The Persistence of [a] Vision: The Electronically Mediated Corporation

Forgoing an examination of the media industries, Chapter 1 focuses instead on the rise of what one might call the mediated industries. A prehistory of television at work, this chapter traces an intensifying relationship between electronic media and the workplace that follows the development and industrial application of telegraphy, telephony, recorded sound, wireless, applied radio, Muzak, faxing, and nontheatrical film. Situating this discussion in the context of scholars’ treatment of communication and empire, it argues that television occupies a key transitional position for the mediated corporation in which electronic communication’s dual uses as a logistical tool and as a conduit for cultural production converge. These processes illustrate the development of an alternative media sector and the symbiotic relationship between the “knowledge industries” and corporate expansion, as well as the specificities of how media infrastructures are created at scale.

To Extend Vision Beyond the Horizon, to See the Unseen: Industrial Television in the Post-War Era

“Industrial television” (closed-circuit television referred to as ITV) was the first initiative to recognize the potential of television tailored specifically to the needs of industry. This chapter shows how ITV was positioned as a mechanism to extend bodies, adapting workers to match increased physical demands of post-war (1940s–1950s) industrial and informational architectures. ITV as prosthesis made working bodies stronger, bigger, and more tightly bound into automated information systems. Faster than a speeding assembly line, more powerful than a six-story furnace, able to retrieve dispersed data with a single command, these supermen appealed to industries seeking production and workforce efficiencies. In the mediated office, television transformed humans into nodes within complex human-machine hybrid information networks that anticipated networked computing. This chapter (keyword: flow) contributes to studies of how “work systems” produce people, socializing them to the conditions and expectations of capitalism.

Introduction

The introduction describes television’s use as an instrument of orientation engaged in cultural and logistical management in three interrelated senses: (1) shaping viewers’ understanding of their world and their place within it, (2) enabling action in space, and (3) offering a site for groups and institutions to engage the “problem” of electronic workplace communication. Arguing that industrial television sought to acclimate workers to the conditions of post-Fordism, it describes this transition in the US, focusing on one vector of the move to post-Fordism that was a favored target of television: the diminishing boundaries between work and nonwork. It also provides an overview of three bodies of literature: (1) media studies understandings of the conjuncture between labor and audiences (e.g., the audience commodity), (2) the cultural and political interventions of useful cinema, nontheatrical film, and institutional media research, and (3) methodologies for historical studies of emergent technologies. It ends with a chapter overview.

Conclusion

Acting as an extended “acknowledgments,” the conclusion addresses the conditions of possibility that enabled research for the book—both the individuals who shared their time and resources, and the institutions, especially archives, that shaped this work. The author also describes a series of interviews and interactions with corporate communications consultants, television directors and producers, trade organization leadership, authors, teachers, and market researchers who guided her investigations into corporate television. It argues that it is necessary to distinguish between the desires of multinational capital and the aims of the people who devoted their lives to television at work, many of whom were (and are) sincerely invested in making the workplace more humane. In following this latter ambition—the workplace as an opportunity to build community, as locus of personal connection and self-actualization—it may be possible to renew attempts to build broad-based worker solidarity by developing the conditions of possibility for just labor.

The Other Format Wars: Cartridges, Cassettes, and Making Home Work

Chapter 4 (keyword: time-shifting) outlines industrial users’ contributions to the development of videocassettes before “the” format wars between VHS and Betamax. It argues that the key terms for cassettes were not simply “Whatever. Whenever,” but “Whenever. Whomever. Wherever.” Rather than promise freedom from the broadcast schedule, this triadic promise of flexibility responded to industrial concerns with employee management in an era when the temporal demands on worker time were becoming more complex (whenever), when workforces were becoming more diverse (whomever), and when companies were growing more expansive (wherever). Tracing the pursuit of whenever-whomever-wherever as a management strategy through a series of three case studies—8mm cartridge projectors (1961–1970s), CBS’s EVR (1960–1971), and Sony’s U-matic (1961–1980s)—this chapter also reveals how businesses drew on workers’ pleasurable associations with domestic television and transformed the home into an exhibition site for corporate communications—in both instances, intensifying claims to employees’ nonworking time.

The People’s Network: Soft Management with Satellite Business Television

Chapter 5 (keyword: narrowcasting) explores the development of private satellite networks to manage distributed workforces in the context of globalization and a “cultural turn” in popular management theories. The late 1980s saw the proliferation of industry-focused subscription channels (e.g., geared toward insurers) and internal “networks” housed by a single company (e.g., Hewlett Packard). Two case studies (Johnson Controls and Steelcase) show how businesses used television to target worker identity in a bid to usurp other modes of affiliation (the nation, class) within the unstable employment environment of the 1980s and 1990s. This is the other side of the multichannel era: the creative deployment of employees as niche audiences. At the same time that post-national consumer identities became lucrative as a means of gathering and selling audiences on the diverse products of flexible specialization, proper cultural management of worker identity supported companies’ profit-maximization strategies (often based in cuts to employees’ material welfare).

Frankly Boring and Agonizingly Slow: Television Moves to the Office

Using AT&T as a case study, Chapter 3 (keyword: immediacy) follows a series of halting experiments surrounding live and near-live television that attended the medium’s move from the factory to the office. First, it describes companies’ adoption of theater television for live, city-spanning business meetings. Often understood as a site of tension between film and commercial broadcasting interests, theater television reached its apogee as a site of business experimentation with efficient and affective management. Second, it details companies’ use of early videotape systems for self-observation. Borrowing legitimacy from psychology’s use of “encounter groups,” self-observation required workers to tape themselves in various situations for immediate playback and intensified self-regulation. Third, and following from these experiments, it traces AT&T’s installation of in-house closed-circuit television systems. In addition to distributing content, CCTV systems supported corporate imaginaries in which geographies were themselves subject to executive control and reorganization.