Computerization Movements and the Mobilization of Support for Computerization
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September 21, 1994 To appear in:
Ecologies of Knowledge. SUNY Press. Leigh Starr (Ed). An earlier version of this paper appeared in Social Problems 35(3)(June 1988):226-243 as "The Mobilization of Support for Computerization: The Role of Computerization Movements." This 1994 version adds an epilogue.
Abstract
This chapter describes how computerization is the byproduct of loosely organized movements rather than only the results of an industry selling products to eager customers. We briefly examine five "computerization movements" -- urban information systems, artificial intelligence, office automation, instructional computing, and personal computing. (The 1994 epilogue also discusses Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Virtual Reality, and Computer Networking as the foci of computerization moevements). These computerization movements share key ideological beliefs, which we also characterize. The main alternative normative analyses of appropriate computerization comes from counter movements whose interests intersect with some special form of computerization: in workplaces, to intrusions on personal privacy, to consumer rights. These counter movements articulate how computing should be balanced with competing values such as good jobs, fair information practices, and consumer control. However these counter movements visions do not add up to a coherent alternative humanistic vision for appropriate computerization.
Introduction
There is a major mobilization for computerization in many institutional sectors in the United States. Computerization is a social process for providing access to and support for computer equipment to be used in activities such as teaching, accounting, writing, designing circuits, etc. Computerization entails social choices about the levels of appropriate investment and control over equipment and expertise, as well as choices of equipment. Many professionals and managers are adopting computing systems rather rapidly, while they often puzzle about ways to organize positive forms of social life around them. By the early 1990s, computing and telecommunications accounted for half of the capital investments made by private firms ( Dunlop and Kling, 1991; Kling, in press). However, the most fervent advocates of computerization have argued that the actual pace of computerization in schools, offices, factories, and homes is too slow (Papert, 1980; Feigenbaum and McCorduck, 1983; Yourdon, 1986; also see Kaplan, 1983).
Why is the United States rapidly computerizing? One common answer argues that computer-based technologies are adopted only because they are efficient economic substitutes for labor or other technologies (Simon, 1977). Rapid computerization is simply a byproduct of cost-effective computing technologies. A variant of this answer views computerization as an efficient tool through which monopoly capitalists control their suppliers and markets, and by which managers to tighten their control over workers and the labor process (Braverman, 1975; Mowshowitz, 1976; Shaiken, 1986).
A second answer focuses on major epochal social transformations and argues that the United States is shifting from a society where industrial activity dominates to one in which information processing dominates (Bell, 1979). Computer-based technologies are simply "power tools" for "information workers" or "knowledge workers" as drill presses are power-tools for machinists (Strassman, 1985).
While each of these responses offers insight into computerization, we believe that they ignore some of the broadly noneconomic dimensions of computerization in industrialized countries. The market assumptions of these common answers have also shaped the majority of social studies of computerization (See Kling, 1980, 1987 for a detailed review of the empirical studies of computerization). These studies focus on computerization in particular social settings that range in scale from small groups and workplaces (Shaiken, 1986) through single organizations (Kling, 1978a; Kling and Iacono, 1984) to comparative multi-organizational studies (Laudon, 1974; Laudon, 1986). They usually ignore the ways that participants in the settings under study develop beliefs about what computing technologies are good for and how they should organize and use them (see for example, Attewell and Rule, 1984).
During the last 15 years we have conducted systematic studies of computerization in diverse organizations: banks (Kling, 1978b; Kling, 1983), engineering firms (Kling and Scacchi, 1982), insurance companies (Kling and Scacchi, 1982), manufacturing firms (Kling and Iacono, 1984), public agencies (Kling, 1978a), and schools (Kling, 1983; Kling, 1986). We have also been participant observers of four specific computerization movements: artificial intelligence (1966-1974), computer-based education (1974-1994), office automation (1975-1990), and personal computing (1983-1994). We have also have learned about several computerization efforts at our home university as participants, first-hand observers, or coordinators of an assessment team.
Our research and participant experiences have taught us that the adoption, acquisition, installation and operation of computer-based systems is often much more socially charged than the adoption and operation of other equipment, like telephone systems, photocopiers, air conditioners, or elevators. Participants are often highly mobilized adopt and adapt to particular computing arrangements through collective activities. These collective activities take place both outside and within computerizing organizations, and that they share important similarities with various other social, professional, intellectual, and scientific movements. Strongly committed advocates often drive computerization projects. They develop and encourage ideologies that interpret what computing is good for and how people in these projects should manage and organize access to computing. They usually import these ideologies from discourses about computerization external to the computerizing organization (Kling and Iacono, 1984).
In this paper we examine how specialized "computerization movements" advance computerization, in ways that go beyond the effect of promotion by the industries that produce and sell computer-based technologies and services. Our main thesis is that computerization movements communicate key ideological beliefs about the favorable links between computerization and a preferred social order which helps legitimate relatively high levels of computing investment for many potential adopters. These ideologies also set adopter's expectations about what they should use computing for and how they should organize access to it. In this paper we focus our attention primarily upon the character of the computerization movements and their organizing ideologies(1).
We have selected five specific computing technologies to examine as the focus of computerization movements (CMs): urban information systems, artificial intelligence, computer-based education, office automation, and personal computing. Collectively, these specific CMs, along with movements organized around other computing technologies, form a general computerization movement. We identify a core ideology that supports the general CM and examine groups whose world views balance the pursuit of the most advanced computing technologies with alternative social values. We argue that computerization is a process deeply embedded in social worlds that extend beyond the confines of any particular organization or setting. In this paper we examine the character of CMs (2).
Computerization Movements
Sociologists have used the concept "movement" to study many different kinds of collective phenomena. The most common term found in this literature is "social movement," often used in a generic way to refer to movements in general. But sociologists also have written about professional movements (Bucher and Strauss, 1961), artistic movements, and scientific movements (Aronson, 1984; Star, 1989). From the diverse ways sociologists have used the concept, we found Blumer's (1969:8) general definition most helpful for our analysis: social movements are "collective enterprises to establish a new order of life." This is an inclusive definition that allows us to consider elements relevant to computerization that other, narrower conceptions would rule out. We also found the work of Zald and his colleagues (McCarthy and Zald, 1978; Zald and Berger, 1978) helpful in that it allows us to consider social forms that are both highly and loosely organized as part of computerization movements.
Computerization movements (CMs) are a kind of movement whose advocates focus on computer-based systems as instruments to bring about a new social order. The mobilizing ideologies of computerization counter-movements (CCMs) oppose certain modes of computerization which their advocates view as bringing about an inappropriate social order. We will examine five CMs, some CCMs, and their mobilizing ideologies in the next sections. Various scholars who write about movements emphasize the potential importance of activist entrepreneurs who also help drive movements through books, speeches, and other actions. Such activists, who write for broad national audiences, but who do not belong to a particular movement organization, play an important part in the computerization movements we describe here.
"Movements" serve as theoretical constructs. Our descriptions that "people join movements," "people speak for movements," "movements hold a particular ideology," or "one movement is a wing of a second, general movement" and similar attributions are conveniently concise ways of describing much more complicated and varied collective actions.
We also find two distinctions made by Blumer (1969) specially helpful for our analysis. First, Blumer distinguished between "reform" and "revolutionary" movements. The ideologies of revolutionary movements emphasize changing key social relations throughout a social order, while reform movements focus on change of a restricted set of social relations. Blumer also distinguished between "specific" and "general" movements. Specific movements are the various wings or submovements of a broader, general" movement. Many movements, like those that advance feminism, Eastern religions, civil rights, quantification in the sciences, or computerization, are heterogeneous. The distinction between specific movements and general movements helps us characterize the relationships between distinct wings of a larger movement.
