Software in the Workplace

“The Workplace” conjures up images of cavernous factories where people stand shoulder-to-shoulder, dwarfed by huge machines. Though probably a popular image, it describes the conditions of work for less than 15 percent of the working population. Instead, a greater number of people find themselves face-to-face with a computer monitor, whose small displays they depend on for conducting their work. The computer has come to be an intermediary as we do our work. The keyboard, replacing various tools of the trade, has become the common instrument of work, not just in services but also in manufacturing. Work now involves sending instructions to various machines that perform the required tasks, whether retrieving data or turning lathes. Within organizations it has also distanced supervision. Instead of the boss breathing down the worker’s neck, “objective” data on performance are collected and reviewed remotely, at a supervisor’s pleasure and leisure. The mediation of work and regulation of the workplace through use of computer software raises anew central questions about how work should be organized and how the design of software dynamically shapes and reflects the structure of the workplace. New software systems (which expanded, in part, because of new hardware technology) not only dramatically increase the use of information, but also change the structure and working conditions of organizations. The “conversations and connections” that constitute an organization or business are “embodied in the structure of the computer system,” according to Winograd and Flores (1986, p. 169), and thus software design is also the design of the user organization. Depending upon the choices made, computer systems can “reduce the space of possibilities open to workers in organizing their activities” or they can generate new possibilities. In this respect, software is increasingly significant in its effects as it has become an important “process technology” throughout the advanced industrial economies of the world. Until recent years, software was an adjunct technology for most organizations. It was used for a limited set of organizational functions and one or two specific departments were its only direct users. It was commonly viewed as a technology subsidiary to hardware, providing support functions rather than crucial operations for achieving the organization’s goals.