession. For example, Noble (1998) has outlined the struggles at York University in Toronto where faculty went on strike when university administrators forced many untenured faculty to put their courses on video, CD-ROM or the Internet or lose their jobs. In the end, the faculty retained unambiguous control over all decisions relating to the use of technology as a supplement to their classroom instruction or as a means of instructional delivery.
 Within these micro-social contexts, social groups struggle over the meaning of these new technologies as they amplify or contend with the dominant technological action frame to fit their own preferences and goals. In the course of these struggles, organizations are reorganized and professions are redefined. Sometimes, best practices and other testimonials to effective restructuring become public knowledge through stories in trade journals and business publications. But more frequently, discourses about actual practices remain relatively obscure. Organizations may be embarrassed when their adoption of a new technology turns political or their intended results are not quickly obtained. Some of the best accounts of these struggles come from careful historical analyses, enthnographic studies, and case analyses which highlight actual practice and the various sense-making struggles and upheaval that may be associated with organizational restructuring. When these accounts become public, contending discourses can emerge and new technological action frames developed.

 Computer-based work: On the road to distant forms of work

 Many specific computerization movements have already been spawned by the more general internetworking movement (e.g., electronic commerce, distant learning, telemedicine, etc.). What these specific CMs share is a similar approach for how to organize business, education and medical practices when geographic distances are no longer considered to be relevant. In this section, we will illustrate our CM perspective by focusing on the rise of distant forms of work. This specific CM intersects and gives new life to a computerization movement that has been influential for some time -- computer-based work. We first discuss the technological frames, discourses and practices related to the earlier computer-based work movement. Then, we discuss its intersection with internetworking and the current discourses around distant forms of work.

Work Automation

 Automating the Firm. The use of machines to automate various aspects of office work began in the second half of the 19th century. By the end of the 19th century, typewriters were widely available in many offices (Giuliano, 1982). Fully-functional digital computers were developed during World War II. While debates still circulate about whether the first digital computer was the British “Colussus” or the American ENIAC (Edwards, 1996), by the mid-1950s, the Univac, the first commercial computer, was being used for billing and accounting in insurance firms (Yates, forthcoming).  From the 1950s to the mid-1980s, the computerization of work was framed as a work automation activity.

 Technological action frames were built up around many work automation technologies, from the earliest organizational accounting systems to computer-based numerical control systems on shop floors to expert systems in professional offices. Managers in many large hierarchical organizations at the time perceived a number of major problems: lack of control over work processes; uncertainty in decision-making; and increasing demand for clerical workers to handle the growing volume of business transactions. Their solution was the implementation of work automation systems, i.e., formal, closed-loop, information processing and feedback systems which enabled system-level self-correction and the automation of many work processes and activities through step-by-step procedures. The dominant scientific theories employed to understand how and why organizations should restructure themselves to incorporate work automation systems were cybernetics (Weiner, 1948), systems theory (Churchman, 1971; Dertouzos, 1972; Rapaport, 1986), and theories of organizational information processing (Galbraith, 1974). The primary goals of many organizations that implemented these new systems were increased productivity (including cost reductions) and the reduction of uncertainty.

 Scientific discourses about work process automation emerged during the pre-World War II era. At Harvard, Howard Aiken and Wassily Leontif, inspired by Babbage’s work in Britain a century before, developed the science of mathematical economy, a formal theory of input-output analysis and a design for an early electromechanical computer (Beniger, 1991). Independently, George Stibitz at Bell Laboratories and John Atanasoff at Iowa State University were developing prototypes of electronic and electro-mechanical automatic digital calculators. Alan Turing, a British mathematician, discovered that machines could carry out mental operations and published a paper called “On computable numbers” during the mid-1930s. Later, during the war, Turing worked with a team of scientists at the British Government Code and Cypher School to develop computational devices that could automate and speed up the decryption of encoded German messages (Edwards, 1996).