One theme in our discussion of computerization and the specific movements that help produce it is the importance of seeing how local practices and concerns, in workplaces, schools, or corporations, are linked to these external developments. By distinguishing between a "general" CM and several "specific" CMs (Blumer, 1969), we want to draw attention to how similar conceptions about modes of computerization found across many organizations or social settings should be understood.
Technological Movements and Computerization Movements
Some movements focus on the promotion of particular technologies as central to a vision of a preferred social order, such as the nuclear power movement (Useem and Zald, 1982) or the "appropriate technology movement." These technological movements (TMs) stand out as a special class because their mobilizing ideologies promote an improved social order through the use of a particular family of technologies. Other movements, such as the anti-nuclear movement (Downey, 1986; Walsh, 1981), oppose the use of a particular technology. Following McCarthy and Zald (1977), we call these latter movements "technology counter-movements" (TCMs). The kind of claims made by TM and TCM spokespeople differ considerably. TM advocates usually claim that the new technologies will improve society in the future. Unless the advocate has a reliable crystal ball, these claims are, of course, speculative. In contrast TCM advocates claim that some current use of a technology causes environmental or social problems today. The ideological content of TCMs brings them closer than TMs to social movement participants who claim that their grievances are anchored in real social conditions (Spector and Kitsuse, 1977; Schneider, 1985).
While McCarthy and Zald's (1977) emphasis on movement organizations is a helpful insight for studying TMs or TCMs, we do not limit ourselves to this conceptualization. They characterize movement organizations very narrowly, as organizations that identify their goals with a movement or counter-movement, and that attempt to implement those goals. Some of the key advocacy for particular technologies comes from broad professional organizations which have subgroups acting as movement organization. But another important set of participants are activists who write for broad national audiences, but who do not belong to a particular movement organization. The extent to which movement organizations play major or minor roles in a particular movement is then an empirical question.
Computerization movements (CMs) are one kind of TM which focus on computer-based systems as the core technologies which their advocates claim will be instruments to bring about a new social order. The mobilizing ideologies of computerization counter-movements (CCMs) oppose certain modes of computerization which their advocates view as bringing about an inappropriate social order. The five CMs we examine below are at different stages of development. Each has different participants who meet and communicate in distinct, but sometimes overlapping, social worlds. The participants in specific CM one may have little or no concern for the outcomes of another. However, the participants in one CM are often sympathetic to some other CMs.
CMs are a major source of support for computerization in the United States today. How society changes during this period of computerization does not depend only upon an industry's ability to manufacture and market products and on individual consumers buying and using them. Moreover, other actors besides equipment vendors and consumers mobilize enthusiasm for increased computing. In the case of computer-based education, for example, the mass media, parents, and teachers play critical roles in mobilizing support for the spread of computers in classrooms. Instructional computing researchers also stimulate interest in the potentials of new technologies (Taylor 1980). Local organizations such as school boards and PTAs discuss policies and the practical implications of obtaining resources to implement such concepts as "computer literacy" in the curriculum. Moreover, the ways in which the promises of computer-based education are characterized are similar in many schools. We find movements as a useful way to explain the social mobilization for technologies where the same ideologies and debates recur across diverse social settings, such as in different schools.
Seymour Papert (1979:80), an influential advocate of a special approach to computer-based education in the early 1980s wrote:
In 1973 Christopher Jencks . . . argued . . . that schools do little to redress the inequality of life chances. Certainly he could find no evidence that the introduction of TV, movies, language labs, and other educational hardware made a significant difference. Nor did the innovative curricula of the 1960s. My argument is that powerful computers could have done so.And, Papert (1979:85) continues,"Dewey, Montessori, and Neill all propose to educate children in a spirit that I see as fundamentally correct but that fails in practice for lack of a technological base. The computer now provides it."Papert's advocacy of the LOGO programming language in his popular book, Mindstorms, illustrates how a computing advocate can define the capabilities, options, and consequences of a particular mode of computerization that most of his readers are unlikely to fully understand. Since neither a writer nor a book makes a movement, we have to examine how each CM is a collective activity. But similar conceptions about mode of computerization found across many organizations or social settings serve as signs that some local participants are also adopting ideas about computerization from outside sources.Danziger (1977) illustrated the starting point for such an analysis when he identified a "litany to EDP"--a set of over-idealized promises about the virtues of computerization--that he observed in his studies of urban information systems. But Danziger didn't link the ideologies he characterized to a CM or CM organizations that disseminated them. This is the next key step for such an analysis. We (1984) examined the way that some managers mobilized support for a complex inventory control system. They had members of their employing organization attend indoctrination sessions sponsored by a professional association. Kaplan (1983) examined the ways that arguments about a "lag" in the rate of adoption and sophistication of medical computing technologies permeated the professional medical computing literature between 1950 and 1980. Laudon's (1974) analysis of computerization in police and social service agencies linked those efforts to professional reform movements of the Progressive era, a link he himself did not pursue in subsequent research (Laudon, 1986).
Few social analyses of computing have examined the mobilizing ideologies that local advocates employ or suggest that local advocates develop approaches to computerization through participating in CMs that extend outside of their home organizations (see literature reviews by Kling 1980 and by Attewell and Rule 1984). People become aware of modes of computerization that they may not have personally experienced through the activities and byproducts of CMs: advocates, public speeches and written works, popular stories, television shows, and magazine articles. For example, Time magazine became an agent for a CM when it named the computer the "Machine of the Year" for 1982 ("Machine of the Year," 1982). It helped stimulate interest in computing, rather than simply reporting on the promises, experiences, and problems of computing.
The collaboration of participants with diverse interests has mobilized CMs. Some CM participants represent themselves, while others represent their organizations. For example, computer scientists and researchers develop careers as "experts" in a certain computer-based technology and become associated with specific CMs. Other participants, such as consultants, and computer users, may have temporary job assignments which attach them to a particular computer-based technology.
Some participants or groups may belong to only one or two CMs. For instance, parents and teachers may participate in the computer-based education CM; materials specialists who are interested in automated inventory control systems may participate in a special "Material Requirements Planning movement" (Kling and Iacono, 1984); urban planners interested in quantitative simulations may participate in the urban information systems movement. Participants in each of these CMs may care little about other modes of computerization. Journalists and news reporters, on the other hand, have become central to the mobilization of computing in general as collaborators providing public exposure to CM advocates. Public forums, trade shows, school board meetings and similar events enhance interactions among participant groups.
Both specific CMs and the general CM have grown as a result of these interactions. The most active participants in a CM advocate computerization in addition to using computer-based systems. In this paper we pay most attention to a small but influential group of CM participants, those activists who lobby others to computerize. The most active CM participants try to persuade mass audiences and whole professions to computerize in a particular way. CM activists may not identify with the computer industry, as was true for the first personal computer hobbyists. By the mid-1980s, CM activists could be found in many institutional sectors of North American economies. Socially they were predominantly middle and upper class professionals.
The main alternative to CMs as explanations of sources of beliefs about computerization and support for adopting new technologies is an "industrial model" which focuses upon the actions of manufacturers and vendors in the computer industry to stimulate sales through advertising and other means. Consumers (including computer-using organizations) buy and use computer hardware and software. Computerization is seen as simply the byproduct of collective actions in markets. The Marxist variant of this market explanation focuses upon the owners and managers of private firms as key agents who adopt systems to increase their profits and control over workers (Noble, 1985). In the next section we illustrate how five CMs are organized such that they are not merely subsumed within a market. While vendors and various computer users clearly play important roles in stimulating interest in computerization and in shaping the technologies in use, we believe other forms of collective activity -- what we call computerization movements (CMs) -- also shape expectations and stimulate demand that market analyses ignore.
