FORCES OF PRODUCTION

Rating:
Summary: I endorse Chomsky's recommendation.
Review: I certainly wouldn't have heard of this book if it weren't for Noam Chomsky citing it. David Noble dared to break ranks and suggest that maybe all was not right with machine tool automation. My favorite chapter,entitled "Who's running the shop" describes GE's aircraft division's "Pilot Project" in the 60's. It is first of all a damn good tale--rivaling the arabian nights as a never ending fascinating tale. Secondly, it is a sobering tale of labor-management relations. One suspects that GE management would rather the incident was forgotten. Here is a rough summary: The Air Force gave GE super-expensive numerically controlled (i.e. computerized) machining tools and local GE managers used these as a weapon to deskill workers and lower their pay, but it backfired because without the good will and understanding of the workers it produced only scrap metal at a fantastic rate. The "Pilot Project" was a compromise that enabled the incompetant management to save face, and the workers and union essentially ran the shop during this time. Understandably the union and workers wanted the pilot project to go on forever, and equally understandably the higher corporate management wanted this example of worker control to end as soon as possible even though it worked extremely well.

Rating:
Summary: Superlative
Review: I read this book as part for a course in "Philosophy and Technology" when I was an undergraduate. It is a detailed exposition of how the technologies we adopt are not inevitable, but are instead the consequence of specific choices made by specific people in power (or seeking to be in power). One of the books that fundamentally changed my worldview. Together with his "America By Design," a dull but exacting analysis of engineering education in the U.S., this book should be read as a cautionary tale for the course higher education is taking in its current romance with corporate sponsorship and collaboration. . .

Rating:
Summary: A very important, underpraised book
Review: The infantilism of American culture that started with Reagan appears in many guises. For example, Ron Grossman in the Chicago Tribune pointed out last Sunday that the United States Postal Service has a stamp for Bugs Bunny but none for John Brown, the rebel of Harper's Ferry.

The Smithsonian Institution recently thought fit to exhibit Daisy's shortened Levi's from the 1970s television series The Dukes of Hazzard.

The infantilism is that the author of Forces of Production, David Noble, was a serious and pro-labor voice who worked at the Smithsonian in the 1970s and was forced out under Reagan...in favor of Daisy's shorts, it appears.

The subject of Forces of Production may seem to be specialized for overtly it is on numerically-controlled machine tools, nowadays a very small application of computers. Nonetheless this book can be read in the context, not only of machine tools but also of computerization in general.

Noble's book is an account of management folly. Machine tool automation was implemented to eliminate not the unskilled but men like my great-grandfather: machinists who had the nerve to set their own pace, and to design as they saw fit tools to accomplish their job.

The machinist occupies in the world of physical tools somewhat the same space as is occupied by the advanced programmer since the machinist has the choice, in a well-run shop, of deciding not to fashion the part that management wants, but instead to fashion a tool that will in turn make the part that management wants...faster, more accurately and in the long and short run cheaper.

Like Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital, Noble shows how this economic rationality was subverted by the high priests of economic rationality: the CEOs.

Ultimately preferring control over profits, the managers of machine shops imported programmatic numerical control NOT to make the skilled machinist's life easier but instead to eliminate the skilled union men.

Noble shows how a rough compromise was hammered out because the unskilled machinists, and the alienated skilled machinists, stood by (under management's direction) as the improperly programmed machine tools produced "scrap at high speeds."

Union negotiation then restored the skilled men to their positions to get the technology under control.

There is a striking parallel here with the situation in white-collar computer programming, for it has been the consistent discovery of skilled programmers that the computer itself can be used, NOT to "focus on the bottom line goals of management" (as goes the management songbook) but instead to fashion tools...that accomplish, in a laughing and almost scornful way, the goals of the management.

For example, in 1974 I was confronted in a computer center with 50 different programs to scan and to print mailing lists. Being a lazy hippie I suggested to my boss that I write ONE program that would read and parse the format and the logic rules. My manager approved and as a result I implemented a form of "data base."