 Yates (forthcoming) reports that in the U.S. during World War II, many mathematically trained actuaries also worked on military projects involving statistics and cryptology and came to learn about new electronic computers through these government discourses and practices. As the war ended and these actuaries went back to work, they were anxious to examine the potential of computers for the insurance industry. At the 1947 meeting of the Society of Actuaries, a committee was formed to study their potential use. The committee worked closely with IBM and Remington Rand’s Univac division to develop technologies that would be explicitly useful to their firms and profession. Their report was distributed to their members in 1952 and helped to spread ideas about how computing could enhance productivity. While initially the committee had wanted to see the development of applications that would specifically help their profession (e.g., in automating mortality studies and financial analyses), these computations represented insufficient volumes of work to justify the expense of the machines. As a consequence, they concluded that the most effective use of new computers would be for routine billing and accounting processes. The efforts of this committee and other similar committees at the Life Office Management Association and Insurance Accounting and Statistical Association initiated sales to a number of insurance companies. These innovations provided models for the evolution of computing in other insurance companies and large firms that routinely handled large volumes of billing and accounting transactions.

 During the 1960s, a variety of work automation systems continued to be developed and implemented for use in banks, government agencies and manufacturing firms. In its most extreme form, organizations expected to be able to increase their productivity through investments in technology and the substitution of machines for labor. In a less extreme form, organizations expected to hire less skilled, lower paid workers who could perform more work with the aid of a machine. In one set of estimates, each word-processing machine was thought to be equal to between one and five typists (Reinicke, 1984) while every robot introduced into an automobile plant could replace two workers (Shaiken, 1985).

 Management theorists within academia (cf., Leavitt and Whisler, 1958; Simon, 1977) saw computerization as a mechanism for enhanced control over decision-making in hierarchical organizations. If information from front-line workers could be quickly pushed up the hierarchy and integrated into top-level decision-making, managers could re-centralize decision-authorities, reassert control over work processes and increase organizational productivity and competitiveness. Top managers in large organizations informed by these new theories and technologies advocated the computerization of their firms.  Information became privileged and many management information systems were developed and implemented for use by mid-level  managers. An entire new field, Management Information Systems, emerged in academia to develop theories and research programs centered on technological improvements in organizational decision-making. Most of these theories and many new technologies such as decision support systems were aimed at enhancing the work of individuals in organizations (e.g., supervisors and mid-level managers.) In practice, many organizations had problems developing and implementing these new systems. Gladden (1982) estimated that nearly 75 percent of all systems development projects were either never completed or, if completed were never used.

 Many contending discourses emerged in academia and labor. The early work automation frame reignited the age-old fear that workers have of being replaced by machines (Castells, 1996). In the 1950s, Norbert Weiner (1954) predicted that automation would result in a depression within twenty-five years that would make the depression of the 1930s seem trivial. A discourse emerged around this idea and maintained this pessimistic position throughout the next several decades (cf., The Collapse of Work [Jenkins and Sherman, 1979] and Automatic Unemployment [Hines and Searle, 1979]). From the 1970s through the 1990s, researchers in the field of industrial and labor relations developed a discourse that articulated for a wider audience the process of automation within manufacturing organizations, focusing on de-skilling and computer-mediated work (Adler, 1992; Braverman, 1974; Hirschhorn, 1984; Shaiken, 1985; Zuboff, 1988). Others focused on the impacts of new technologies on clerical and other white-collar workers (Feldberg and Glenn, 1983; Gregory and Nussbaum, 1982; Iacono and Kling, 1987; Mumford, 1983) and on general reductions in the quality of worklife in extensively computerized settings (Attewell and Rule, 1984; Kling and Iacono, 1989). Debates emerged in the discourses of sociology, computer science and information systems about all of these topics. Many argued, however, that the apparent negative employment effects were overstated due to simplistic notions about the substitution of machines for labor (Hunt and Hunt, 1985). While some occupations, such as telephone operators, clearly have seen reductions in their numbers through the automation of their jobs (Denny and Fuss, 1983), the more or less continuous growth of jobs in the U.S. contradicted the idea that machines could substitute for labor. Moreover, empirical studies on de-skilling, monitoring, and quality of worklife did not find that negative outcomes were necessarily determined by the new technologies -- as predicted by the framing of the technology and its associated discourses. Instead, outcomes were non-deterministic and depended on a variety of factors including type of organization, general economic conditions, and the predominant management philosophy.