Five Specific Computerization Movements
Below we describe five specific computerization movements. These, along with other CMs, form a general CM(3). We briefly indicate how the collective activities of each CM include the development of a mobilizing ideology and organized activity to promote the it(4). We examine key ideological elements of these CMs in the next section.
Urban Information Systems
Urban information systems process data about the activities of people in local jurisdictions, the government services they receive, and the internal operations of local governments. These include systems to support tax collection, police operations, municipal libraries, and urban planning. Support for urban information systems was continuous with progressive reform movements that sought to professionalize local government administration in the early part of the century (Laudon, 1974). Local governments which have pursued these reforms are disproportionately likely to adopt computer-based applications (Danziger, Dutton, Kling, and Kraemer, 1982). The urban information systems CM is a relatively low profile movement that forms one segment of a larger professional reform movement to "take politics out of government operations." Its adherents conceive of computerization as fostering government by skilled professionals instead of political appointees and bringing the purported rationality and efficiency of business to governmental operations.
Urban information systems activists have employed associations for local government officials and professionals as movement organizations. Professional organizations for tax assessors, finance officers and other administrators have been strong supporters of computerization within their areas of expertise. Urban planners, social service professionals and computer specialists have also found organized support for their computer interests within the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association which has held annual national conferences since the 1960s. Other professional associations, such as the International City Managers Association, provide information and staff support to foster automation in local governments.
During the 1960s the federal government stimulated the growth of urban information systems through a wide variety of grants: the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development supported planning and social services (Kling, 1978a); the DOT for transportation planning; the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration for police systems; and HUD for several massive demonstration projects (Kraemer and King, 1978). Though federal funding for specific urban projects has been substantially reduced since the late 1960s, urban governments now support their own information systems which have become embedded in the operations of many departments, especially tax collection, finance, police, welfare, and planning (Danziger, Dutton, Kling, and Kraemer, 1982). The urban information systems movement is highly institutionalized today.
Artificial Intelligence
The belief that computer-based technologies can be programmed to "think" about complex cognitive tasks is the central tenet held by enthusiasts of artificial intelligence (Turkle, 1984). Early conceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) were framed within an abstract scientific discourse, emphasizing the formal modeling of different domains of knowledge or the study and simulation of human cognitive processes. In the early 1980s, some AI enthusiasts replaced abstract models of universal cognitive processes with the social construct of "expert systems (Feigenbaum and McCorduck, 1983).
In one of the most enthusiastic accounts, Feigenbaum and McCorduck (1983) assert that almost no meaningful intellectual work will be possible in the "the world of our children" that does not depend upon knowledge-based (e.g., AI) systems. This idea, a controversial one within academic computer science, argues for a vision of the world its proponents hope others will help them construct. Public proselytizing for AI, so conceived, has transformed it from a technological-scientific movement into a CM.
AI spread as a scientific movement within the computer science profession itself. In the 1960s and 1970s interest in AI was focused around the Artificial Intelligence Journal and the triennial International Joint AI Conference, originally organized by the secret Artificial Intelligence Council. By the mid-1980s, other organizations were established, including a "special interest group" on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART) within the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (with its monthly publication, The AI Magazine ).
Large scale AI research began in the early 1960s under sponsorship of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, although other military agencies and the National Science Foundation also supported some of this initial research. This funding was used to create major laboratories at a handful of universities and research institutes. In the late 1970s AI became commercialized as established industrial firms such as Schlumberger and General Motors made substantial investments (Winston and Prendergast, 1984). AI specialty firms emerged along with expert systems and practical natural language processing. In the 1980s artificial intelligence was transformed into a CM as the mainstream business magazines (e.g., Fortune, Business Week) began to aggressively promote a fantasy definition of powerful and accessible AI being "here today."
Media accounts in the United States usually describe the value of current technologies in terms of their potential capabilities. They often exaggerate their level of development, the quality of product engineering, and the extent to which they have been adopted. They have also exaggerated the attributes of the few commercial applications that do exist by suggesting that these systems "think" like people rather than simply performing the symbolic manipulations on formal representations of the tasks usually performed by people. The American press often promotes AI in sensationalist terms (cf. "Artificial Intelligence is Here," 1984; Applegate and Day, 1984). A representative example appeared on the cover of the February 15, 1988 issue of Insight on the News. It heralded its cover story about AI with: "See machines think. Think, machine, think. The world of artificial intelligence." More accurate stories sometimes appear in the magazines and newspapers, but they are less common than the sensationalized stories. Despite sensational claims in the press, none of the higher performance AI systems, with the exception of a particular checkers playing program, has "learned" to modify its behavior, let alone learn "the way that humans do."
Computer-Based Education
Computer-based education includes both computer-assisted instruction programs that interact with students in a dialogue and a broader array of educational computer applications such as simulations or instruction in computer programming (see for example, Taylor, 1980). There is a major national push for extended application of computer-based education at all educational levels. For example, in the mid-1980s private several colleges and universities required all of their freshmen students to buy a specific kind of microcomputer, and others invested heavily in visions of a "wired campus." There was also a major push to establish computer literacy and computer science as required topics in the nation's elementary and secondary schools.
Computer-based education has been promoted with two different underlying ideologies in primary and secondary schools (Kling, 1983). Some educators argue that computer-based instructional approaches can help fulfill the traditional values of progressive education: the stimulation of intellectual curiosity, initiative, and democratic experiences. For example, Cyert (1984) has argued that computerized universities are qualitatively different than traditional universities: college students with microcomputers in their dorm rooms will be more stimulated to learn because they will have easy access to instructional materials and more interesting problems to solve. Papert (1979) argues that in a new computer-based school culture, children will no longer simply be taught mathematics; rather they will learn to be mathematicians. These visions portray an enchanted social order transformed by advanced computing technologies. Other advocates are a bit less romantic, but not less enthusiastic. For example, Cole argues:
Because of . . . the insatiable desire of students for more and more information at a higher level of complexity and more sophisticated level of utilization . . . more effective means of communication must be used . . . computers can provide a unique vehicle for this transmission." (Cole, 1972:143)Others emphasize a labor-market pragmatism that we label "vocational matching" (Kling, 1983). In this view, people will need computer skills, such as programming, to compete in future labor markets and to participate in a highly automated society; a responsible school will teach some of these skills today. Advocates of computer-based education promote a utopian image of computer-using schools as places where students learn in a cheerful, cooperative setting and where all teachers can be supportive, enthusiastic mentors (Kling, 1986).The computer-based education movement is not a well-organized national movement. It is far more diffuse and localized than other CMs. In some regions, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, consortia of teachers who are interested in computer-based instruction have formed local movement organizations. At the university level, the Apple Computer Company has formed a consortium of faculty from schools that have adopted Apple computers on a major scale. While this movement organization is linked to a particular vendor, its participants advance a more general vision of computer-based education. Some magazines, such as The Computer Teacher, also promote the movement. Regional conferences usually hosted by schools of education in state universities are held for school teachers and administrators interested in computer-based education.
