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diff --git a/books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md b/books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md index 953d22d..a63839d 100644 --- a/books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md +++ b/books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md @@ -816,3 +816,42 @@ Another form of [labor camp](/books/historia/ibm-holocaust), it's mirror image: etc., do not lend themselves to control. ,,65 -- 121-122 + +### Office technology as exile and integration + + One afternoon, after several weeks of participant observation and + discussions with clerks and supervisors, I was returning to the office + from a lunch with a group of employees when two of them beckoned + me over to their desks, indicating that they had something to show me. + They seated themselves at their workstations on either side of a tall + gray partition. Then they pointed out a small rupture in the orderly, + high-tech appearance of their work space: the metal seam in the parti- + tion that separated their desks had been pried open. + + With the look of mischievous co-conspirators, they confided that + they had inflicted this surgery upon the wall between them. Why? The + small opening now made it possible to peek through and see if the + other worker was at her seat, without having to stand up and peer over + or around the wall. Through that aperture questions could be asked, + advice could be given, and dinner menus could be planned. At the time + I took this to be the effort of two women to humanize their surround- + ings. While I still believe that is true, the weeks, months, and years that + followed led me to a fuller appreciation of the significance of their + action. + + Installing those partitions was the final step that completed the + clerks' relegation to the realm of the machine. Exiled from the inter- + personal world of office routines, each clerk became isolated and soli- + tary. That interpersonal world involves the work of managing; it is the + domain in which coordination and communication occur. These clerks + not only had been denied benign forms of social intercourse but also + had been expelled from the managerial world of actino-with that had + formerly required them to accept, in some small degree, responsibility + for the coordination of their office. Installing the partitions was one + concrete technique, among others, designed to create the discontinuity + needed to achieve Leffingwell's goal: to convert the clerk from an inter- + personal operator to a laboring body, substituting communicative and + coordinative responsibilities with the physical demands of continuous + production. + + -- 125 |