 Automating the Professions and Jobs. By the mid-1980s, the types of computers and applications available in the marketplace had increased significantly. Many professionals and semi-professionals in the workplace were eager to have increased access to these new machines and their related applications to develop their own local systems and manipulate organizational information for their own needs. This type of computer use is often referred to as “end-user computing” (Rockart and Flannery, 1983). However, it was not the ready availability of new machines in the workplace that engendered these changes, but extra-organizational discourse in professional societies promoting the computerization of their members’ work. Similar to the Society of Actuaries during the earlier period, national and regional accounting and finance associations advocated the use of PCs and spreadsheets in the early 1980s as part of the professionalization of their members. From the 1970s through the 1980s, material control and production associations pushed for Material Requirements Planning (MRP) systems and, then, Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II) systems as ways to rationalize and increase the productivity of manufacturing organizations (Kling and Iacono, 1984). During this same period, several associations, such as the Data Processing Managers Association (DPMA) and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), emerged to serve computer specialists and the managers of Data Processing (DP) and Management Information Systems (MIS) departments.

 In each administrative sector, some related groups have taken on the mantle of computerization as a subject of professional reform. These professionals do not work for computer vendors; they identify themselves as accountants, production planners, or information systems specialists, for example, with an interest in using certain computer applications in the course of their work in insurance firms, manufacturing companies or the public sector. In practice, many had to struggle within their organizations to acquire new machines and applications (e.g., PCs  and spreadsheet software) (cf., George et al., 1995; Kling and Iacono, 1984, 1989). Many professionals and their managers developed strategies to acquire new machines for their personal use over periods of time, by hiding their purchases in departmental budgets, or by reconstituting cast-off machines (e.g., old test equipment used on the manufacturing floor) for use in their own offices.  Since these struggles to gain access to machines and applications constituted grass-roots efforts on the part of various professionals and semi-professionals, there was little discourse that rose to counter the idea of more ubiquitous computing for many types of workers.

 Automating the Office and the Distant Worker. By the mid 1980s, most large organizations were already using their own wide-area-networks or value-added networks (telecommunications services purchased from outside vendors) to communicate across their distant divisions and workplaces. Many were also implementing local-area-networks (within buildings and offices) to enhance work-group computing. Giuliano (1982: 150) suggested that in such an “information-age office” people could communicate with one another and with their home offices through “one of a half dozen ‘electronic mail’ networks now available throughout the U.S.” He argued that people would increasingly conduct their work not only in the office, but also while traveling, while on the shop floor and at home. Not only would they have access to their personal files, but they could also access information from the company’s mainframe. The build-up of these technologies in the mid-1980s was the fuel for a number of highly exaggerated and short-lived claims for an “office of the future” where workers could “compute” from home while having real-time access to the critical events and information of a more virtual and paperless workplace (Miles, 1987; Toffler, 1980).

With the decreasing costs of computers and modems, telecommuting, (i.e., remote supervision with a reduction in commuting) as a form of distant work became a viable option (Mokhtarian, 1991). During the mid-1980s, many departments of transportation concerned with increasing traffic jams and air pollution attempted to mobilize many large organizations to experiment with and implement telecommuting programs. They argued that organizations concerned with a shortage of workers or space could expand their work force while still maintaining communications and control through computer networks. For example, workers could respond to customers’ telephone calls by utilizing a personal computer and special telephone line at home or at satellite offices. While some companies did implement experimental programs, often to comply with government requirements, most did not move toward telecommuting as a major new form of work.

 Much of the empirical research on telecommuting has found that management issues are a factor in preventing its widespread adoption (Staples, Hulland, and Higgins, 1998). Managers report difficulties in managing their workers and dislike their lack of control over work processes. The “Technology and Telecommuting: Issues and Impacts Committee” of the National Science Counsel (1994) developed a report on the status of telecommuting in the U.S. and found telecommuting to be quite narrow in its traditional conceptualization. We agree and suggest that telecommuting has largely been framed as a work automation technology. It is typically aimed at individual workers who use a computer all day and for whom control over work productivity is paramount. The key management strategies employed to insure control are either piece-work or management by objective. In practice, these workers can be cut off from the discourses of their workplaces and subjected to extensive work monitoring. In the NII: Agenda for Action (White House, 1993), it is argued that people can live anywhere and telecommute to their offices if they are connected to the NII. It is assumed that simply because internetworking technologies are available that people will move to less populated areas and that land use patterns will change. But most workers are not going to move simply because it is feasible to telecommute.

 There are many factors that may cause people to move. Work may be one of them. But, job security is a key worry in US workplaces today and people tend to live where they will have many job opportunities. While the U.S. Department of Transportation estimated that there were about two million telecommuters in 1993 and expected those numbers to grow over this decade, we suggest, however, that over reliance on the technological frame of work automation and the way that it has informed the managerial practices for telecommuting are primary reasons that telecommuting has not been the vast success that was expected -- despite its assumed benefits for the public good and the availability of new internetworking technologies.