Academic researchers have been developing instructional courseware for primary and secondary schools since the 1960s. However, such products only became viable when computing equipment costs declined with the advent of microcomputers. By the 1980s, the promotion of computer-based education surged substantially. On one hand, there was growing public belief that public schools were having chronic problems in educating children. On the other, the personal computer industry was reducing the prices of basic equipment and promoting educational applications. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer Corporation, lobbied hard and visibly to receive tax advantages by giving a free Apple IIe microcomputer to each public school district.
One microcomputer for a school of 500 students has little educational value, but the industry's marketing efforts and press promotion stimulated public interest in educational computing. Popular literature stresses the capabilities of equipment, ignoring the lack of high quality courseware and inadequate teacher training in computer use (Kling, 1983). Many parents are concerned that their children must be exposed to computers in school though they know little at all about the details of computerized education.
The computer-based education movement received a symbolic boost in the Spring of 1983 when the President's Commission on Excellence in Education released an urgent report which recommended that one semester of "computer science" be added to high school graduation requirements. This one report is simply a high profile example of many local activities throughout the nation, much as the mobilization for the Equal Rights Amendment was one national level activity which captured the sentiments of many local variants of the woman's movement. In the 1980s there has been continuous ferment at state and local levels with coalitions of administrators, teachers, and parents banding together to lobby for various computer-based education programs in the public schools.
Office Automation
In the 1950s and early 1960s, "office automation" was synonymous with the introduction of computer-based technologies in offices--batch information systems in that period. By the mid-1980s, office automation (OA) became a diffuse term that usually connoted the use of text-oriented computer-based technologies in offices (Uhlig, Farber and Bair, 1979).
OA technologies have two different kinds of roots. Stand-alone word processors evolved from magnetic card and magnetic tape typewriters. The organizational side of these office technologies evolved from kinds of secretarial work and the administrative services departments that commonly controlled organization- wide secretarial pools. The second root is computer systems that tied together text processing and electronic mail along with general-purpose computing capabilities (e.g., workstations). These differences in technology become less significant since specialized word processors were marketed with a wider array of information-handling functions. However, the social worlds that support these technologies still differ, even though they overlap.
Visionaries of automated offices used the term "office of the future" (Uhlig, Farber and Bair, 1979) as one of their major rallying points. An "office of the future" could never be built since there is no fixed future as a reference point for these technologies. However, a more prosaic conception lies beneath this vision: a terminal on every desk which provides text processing, mail, calendar and file handling, communications, and other computing capabilities with a flexible interface. The scenarios emphasize the deployment of equipment, while OA advocates portray social relations as cheerful, cooperative, relaxed, and efficient--better jobs in better environments (Giuliano, 1982; Strassman, 1985).
These scenarios gloss the realities of worklife in a highly automated office. Some office automation has led to deskilling and highly pressured jobs while work has been upskilled in other offices (Iacono and Kling, 1987). More seriously, the clerical workforce is likely to retain jobs near the bottom of the American occupational structure in terms of pay, prestige, control of working conditions (Kling, 1990). This is true even if the content of clerical jobs requires vastly more complex computer-related skills because most clerical jobs specialize in less discretionary delegated work (Iacono and Kling, 1987). The changes in professional work in automated offices are less clear; but it is clear that professionals cannot count on working with ample resources in a cooperative, cheerful environment (Kling 1987). Computerization is a complex social and technical intervention into the operations of an organization. Conventional CM ideology emphasizes the power of new equipment and downplays the kinds of social choices that can allow powerful equipment to facilitate better jobs. When journalists criticize OA, it is often because the equipment does not deliver the miracles promised by the more enthusiastic advocates (Salerno, 1985).
Several national professional organizations promote OA. Associations of professional administrators and computer specialists have expanded their activities to include OA within their domains while the more specialized Association of Information Systems Professionals has a direct interest in the diffusion of OA. A large number of trade magazines and several academic journals, such as Office and ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems support the OA movement. A strong office products industry also developed and promotes OA equipment. This industry includes major vendors of mainframes, microcomputers, and specialized office equipment. Since the late 1970s the American Federation of Information Processing Societies has sponsored an annual trade show and conference of academic and professional OA activists.
Personal Computing
Personal computers (PCs), like video-recorders, became middle-class luxury appliances of the early 1980s and commonplace in the 1990s. The PC movement began in the early 1970s as groups of hobbyists built their own primitive computers (Levy, 1984). Apple Computer Company and Tandy Corporation grew quickly in the late 1970s by providing two of the first microcomputers for which the purchaser did not have to solder parts and continually fiddle with every component. The PC movement is one of the few CMs which has a distinctly "mass public" audience, although an elite audience of relatively wealthy organizations that have also adopted and institutionalized the more complex and capable PCs in some of their operations has developed as well.
Some of the early writings about PCs emphasized personal and social transformations that would accompany widespread PC use (Kay, 1977; Osborne, 1979). By the last 1980s, the mobilizing ideologies of the PC movement shifted to an instrumental pragmatism based on the capabilities of PCs for professionals. However, many PC enthusiasts believe that "almost everybody" should have a PC. For example, Jim Warren, the founder of a popular computer magazine and a series of immensely popular regional PC fairs, commented:
I continue to feel that computers in the hands of the general public are crucial tools for positive social change. The only hope we have of regaining control over our society and our future is by extracting the information we need to make informed, competent decisions. And that's what computers do (quoted in Goodwin, 1988:114).
While PC applications such as word processing, financial analysis, and project scheduling are useful for professionals, "home applications" such as checkbook balancing, recipe storage, and home inventory are perhaps too marginal to justify a PC on instrumental grounds. The assumption that "almost everybody" should have a PC reveals the ideology of the PC movement.
The PC movement is national in scope, and is popularized by high circulation national publications. By the mid 1980s, about 12 PC magazines were widely sold on newsstands in the United States. Many were specialized for audiences who own microcomputers made by particular vendors such as Apple, Tandy and IBM. Others were specialized for business applications or some particular kind of technology (e.g., programming languages, UNIX). One very popular multi-vendor magazine, Byte, circulated approximately 500,000 copies per monthly issue.
The main national level activities are the trade fairs that travel from region to region. The software and hardware vendors in the microcomputer industry now play a major role in these ventures. The PC movement has numerous local movement organizations. The computer clubs in metropolitan areas are usually segmented along the vendor lines (e.g., Apple, IBM, Atari) and are still dominated by hobbyists. In addition, computerized "bulletin boards" are operated by commercial firms and hobbyist amateurs. The operators of large commercial computer bulletin boards, such as Compuserve and Prodigy, serve businesses, professionals, and hobbyists nationwide. The operators of amateur-run bulletin boards are relatively transient and aim their services at computer hobbyists in their metropolitan areas. In the mid-1980s there were over 200 amateur- run bulletin boards in the United States, and the number mushroomed in the 1990s to over 30,000. The PC movement overlaps with the office automation movement and the instructional computing movement, since microcomputers have come to play a significant role as focal technologies for each. Some specialized organizations link these movements. For example, in the Los Angeles area, the PC Professional Association holds monthly meetings for PC coordinators who work in business organizations.
The mass media has become a major promoter of the PC movement. Newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times run a weekly PC column. It is difficult to separate the effects of journalistic promotion from industry advertising. As the PC industry has grown, firms like IBM, Apple, and Commodore have placed advertisements on prime time television. The PC industry's advertising is significantly enhanced by CM promotion. In the case of the PC movement, the mass media have played a major role. It is relatively rare to find the mass media investigating PC use. Dissatisfaction with the service and support provided by major computer sales chains is commonplace among PC enthusiasts. Journalists are much more apt to write about poor service in auto sales than in home computer sales.