Of course, management does see the wisdom of this move, but typically (as related in the case of machine tools by David Noble) management prefers to alienate the programmers from the tools, which are bought from third parties. While this makes sense in many environments it has also produced unrecognized disasters...especially where the programmers know or believe they could do a better job.

For example, the state of Virginia recently wasted five years and millions of dollars in trying to use a generalized solution from Peoplesoft to automate human resources. A new manager walked in and had one or two good programmers code, in-house, the most needed routines on the Web.

Reading Noble's important work teaches us how to avoid Luddism (and Luddism itself may have a bad name for certain historians have shown that the Luddite textile weavers of the early 19th century were critics, not of technology itself, but of its use to downsize and to degrade.) It gives the ordinary person who wants at one and the same time to be successful at his profession and to have time for his family an informed way of criticising "scrap at high speeds."

Rating:
Summary: A very important, underpraised book
Review: The infantilism of American culture that started with Reagan appears in many guises. For example, Ron Grossman in the Chicago Tribune pointed out last Sunday that the United States Postal Service has a stamp for Bugs Bunny but none for John Brown, the rebel of Harper's Ferry.

The Smithsonian Institution recently thought fit to exhibit Daisy's shortened Levi's from the 1970s television series The Dukes of Hazzard.

The infantilism is that the author of Forces of Production, David Noble, was a serious and pro-labor voice who worked at the Smithsonian in the 1970s and was forced out under Reagan...in favor of Daisy's shorts, it appears.

The subject of Forces of Production may seem to be specialized for overtly it is on numerically-controlled machine tools, nowadays a very small application of computers. Nonetheless this book can be read in the context, not only of machine tools but also of computerization in general.

Noble's book is an account of management folly. Machine tool automation was implemented to eliminate not the unskilled but men like my great-grandfather: machinists who had the nerve to set their own pace, and to design as they saw fit tools to accomplish their job.

The machinist occupies in the world of physical tools somewhat the same space as is occupied by the advanced programmer since the machinist has the choice, in a well-run shop, of deciding not to fashion the part that management wants, but instead to fashion a tool that will in turn make the part that management wants...faster, more accurately and in the long and short run cheaper.

Like Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital, Noble shows how this economic rationality was subverted by the high priests of economic rationality: the CEOs.

Ultimately preferring control over profits, the managers of machine shops imported programmatic numerical control NOT to make the skilled machinist's life easier but instead to eliminate the skilled union men.

Noble shows how a rough compromise was hammered out because the unskilled machinists, and the alienated skilled machinists, stood by (under management's direction) as the improperly programmed machine tools produced "scrap at high speeds."

Union negotiation then restored the skilled men to their positions to get the technology under control.

There is a striking parallel here with the situation in white-collar computer programming, for it has been the consistent discovery of skilled programmers that the computer itself can be used, NOT to "focus on the bottom line goals of management" (as goes the management songbook) but instead to fashion tools...that accomplish, in a laughing and almost scornful way, the goals of the management.

For example, in 1974 I was confronted in a computer center with 50 different programs to scan and to print mailing lists. Being a lazy hippie I suggested to my boss that I write ONE program that would read and parse the format and the logic rules. My manager approved and as a result I implemented a form of "data base."

Of course, management does see the wisdom of this move, but typically (as related in the case of machine tools by David Noble) management prefers to alienate the programmers from the tools, which are bought from third parties. While this makes sense in many environments it has also produced unrecognized disasters...especially where the programmers know or believe they could do a better job.

For example, the state of Virginia recently wasted five years and millions of dollars in trying to use a generalized solution from Peoplesoft to automate human resources. A new manager walked in and had one or two good programmers code, in-house, the most needed routines on the Web.

Reading Noble's important work teaches us how to avoid Luddism (and Luddism itself may have a bad name for certain historians have shown that the Luddite textile weavers of the early 19th century were critics, not of technology itself, but of its use to downsize and to degrade.) It gives the ordinary person who wants at one and the same time to be successful at his profession and to have time for his family an informed way of criticising "scrap at high speeds."