Work Collaboration

 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, disillusionment set in over the lack of productivity gains from the wide-spread individual use of computers and information systems. Computing and telecommunications systems accounted for half of the capital investments made by private firms while annual rates of productivity growth remained low -- especially in the service sector. The wide-scale recognition of this problem was termed the “productivity paradox” (Dunlop and Kling, 1991). A new technological action frame, work collaboration, emerged. Its development depended largely on the earlier counter-discourses about work automation. It was widely argued that workers should be recognized as organizational assets; they should be empowered, not replaced. Environments should be created so that workers can fully contribute to the limits of their ability, instead of being monitored eight hours a day (Creed and Miles, 1996). Since work is a social endeavor, it was argued, technologies should support social communication and collaboration rather than individual work done in seclusion from the ongoing activities of the firm.

 Technological frames were built up around many work collaboration technologies (e.g., screen-sharing software, group schedulers, group authoring tools, group support systems and shared databases). A major problem for management at the time was the lack of evidence of productivity gains from their heavy investments in work automation technologies. The major solution was the use of technologies that would facilitate information sharing and collaboration. Potential users included everyone in an organization. A key belief was that productivity from the new technologies that supported group work had the potential to exceed what had been achieved with PCs used by individuals (Bullen and Bennett, 1991). But, further, it was expected that the use of these technologies would transform organizations into more collaborative places to work. Almost everyone in an organization would have access to organizational information and almost everyone would be empowered to make decisions and innovate as necessary in their jobs. Since the 1950s, the framing of work computerization had come full circle. Computing was originally believed to enable a shift in control and decision authorities to centralized and top management. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, new technologies were expected to decentralize authority and empower lower-level employees and professionals.

  Discourses about work collaboration were initially embedded in the software engineering and computer science research labs of commercial firms, such as XeroxPARC, MCC, and SRI, and universities, such as the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and the University of Arizona GroupSystems research projects. Participants called the technologies they were developing and the forms of work they were espousing computer-supported cooperative (and later, collaborative) work (CSCW). CSCW was coined as a galvanizing catch?phrase, and later given more substance through a lively stream of research and the emergence of a community of interest.  Conferences identified with the term and participants advanced prototype systems, studies of their use, and key theories about their development and potential impacts. The media promoted this stream of research. But unlike the general internetworking movement that is highly visible in mainstream media, CSCW was discussed primarily in business publications, like the Wall Street Journal or Business Week, the business sections of daily newspapers, and computer and information science publications (e.g., Communications of the ACM). In these discourses, pundits and consultants predicted organizational transformations (e.g., the flattening of organizational hierarchies and the empowering of lower-level workers) through use of these new technologies (cf., Wilke, 1993).

 Researchers examining the early use of CSCW applications in organizational settings found little evidence of transformation, however. Within these sites, there was little discourse about the new technologies (e.g., how to use them, their expected benefits, or their role in the firm). As a consequence, many potential users perceived the new technology in the old work automation frame. Researchers found that they were mainly used as devices for extending the capabilities of individuals (Bullen and Bennett, 1991) or they were not used as originally intended (i.e., for information sharing or collaboration) or at all (Orlikowski, 1993). Further, these researchers argued that the expectation that groupware or CSCW technologies can transform organizations to be more collaborative is based in technological determinism. In practice, many working relationships can be multivalent, and mix elements of cooperation, conflict, conviviality, competition, collaboration, commitment, caution, control, coercion, coordination and combat (Kling, 1991). But the frames that were built up around collaborative work technologies had come largely from technologists wishing to push their products. Like others before them, they were rejecting the old cultural models of work, and attempting to mobilize support for new ways of doing work. But, managers were slow to buy these technologies.

Distant Forms of Work

 During the early 1990s, the themes of many popular management consultants shifted towards more socially rich conceptions of work practices, focusing on cross-functional teams, partnerships and strategic alliances, for example. Whole literatures emerged heralding new forms of organization -- flexible, networked, learning, trust-based governance forms, cluster and virtual. These conceptualizations argued for the importance of lateral forms of communication within and across organizations enabled by new internetworking technologies. The idea of collaborative work was given new life through the intersection of the internetworking CM.