Ideological Elements of CMs
We have found ideologies of computerization especially developed in two kinds of writings. Some accounts focus on the coming of an "information society" and treat computerization as one key element in that transformation. In this view, the computerization of America will be an apolitical, bloodless "revolution." All will gain, with the possible exception of a few million workers who will be temporarily displaced from "old-technology" jobs such as telephone operators and assembly line welders. Prophets of a new "information age" like Bell (1979), Toffler (1980), Dizard (1982), Naisbitt (1984) and Strassman (1985) argue that this transformation is an inevitable and straightforward social process. Human intention, pluralities of interest, or large scale conflict play a minor role in these predictions of substantial social transformation.
A second kind of writing in which we found computerization ideologies focuses on specific CMs is of greater interest to us. Few CM activists, including those who publish their arguments, assert their key ideological themes directly. They can be located in books and articles through a "symptomatic reading" through which the reader identifies relevant themes that are absent from a document as well as those it, however implicitly, contains. For example, if an author argues that every household should have PCs for all family members, she is arguing in effect that families should restructure their budgets such that computing investments are not compromised.
We have identified five key and related ideas from such symptomatic reading. In addition, as students of and participants in several CMs, we have had continuing discussions with movement activists in which some of these ideas recur. As a system of beliefs, these five themes help advance computerization on many fronts:
1. Computer-based technologies are central for a reformed world;
2. Improved computer-based technologies can further reform society;
3. More computing is better than less, and there are no conceptual limits to the scope of appropriate computerization;
4. No one loses from computerization; and
5. Uncooperative people are the main barriers to social reform through computing.
Computer-Based Technologies Are Central for a Reformed World
Many CM activists assert (or imply) that computer technology provides a historically unique opportunity for important social changes. For example, Papert (1979:74) advocates a special mode of computer-based education (e.g., LOGO programming) and strongly criticizes other modes of computer-based education as reinforcing "traditional educational structures and thus play a reactionary role." Papert clearly articulates the belief that computing is special and different from all other educational innovations of the 1960s in its potential to redress serious widespread social inequities. Papert's analysis is largely individualistic and focuses upon children's cognitive abilities. He made no attempt to ask whether social inequities are tied to a structured economic system rather than simply to the distribution of skills in society.
Similarly simple assertions about the special role of computing can be found in literature for each of the CMs. In the case of urban information systems, Evans and Knisley (1970) argued that a wide array of pro-social services can be specially supported by urban information systems. Giuliano (1982) suggested that office automation provides a unique historical opportunity to organize offices without tedious clerical work. Hayes-Roth (1984) suggested that AI-based expert systems will radically transform the professions by providing a unique capability in taking over cognitive expertise previously monopolized by people. In each case, these analysts imply that the computer-based technologies they advocate have a historically powerful and unique role.
CM activists often argue that computers are a central medium for creating the world they prefer. This belief gives proposals for computerization a peculiarly technocentric character: computer technologies are central to all socially valuable behavior. This belief is exemplified in characterizations of computer-based education in which any meaningful learning is computer-mediated (e.g., Papert, 1980).
One variant of this argument holds that computing is essential for modern organizations to compete effectively through increased productivity. Productivity, an economic conception, is linked to social progress through economic advance, and computerization, like prayer, will always have this desired result if it is "done properly." In addition, advocates attribute "productivity gains" primarily to new computing technologies, even though other elements, such as work organization and reward systems play a critical role.
Concerns for productivity are closely linked to concerns for reducing costs. These concerns, and the relatively high cost of "state of the art" computing which helps set expectations, gives the practice of computerization a relatively conservative political character. New systems of socially significant scale require the approval of higher level managers who are unlikely to approve arrangements which threaten their own interests (Danziger, Dutton, Kling, and Kraemer, 1982).
Improved Computer-Based Technologies Can Further Reform Society
Advocates often portray the routine use of ordinary computer equipment as insufficient to reap the hoped-for benefits. Rather, the most advanced equipment is essential. This ideological theme is most clear when CM activists emphasize the continual acquisition of advanced equipment. They give minor attention to how to organize access to it or how to use it for social change. Nationally, the belief is reflected in funding priorities for computing research and development: the overwhelming support is for the development of new equipment. In the organizations we have studied, we have found relatively little money and attention spent on learning how to humanely integrate new computer-based technologies into routine social life.
CM activists often define computing capabilities as those of future technologies, not the limits of presently available technologies. Many promotional accounts for computing reflect this future orientation. For example, Kay (1977) advocates book-sized personal computers which handle graphics, play music, and store vast amounts of data. Hiltz and Turoff (1978) advocate nationwide computer conferencing systems which would connect every household and office, much like telephones. During the last 30 years, computer-based technologies have become substantially cheaper, faster, smaller, and more flexible. Doubtless, computer-based systems will improve technologically during the next two decades similar to the ways in which cars, airplanes, typewriters and telephones improved between 1910 and 1980. However, CM activists usually dismiss contemporary technologies, except to the extent they foreshadow more interesting future technologies.
In any year, only a few organizations can purchase the state of the art equipment which CM activists recommend. With rapid changes in technological capabilities, today's technological leaders are surpassed by tomorrow's, unless they recycle their equipment so rapidly that they never "fall behind." Like people who purchase a new car or stereo with every model change, the heroes of this vision invest heavily and endlessly.
Computer hardware has become faster, cheaper, larger in scale, and more reliable in the last 30 years. Software support systems (like programming languages) have become more powerful and flexible, albeit at a much slower pace. Finally, computer applications have also improved technologically, at a still slower rate. But a focus on future technologies helps deflect attention from the problems of using today's technologies effectively, while offering the hope of salvation soon.
More Computing Is Better than Less, and There Are No Conceptual Limits to the Scope of Appropriate Computerization
This theme goes beyond the previous theme that 'more computing can help reform society." CM activists usually push hard on two fronts: people and organizations ought to use state of the art computing equipment, and state of the art computing should become universal. In their writing and talks, CM activists usually emphasize the claim that certain groups use the forms of computing they prefer, rather than explaining carefully how people alter their social lives to use or accommodate to new technologies. For example, it is common for enthusiasts of computer-based education in schools to report that there are now several hundred thousand micro-computers in use, but to spend relatively little time examining how children actually partake in computer-oriented classes.
CM activists imply that there are no limits to meaningful computing by down playing the limits of the relevant technologies and failing to balance computing activity against competing social values. They portray computing technologies as mediating the most meaningful activities: the only real learning, the most important communications, or the most meaningful work, whether now or in the future they prefer. Other media for learning, communicating, or working are treated as less important. Real life is life on-line (e.g., Feigenbaum and McCorduck, 1983; Papert, 1980; Hiltz and Turoff, 1978).
No One Loses from Computerization
Computer-based technologies are portrayed as inherently apolitical. While they are said to be consistent with any social order, CM advocates usually portray their use in a cheerful, cooperative, flexible, individualistic and efficient world. This allows computer-based technologies to be shown as consistent with the most cherished social values. Computerization can enable long-term societal goals such as a stronger economy and military for the nation. Any short-term sacrifices that might accompany these goals, such as displaced workers, are portrayed as minor unavoidable consequences.
CM activists rarely acknowledge that systematic conflicts might follow from computerizing major social institutions. Those that are acknowledged are defined as solvable by "rational discourse" and appropriate communication technologies (see for example, Hiltz and Turoff, 1978). Many activists ignore social conflicts in their discussions of computerization and thus imply that computerization will reduce them. Some authors explicitly claim that computerized organizations will be less authoritarian and more cooperative than their less automated counterparts (Simon, 1977). In most of the accounts of office automation, staff are cheerfully efficient and conflicts are minor (See for example, Strassman, 1985; Guiliano, 1982).