 One vision of this new organization argues that large, hierarchical organizations will vertically disintegrate to become small, lean organizations joined in networks and alliances. The apostles of these virtual corporations, like the earlier disciples of other forms of computer-based work, are not shy about pushing their ideas. William Davidow and Michael Malone (1992), who wrote The Virtual Corporation, argue that unless the U.S. becomes a leader in forming virtual organizations by the year 2015, it will lose its competitive edge.

 While many organizations already had a variety of internal and external networks in place using proprietary protocols and standards, the rise of internetworking stabilized the exemplary artifacts of an emerging and contending technological frame for computer-based work around the Internet and open protocols and standards. Government discourses, which supported the research and development of internetworking technologies, legitimized distant forms of work based on the Internet, the World Wide Web and other internetworking technologies (despite the narrow conceptualization in the NII of distant work as telecommuting.)

 Today, the merging of new organizational forms, collaborative work technologies and the broad internetworking movement has resulted in a new technological action frame with the dominant ideational element of distributed or distant forms of work. Distributed work is defined as: “work that is done in a location different from that of the supervisor, subordinate or fellow team member” (Technology and Telecommuting Committee, 1994). Technological frames have built up around many new technologies and concepts related to distributed work such as intra- and extra-nets, electronic communities, web-based conferencing tools, and desktop video-conferencing. Some technologies have been reconstituted from their earlier framing as work collaboration tools. For example, Lotus Notes, a primary work collaboration technology, was initially assumed to enhance work collaboration for anyone and everyone in an organization. Today, it is given to team members and managers who are distributed and who must use electronic communications to accomplish their work. A major problem identified by organizations is that people must work together (e.g., on cross-functional or global teams) while they are often distributed in time and space. For example, many people work on multiple teams, travel to see customers, or are not collocated with their colleagues and teammates. The major solution is internetworking to enable their distributed work. The primary goals of many organizations that choose to adopt distant forms of work are increased communications at all levels within and across relevant social groups of organizations (e.g., the sales force,  product repair people, customers, suppliers, buyers, team members, partners, etc.) for real-time or near real-time information sharing and the integration of distributed knowledge.

 Not surprisingly, the theoretical basis for this technological frame is forming around the ideas of networks, social networks and knowledge networks (cf., Sproull and Kiesler, 1991). But the idea of a network is less a theoretical model than a rhetorical tool for researchers to easily discuss the variety of complex and not well understood relationships currently found in organizations today (Guice, 1998). A number of different streams of research have developed around these core ideas. Some studies of virtual organizations, for example, have taken an economic perspective and have focused primarily on buyer-supplier networks rather than worklife (Kraut et al., 1998). Another stream has focused on the technologies used in internetworking and the choices that managers and professionals make about how to communicate with co-workers, not on the work itself or the ways that organizations restructure around these new technologies (cf., Fulk, Schmitz, and Steinfield, 1990; Zack and McKenney, 1995). Studies of computer-mediated communication (cf., Sproull and Kiesler, 1991) have investigated the use of email and distribution lists in organizations and assert that these technologies can make an organization become networked -- as users begin to communicate and form relationships with people that they never would have communicated with otherwise. One study (Hesse et al., 1993), for example, found that oceanographers who are on the periphery of their scientific community benefited more from their use of electronic networks than did those who were more centrally located. In sociology, Powell’s (1996) work on trust-based forms of work and Meyerson et al.’s (1996) work on swift trust have engendered studies of trust in temporary, virtual teams (Iacono and Weisband, 1997; Jarvenpaa and Liedner, 1998). The thread that runs across these various streams is the death of distance -- geographic distance is irrelevant. Little attention is paid, however, to the possible social or cultural barriers that may still be present.

 But, today, there is a dearth of studies that focus on the practices of distributed work (e.g., how distributed work is accomplished, how people communicate, how monitoring is carried out [or not], how leadership works, how people learn or innovate, or what the impacts of these types of work are on the people who engage in them). One study of distributed work focuses on the long-term communicative practices of the computer scientists and researchers that used the early Internet to develop the Common Lisp programming language (cf., Orlikowski and Yates, 1995). Other studies are currently being conducted on the use of video-conferencing across distant work sites (Ruhleder and Jordan, 1997) and continuous video-integration of worksites (Graham, 1996). Some discourse about distant forms of work has emerged in reports commissioned by the government (cf., Technology and Telecommuting Committee, 1994). But this research stream is still very new and few conclusions can be drawn about what the actual practices of distributed workers will be.

 While some counter discourse emerged around the early telecommuting technologies (e.g., by pointing out the isolation of telecommuters, their extensive monitoring, and loss of a social office), by and large, distributed workers do not have those problems. Rather than working at home most of the time, they travel with their laptops to see clients or other colleagues. New problems have arisen, however. A white paper on “High Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology and the Next Generation Internet” reports that there are many logistical and maintenance problems related to internetworking (Kling, 1997). This report expects that these issues will become more salient as the technologies become more sophisticated, the users become less sophisticated and technical support is less available.

 Media discourses have also pointed out some of the problems that distributed workers may have: the blurring of home and work; work that encompasses more hours of the day or week; and the extensive learning that has to go on before these technologies can be effectively used. But one of the more ironic twists is the idea that the new “borderless economy,” instead of allowing people to live and work anywhere they desire, has created an “elite class of nomads” or the “business homeless” who live nowhere or perhaps even worse live in “mind-numbing” airports much of the time (Iyer, 1998; Rayner, 1998). One unanticipated outcome of distributed work may be that rather than distance becoming irrelevant through new technologies, it may become increasingly relevant as people travel more frequently to accomplish their work. Castells (1996) argues that world-wide networking will exclude entire segments of society -- those that are not networked  -- and result in a highly segmented global society. But given the indeterminacy of the meaning of new and complex technologies, a future based on internetworking can only discerned at this point with some difficulty.

 Summary. In this analysis, we have examined the framing, discourses and practices of three historical shifts in the computer-based work CM -- from work automation (including telecommuting) to work collaboration and distant forms of work. We have seen that with these shifts, new technological action frames were constituted in the discourses of the government (especially for telecommuting), professional associations (especially for work automation), scientific discourses (work automation, work collaboration, and distant forms of work) and the mass media (work collaboration and distant forms of work). While these discourses have mobilized various types of organizations to adopt these technologies, in practice, the goals related to these frames have remained elusive. Productivity gains, especially in the service sector, remained low while work automation was prevalent. Across a variety of work settings with groupware or CSCW applications, collaboration was difficult to achieve. And distant forms of work, rather than integrating distributed people and resources, may actually cause more workers to travel distances. As a consequence, there are continuing gaps between the discourses about these work technologies and actual practices in micro-social contexts. We have also seen that careful scientific studies of the use of these technologies in worklife play a critical role in the development of contending discourses and the further development of new technological action frames. For the most part, the dominant critiques of various modes of computerization have come from the discourses produced by careful scientific research on work practices. These discourses are essential in correcting the many misrepresentations and misunderstandings about the nature of organizational restructuring and how new technologies influence work practices.
 

 Conclusions

        We have argued that the rise of the Internet and other internetworking technologies in US organizations has been stimulated by a set of loosely linked computerization movements. We analyzed these movements by investigating how societal mobilization is socially constructed through the interplay of three elements: technological action frames, public discourses and practices. Technological action frames are built up in public discourses and can be persuasive to broad audiences. They can mobilize similarly situated organizations to reject old cultural models and to identify with new ones, for example, by getting connected to the Internet, and restructuring work around these new technologies. Our analysis of organizational change differs from most organizational analyses by considering CMs which cut across society as important sources of interpretations and beliefs about what internetworking is good for and what social actions people should take to secure the future they envision.

 Today, a dominant technological frame is being built up around the Internet. A major ideational element is the death of distance. This idea simultaneously attributes blame for societal problems to the distances among distributed people and social institutions and suggests ways to ameliorate the situation --use internetworking to obliterate distance and integrate, connect or network distributed people and organizations. The media, the government and scientific disciplines embed these beliefs, goals, and attributions in their own discourses about how internetworking might apply to various sectors of society. Theories derived from scientific disciplines provide organizing rationales (e.g., transition to a networked world, participation in an information society) for unbounded internetworking. Computerization movements play a role in persuading organizations to accept an ideology that favors everybody adopting state-of-the-art internetworking technologies. Their discourses, however, rarely explain the values, resource commitments, and extensive restructuring that accompany their visions. While CMs can generate a rhetoric of transformation, evidence thus far does not point to widespread actual transformations as intended. Actual transformations (or failures to transform) work themselves out in situated practices.