Similarly, in the literature on computer-based education, cheerful students and teachers who are invariably helpful and understanding populate computerized classrooms (see, for example, Taylor, 1980). Spitballs, paper planes, and secret paper messages that pass under the desks do not appear in this literature (Kling, 1983). Teachers who are puzzled by new technologies, concerned with maintaining order in their classrooms, or faced with broken equipment, competitive students, and condescending consultants are also ignored in the published discourse. Occasionally, an advocate of one mode of computer-based education may criticize advocates of others (e.g., Papert, 1979) but these are only sectarian battles within a CM.
Most seriously, the theme that computing fosters cooperation and rationality allows CM activists to gloss deep social and value conflicts that social change can precipitate (Kling, 1983; Kraemer, Dickhoven, Tierney, and King, 1987). In practice, organizational participants can have major battles about what kind of computing equipment to acquire, how to organize access to it, and the standards to regulate its use (Kling and Scacchi, 1982; Kling, 1987).
Uncooperative People Are the Main Barriers to Social Reform through Computing
In many social settings we have found CM advocates arguing that poorly trained or undisciplined users undermine good technologies (Kling and Iacono, 1984). Even when they are making their procedures even more complex or automate more exceptions and special contingencies, these advocates argue that the limitations of their coworkers, rather than problems in their strategy of automation, are the major impediments to nearly perfect computer-based systems. Computerization is difficult when compared with the imagery of easy use advanced by CM advocates. In short, people place "unnecessary" limits on the complexity of desirable computer-based technologies and must be properly trained and taught to reorganize their activities and institutions around the new technology.
These central themes of computerization movement ideology emphasize technological progress and deflect competing social values. They are a foundation for social visions that include the extensive use of relatively advanced computer systems. In this vision, computer users should actively seek and acquire "the best" computer technologies and adapt to new technologies that become available, regardless of their cost. 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 (Cawelti, 1976:262), only developers and users of advanced computing technologies find the good life.
These five ideological themes shape public images of computers and computerization. We do not claim that computer systems are "useless" or merely a fad. But these ideological positions help activists to help build commitment and mobilize resources for extensive computerization in organizations that adopt computer technologies beyond the value that mere utility justifies. It is ironic that activists often employ the imagery of science and objectivity (e.g., "knowledge") to advance their CMs. They deflect attention from what other analysts claim are the social problems raised by computerization--problems of consumer control, protection of personal privacy, quality of jobs, employment, and social equity, among others.
Counter-Computerization Movements
CMs generally advance the interests of richer groups in the society because of the relatively high costs of developing, using, and maintaining computer-based technologies. This pattern leads us to ask whether CMs could advance the interests of poorer groups or whether there are counter-movements which oppose the general CM. Many CM activists bridle at these questions. They do not always value "helping the rich." In our fieldwork we have found that CM advocates sometimes see themselves as fighting existing institutional arrangements and working with inadequate resources. We do not suggest that "relative deprivation" triggers CMs. We are suggesting that CM participants can argue that they have non-elite positions even though they work with elite organizations. CM activists often develop coalitions with elite groups that can provide the necessary financial and social resources. The elite orientation of the general CM is sufficiently strong that one might expect some systematic "progressive" alternative to the major CMs.
There is no well-organized opposition or substantial alternative to the general CM. A general counter-computerization movement (CCM) might well be stigmatized as "Luddite." CM activists portray computing simply as a means to reform a limited set of social settings. Therefore, a specific CCM would have to oppose all or most computer-based education developments, or most office automation, or most PC applications, and so on. A successful ideological base for such opposition probably would have to be anchored in an alternate conception of society and the place of technology in it. In practice there is no movement to counter computerization in general, though some writers are clearly hostile to whole modalities of computerization (Braverman, 1976: Mowshowitz, 1976; Reinecke, 1984; Weizenbaum, 1975). These writers differ substantially in their bases of criticism, from Frankfurt School critical theory (Weizenbaum) to Marxism (Mowshowitz, Braverman).
The major alternatives to CMs come from social movements that are organized to criticize specific changes from some specialized aspect of computerization. For example, civil libertarians are critical of those computing applications that most threaten personal privacy but are mute about other kinds of computing applications (Burnham, 1983). Consumer advocates may be highly critical of strategies of computerization that place consumers at a disadvantage in dealing with supermarkets on pricing that increase consumers' liability in case of bank card problems. But neither civil libertarians nor consumer advocates typically focus on problems of computerization in employment. Union spokesmen are especially concerned about how computerization affects the number and quality of jobs (Shaiken, 1986) but mute about consumer issues. Anti-war activists criticize computer technologies which they view as making war more likely but are relatively mute on all other computerization issues. Consequently, some analysts try to envision computer use which is shaped by with other values--such as consumer control over electronic payments or improvements in working life. They view appropriate computerization as something other than the most technologically sophisticated computer use at any price.
Major policy initiatives in these directions have come from other social movements. For example, consumer groups rather than CMs have been the main advocates of allowing users of debit cards protections such as ceilings on liability when cards are stolen, clear procedures for correcting errors, reverse payments, and stop payments (Kling, 1983). Civil liberties groups, such as the ACLU, have played a stronger role than CMs in pressing for the protection of privacy in automated personal record systems. Labor unions, rather than CMs, have been most insistent in exploring the conditions under which work with VDTs has possible adverse health consequences. Each of these reform movements is relatively weak and specialized. Moreover, each initiative by CCMs to place "humane" constraints on laissez-faire computerization may be met by well funded opposition within parts of the computer industry or computer-using industries. Consequently, the general drift is towards increased and intensive computerization with equipment costs, technological capabilities, and local organizational politics playing major enabling/limiting roles.
Discussion
We have argued that the computerization of many facets of life in the United States has been stimulated by a set of loosely linked CMs guided by mobilizing ideologies offered by CM activists who are not directly employed in the computer and related industries (Kling, 1983). We have characterized CMs by their ideological content, shown how five computer-based technologies are the focus of specific CMs, characterized core beliefs in their ideologies and examined the fragmentary character of CMs. Our analysis differs from most organizational analyses of computerization by considering CMs which cut across the society as important sources of mobilizing ideologies for computing advocates. Their publications and meetings provide channels of communication for computing enthusiasts outside of the organizations which employ them, and which they try to aggressively computerize.
But much more should be done in examining particular CMs. We need to learn in more detail about their participants and social organization and to better understand their relations with computerizing organizations, interest groups, the media, other CMs and different segments of the computer industry. We hope that this analysis will encourage scholars to examine the CMs in other specific social settings and the activists who push them. These activists play a critical role in setting expectations about what a particular mode of computing is good for, how it can be organized, and how costly or difficult it will be to implement. These expectations can shape participants attempts to computerize in a specific social setting such as a school, public agency, hospital or business.
CMs play a role in trying to persuade their audiences to accept an ideology that favors everybody adopting "state of the art" computer equipment in specific social sectors. There are many ways to computerize, and each emphasizes different social values (Kling, 1983). While computerization is rife with value conflicts, CM activists rarely explain the value and resource commitments which accompany their dreams. And they encourage people and organizations to invest in computer-based equipment rather than paying equal or greater attention to the ways that social life can and should be organized around whatever equipment is acquired. CM activists provide few useful guiding ideas about ways to computerize humanely.