 Contending discourses do arise in the mass media, within scientific disciplines and within organizations as injustices or the loss of valued practices are pointed out for certain groups of people (e.g., the stress of monitoring for clerical workers or the loss of the social office for telecommuters), as critical research findings are made public (e.g., productivity from technology investments is low), or as social conditions change (e.g., more extensive lateral communications are required as many businesses acquire new strategic partners). Contending discourses, by framing technologies in alternative ways, can have powerful effects on the development of new meaning about a set of technologies and can constitute new technological frames. For example, the criticisms of the work automation frame developed into discourses about more collaborative technologies and engendered the development of an entire new families of technologies (e.g., groupware and CSCW). Today, there are few contending discourses about distant forms of work. But we have no reason to doubt that as studies of actual practice emerge, the gaps between discourses and practices will be uncovered.

 We believe that when one studies the sites where internetworking is being adopted, traces of discourses that have been imported into the adopting organization from other sources will be easy to spot. Members of adopting organizations consult with specialists, belong to professional associations, read professional journals and mass media publications, take courses, are affiliated with government committees, and visit other organizations to examine their practices. To the extent that the framing of a new technology has become dominant, we would expect to find its wide-spread use in the discourses within and across many organizational sites. And we would also expect to find many gaps between the discourses and the practices as people struggle to understand what a particular technology means and how to apply it in their own worklives. These ideas open up rich lines of empirical research. Much more work needs to be done to examine particular CMs. We need to learn more about the situational and interactional elements of CM activists and the ways in which cultural templates, such as master frames, are developed and translated into practice. We hope that our analysis of the Internet and computer-based work will encourage scholars to examine CMs in other social settings and to analyze their own discourses and practices.

        During the last 50 years, CMs have helped set the stage on which the computer industry expanded.  As this industry expands, vendor organizations (like Microsoft) also become powerful participants in persuading people to computerize and internetwork.  Some computer vendors and their trade associations can be powerful participants in specific decisions about equipment purchased by a particular company or a powerful force behind weakening legislation which could  protect consumers from trade abuses related to computing. But their actions alone cannot account for the widespread mobilization of internetworking in the United States.  They feed and participate in it; they have not driven it.  Despite the lack of evidence for increased productivity in organizations, investment in new computing and telecommunications systems continues to grow at a staggering rate. Part of the drive to internetwork is economic, but part is driven by the efforts of CM advocates in the government, various scientific disciplines and the popular press who mobilize constituencies. Moreover, the social changes that one can attribute to internetworking can sometimes be disruptive and socially conservative  (e.g., loss of attention to regional needs, increased disparity between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” more opportunities for government surveillance, etc.), contrary to the positive change portrayed by the internetworking computerization movement. But we suspect that the pervasiveness of internetworking and the new energy infused into the movement through the NII will have a significant cumulative effect on American life.

 There is no well-organized opposition or broad-based alternative to the internetworking CM. Even countries like China that have traditionally feared and controlled citizen contact with foreigners have started to develop their own NII’s. In the name of  “economic informatization,” China now allows people to use the Internet, but requires registration with the police. It also blocks certain web sites and monitors the content accessed by its citizens. A general counter-computerization movement (CCM) in most countries might well be stigmatized and marginalized as "Luddite."  Since CM activists portray internetworking as a means to transform society, a general CCM would have to oppose internetworking in all sectors of society and all institutions, (e.g., in education, work, home, and so on).  A successful ideological base for such opposition probably would have to be anchored in an alternative conception of society and the place of technology in it. While there is no active movement to counter internetworking in general, many have joined Senator Exon and others in proclaiming the Internet to be a danger and support the ideas behind his legislation to  regulate speech on the Internet (Cannon, 1996). At the same time, organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union continue to struggle to support individual rights to free speech and other civil liberties for Internet users. However, these discourses and counter discourses are highly legalistic and bound up with governmental ideals rather deeper understandings of actual practices.  In their most likely form, the computerization movements of the late 1990s will constitute a conservative transformation reinforcing patterns of an elite-dominated, stratified society.
 

Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Bryan Pfaffenberger who read an earlier draft and provided insight that helped moved the theoretical ideas in this paper forward. The authors gratefully acknowledge the continuing enthusiasm of Leigh Star for this project and the incredibly detailed and helpful suggestions made by JoAnne Yates, an editor of this volume.
 

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