During the last 20 years, CMs have helped set the stage on which the computer industry expanded. As this industry expands, vendor organizations (like IBM) also become powerful participants in persuading people to automate. 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 (Kling, 1983). But their actions alone cannot account for the widespread mobilization of computing in the United States. They feed and participate in it; they have not driven it. Part of the drive is economic and part is ideological. The ideological flames have been fanned as much by CM advocates as by marketing specialists from the computer industry. Popular writers like Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt and academics like Daniel Bell have stimulated enthusiasm for the general computerization movement and provided organizing rationales (e.g., transition to a new "information society") for unbounded computerization. Much of the enthusiasm to computerize is a byproduct of this writing and other ideological visions inspired.
Most computer-based technologies are purchased by organizations. The advocates of computerization within specific organizations often form coalitions with higher level managers to help gain support and resources for their innovations, which they present as professional reform movements with limited scope. Office automation "only" influences general office practices. Advanced computerized accounting systems "only" influence the financial department and those who manage revenues and expenses. Computer-based inventory control systems "only" influence materials handling in manufacturing firms. In each administrative sector that is professionalized, some related group has taken on the mantle of computerization as a subject of reform. But these professionals do not identify with the computer industry; they identify themselves as accountants, doctors, teachers, or urban planners with an interest in certain computer applications.
By attempting to alter the character of social life across the society, the general computerization movement is basicly revolutionary. A few computing promoters exploit a slick "revolutionary" image. As Langdon Winner (1984) aptly observes, Americans have been marketed "revolutionary" toothpastes, home entertainment centers, and plastics. None of these consumer items has "revolutionized" the social order. According to Winner, the sensible observer would treat claims about a "computer revolution" as marketing hype. We agree with Winner that shallow promotional claims dominate the public "revolutionary" discourse. Moreover, the social changes that one can attribute to computerization are often socially "conservative." But we suspect that the pervasiveness of computerization is having quiet cumulative effects in American life.
However, certain technologies are relatively plastic and substantially extend people's range of action. Basic technologies for transportation, energy, and communications, such as automobiles, electricity, and telephones, have become central elements of social life in advanced industrial societies. We suspect that computer-based technologies will be as socially important as these other technologies rather than peripheral, like plastics, processed foods, and hair spray.
There is unlikely to be a general CCM. More seriously, it is unlikely that humanistic elements will be central in the mobilization of computing in the United States. Central humanistic beliefs are "laid onto" computerization schemes by advocates of other social movements: the labor movement (Shaiken, 1985), the peace movement, the consumer-rights movement (Kling, 1983), the civil liberties movement (Burnham, 1983). Advocates of the other movements primarily care about the way some schemes for computerization intersect their special social interest. They advocate limited alternatives to particular CMs but no comprehensive, humanistic alternative to the general computerization movement. In its most likely form, our "computer revolution" will be a conservative revolution which will reinforce the patterns of an elite dominated, stratified society.
Epilogue 1994
In this article we ask "Why do organizations adopt new computing technologies?" The conventional answer to this question focuses upon two kinds of central social actors: computer vendors who devise and manufacture products for sale, and consumers (often managers in organizations), who purchase computer systems and services because they meet some "need" which can be understood by examining their task structure and business. In this view, organizations generally adopt the computer systems which work for them, and they are generally effective at implementing and using the systems that they acquire. The organizations that adopt computerized systems act are portrayed as closed rational (task) systems (Scott, 1992). Other actors, such as trade associations for the computing industry, professional societies, regulatory agencies, and the numerous technical journalists who write about innovations in computing are assumed to play minor roles. This viewpoint has a strong grounding in both the traditional Weberian view of organizations in American sociology, and in conventional economic analysis.
We based our alternative conception of the social processes that drive computerization on an open natural systems model of organizations [Scott, 1992; Kling and Jewett, in press] and the kinds of meanings that many managers and professionals impute to specific forms of computerization. We suggested that certain professional associations were serving as arenas in which people developed beliefs about what computing was good for and how specific forms of computerization could fit their own organizations. Professional associations also enable their members contact with other people in similar organizational niches with whom to "network" -- to discuss common problems, to gain emotional support, and to help locate other jobs in their industries.
We developed our open natural systems conception of computerization when we studied information systems in hi-tech manufacturing firms. We found that a particular professional society (American Production and Inventory Control Society) played a strong but subtle and indirect role in the ways manufacturing firms adopted complex computerized inventory control systems. It also inculcated members with a similar set of beliefs about what these new inventory systems could do and gave them a shared language with which to communicate their beliefs. In other computer worlds, such as those related to PCs or instructional computing, there are numerous active professional association and hobbyist groups and a level of social activity that goes well beyond any one professional association. We coined the term "computerization movement" (CM) to refer to the active mobilizing role of these groups, including professional associations and allied journalists, that promote specific forms of computerization. In our empirical studies, we have found that we can learn about the direct influence of CMs upon the ways that specific organizations computerize if we probe directly in interviews (Jewett and Kling, 1990).
We did not organize our study to empirically examine CMs relative influence in different organizations, even though this is an important dimension of the story of CMs. In this paper, we were concerned with identifying CMs as social forces, examining their mobilizing ideologies, and examining the possibility of counter-computerization movements. If we were writing the paper in 1993, we would make many small changes and a few larger changes. The details of each CM's focus would differ as technologies change. For example, computer networking and the use of multimedia are more the center of the instructional computing CM than is the use of a programming language such as LOGO. These are three of the more substantial kinds of changes:
1. We examined five key ideas which form a core of the ideologies of CMs:
a. Computer-based technologies are central for a reformed world;2. We would alter the set of CMs which would be central to our analysis. Social movements rise and fall in their influence, and some CMs also seem to be much livelier at particular times. It's worth discussing some alterations in the office automation CM and the rise of some new CMs: virtual reality and computer networking.b. Improved computer-based technologies can further reform society;
c. More computing is better than less, and there are no conceptual limits to the scope of appropriate computerization;
d. No one loses from computerization; and
e. Uncooperative people are the main barriers to social reform through computing.
It is simpler to characterize the ideologies of CMs as forms of "technological utopianism" (Dunlop and Kling, 1991; Kling, 1994; Kling and Lamb, in press; Kling, in press). Technological utopianism is a rhetorical form which places the use of some specific technology, such as computers, nuclear energy, or low-energy low-impact technologies, as key enabling elements of a utopian vision. Sometimes people will casually refer to exotic technologies -- like pocket computers which understand spoken language -- as "utopian gadgets." Technological utopianism does not refer to these amazing technologies. It refers to analyses in which the use of specific technologies plays a key role in shaping a benign social vision. In contrast, technological anti-utopianism examines how certain broad families of technology facilitates a social order which is relentlessly harsh, destructive and miserable.
The Office Automation (OA) CM has lost its force, partly due to the predominance of PCs and its related movements. The OA CM also focussed upon relatively individualistic conceptions of the value to be gained from office computing systems. The themes of many popular management consultants shifted towards more socially rich conceptions, like teams, in the early 1990s, and the OA CM's conceptions seemed more marginal. However, parts of the OA CM have been transformed into a CM for "computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) (Kling, 1991). Like other important computing terms, such as artificial intelligence, CSCW was coined as a galvanizing catch-phrase, and later given more substance through a lively stream of research. A community of interest formed around the research programs and conferences identified with the term and advanced prototype systems, studies of their use, key theories and debates about them, and university courses. CSCW denotes at least two kinds of things: special products such as computer conferencing systems (groupware), and a movement by computer scientists who want to provide better computer support for people, primarily professionals, to enhance the ease of collaborating. In practice, many working relationships can be multivalent, and mix elements of cooperation, conflict, conviviality, competition, collaboration, commitment, caution, control, coercion, coordination and combat. Privileging collaboration is one of the key ideological elements of CSCW.3. In 1988 we observed that there was no significant counter-computerization movement (CCM) to the general CM. Such a movement would have to rest on a technologically anti-utopian vision of computerization in social life. There are a few technologically anti-utopian books or articles (Mander, 1991), but no visible general CCM.According to Doug McAdam, three sets of factors shape the ebb and flow of social movements: the level of organization of the participants (indicating indigenous organizational strength); the assessment of the prospects of success; and the structure of opportunity (opportunity structures may be more or less flexible or vulnerable to change). It would be interesting to conduct a careful empirical study of the decline of the office automation CM with special attention to the opportunity structures for its participants. (The careful empirical study of the social dynamics of any single CM is a substantial project!)
The Virtual Reality CM is relatively young and more fragile. Like some other technology based CMs (ie., Artificial Intelligence and CSCW), people begin to participate in the CM while the focal technology was still ill-defined and subject to several alternative conceptions. And, like many other CMs, its participants were mobilized in part, through enthusiastic stories in the popular, and technical press, as well as by specialized conferences and publications. The Virtual Reality CM's strongest influence today appears to be in the shaping of specific youth and arts subcultures, rather than in business firms.
The Computer Networking CM is greater national significance than the CSCW CM and the Virtual Reality CM. The Computer Networking CM has been active for well over 10 years, but it was relatively esoteric and of interest primarily to computer specialists. For example, the Internet Society -- an organization of technologists and technology managers -- developed standrads for the Internet and promoted government and commercial support for it. In the last few years two related events helped strengthen its appeal: the expansion and growing commercialization of the Internet and the promotion of technological support for a National Information Infrastructure by the Clinton Administration. These events are, in part, a byproduct of lobbying by groups, such as members and officers of the Internet society and numerous similar organizations.
Several newer organizations help promote the Computer Networking CM in the US. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), which was founded in 1990 to "promote the creation of and access to information resources in networked environments in order to enrich scholarship and to enhance intellectual productivity." It is a joint project of the Association for Research Libraries and two associations of university computing administrators: CAUSE, and EDUCOM. CNI's members are organizations, and includes over 160 colleges, universities, publishers, network service providers, computer hardware and system companies, library networks and organizations, and public and state libraries. CNI sponsors several working groups. For example, one group called for descriptions to identify "projects that use networking and networked information resources and services in the broadest possible ways to support and enhance teaching and learning. (Coalition Working Group on Teaching and Learning, 1993)." This public call for descriptions also noted,
The Coalition will use the project descriptions it receives in response to this call: (1) to build a database that can be used to share information and experience in this area; (2) to promote awareness of individuals, institutions, and organizations making important contributions to the state-of-the-art in this area; (3) to attract attention to and mobilize resources for this area; (4) to plan a program in this area for the EDUCOM 93 .... conference in Cincinnati .... and (5) to otherwise encourage individuals, institutions, and organizations to use networks and networked information resources and services to support and enhance teaching and learning.
Clearly, the organizers of this call are not timid in making their interests in mobilizing support for network applications very explicit. The nature and magnitude of the influence, and the influence of the participants of any CM, is a separate issue.
The set of social activities which we identify as a CM includes people in diverse social locations who are promoting the widespread use of some computing technology with a technologically utopian vision. Not every CM thrives, and the members of CMs are selectively influential. The Virtual Reality CM, for example, may have little influence on organizational practices in the US. Our argument focussed on the influential CMs rather than upon CMs which did not mobilize much support. We believe that when one studies the sites where new kinds of computing applications are being adopted, it is common to find the influences of CMs. Members of the adopting organizations or people who consult to them are likely to belong (or have belonged) to CMs which promote that form of computerization. These ideas open up rich lines of empirical research.
However, some groups have emerged to articulate "socially responsible" alternatives to the majority of computerization movements. The Electronic Frontier Foundation supports "litigation in the public interest to preserve, protect and extend First Amendment rights within the realm of computing and telecommunications technology." The Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) was founded as an anti-war group and it opposed certain kind of computer-based systems (ie., StarWars). In the last 5 years it has shifted its focus to examines a wider array of public issues of computerization: workplace democracy, civil liberties issues in networking, and broad pubic access to national computer networks. CPSR has become an active participant in national policy negotiations about information technology policy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation sponsors influential conferences and some of its officers write op-ed articles for influential computing world publications. However, it is not clear how much of a movement is represented by these groups and a few other similar groups.As computer technologies become more pervasive in everyday life, the role of CMs becomes more important. In 1988 our main thesis was that "CMs communicate key ideological beliefs about the favorable links between computerization and a preferred social order which helps legitimate relatively high levels of computing investment for many potential adopters. These ideologies also set adopter's expectations about what they should use computing for and how they should organize access to it." As the nation spends a greater share of public monies on an advanced National Information Infrastructure with expectations of broad social value, this thesis becomes evermore important. (And alternative visions which locate computerization within sound socially driven programs are sorely needed.)Despite these three changes, the concept of CMs has proven rather durable. Sociologists who are interested in social movements might also find CMs to be an interesting subject of study since they work somewhat differently than many of the movements that are traditionally studied. Leaders of mass social movements, like the environmental, civil rights and woman's movements, are often seeking changes in social practices legislation and public policy by mobilizing strong and explicit public sympathy. Thus these groups within these movements often organize activities to attract the news media and bring other forms of public attention. In contrast, the participants in CMs are usually trying to create social changes in settings where strong and explicit public sympathy is of little help. Consequently, they are more apt to work mobilize support through professional and organizational social networks of interested parties. These activities leave less of a public trace than do the activities of groups that rally, picket, and organize mass activities.
CMs, like the traditional social movements, organize activities for their participants to be agents of purposive social change. Viewing the mobilization of computing in terms of CMs allows analysts to more readily enter the social worlds of the managers and professionals who are actively mobilizing support for computerization and who are trying to make a computer revolution (Kling and Iacono, 1991).
Acknowledgements
Mark Poster helped clarify some of our ideas about ideologies, and Kenneth Kraemer helped explore the relationships between utopian computing ideologies and ideologies of utopian urban developments. Leigh Star and Karen Wieckert helped us clarify the overall analysis. This research was supported under NSF Grants DCS 81-17719 and IRI8709613. Correspondence to: Rob Kling, Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, California 92717 (kling@ics.uci.edu).
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1. We are paying much less attention to the second part of our thesis--the ways that movements serve as a source of ideological inspiration and serve as a social world for computing advocates who participate in diverse organizations which they try to get to computerize in the ways they prefer.
2. We do not provide fine grained data about the links between CMs and computerizing organizations. We hope that our analysis will stimulate scholars who are interested in the social dimensions of computerization to develop new lines of inquiry and more complete analyses.
3. Not all applications of computer technologies are the focus of CMs; for example payroll systems are not promoted through CMs. Other computer technologies, such as electronic funds transfer (Kling, 1978; Kling, 1984), robotics and supercomputing, are also advanced by CMs. But we don't have room to examine them here.
4. Data that shows how key players mobilize support for computerization in specific organizations and how they draw their arguments from the relevant CMs would make our argument more conclusive. In our study of the development of an inventory control system in a particular manufacturing firm, we reported that the local ideologies of computerization were imported from a movement organization (Kling and Iacono, 1984)