IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

Abstract

Pamela J. Hinds and Sara Kiesler (eds.), Distributed Work, MIT Press, 2002, ISBN 0-262-08305-1, 495 pp., $52.00. Patterns of work have changed radically in the past few decades. Within organizations, more collaboration across hierarchies exist, and the home has, once again, become a common site of regular paid work. Networks of collaboration have been spun within organizations that operate across cities and countries, and between organizations, partnerships have become pervasive. The spread of information technologies has been both a cause and an effect of these social changes. The bulk of this collection, edited by Pamela Hinds and Sara Kiesler, which surveys the phenomenon of geographically distributed work, concerns contemporary situations. However, they start their book by including two papers that will be of keen interest to the historian. In “Managing Distance Over Time: The Evolution of Technologies of Dis/ambiguation,” John Leslie King and Robert L. Frost argue that the successful management of distance “requires a careful balancing of disambiguation and ambiguation,” by which they mean the processes that either do or do not act to “improve the precision and veracity of communication” (pp. 3–4). They take four case studies, two (texts and coins) of which are examples of disambiguating technologies. Texts let Phoenician traders record clear summaries. Money, at least in its modern form, is an unambiguous measure of value that permits global trade. The other two case studies are of ambiguating technologies. The success of the Roman Catholic Church in becoming a geographically dispersed enterprise was “very much the result of a carefully constructed and maintained doctrinal ambiguity” (p. 11). Likewise, King and Frost highlight the feature of the US Constitution that “it goes into great detail regarding the process by which decisions will be made, but it says virtually nothing about what those decisions should be” (p. 17). Some of this history is broad-brush (the brutal disambiguities of Justinian, for example, and their contributions to the split of the Church are passed over without comment), but the conclusions are perhaps more interesting in consequence. Recent information technologies dedicated to assisting management over distance, argue King and Frost, are almost all dedicated to reducing ambiguity. But be too precise, and innovation can falter. As is well known, part of the reason why regional economies— Silicon Valley being the cliche—can spectacularly take off is because informal face-to-face communication between organizations has been encouraged. Sometimes vagueness can help grease the wheels of the economy. In the second article, Michael O’Leary, Wanda Orlikowski, and JoAnne Yates examine issues of trust and control in the Hudson’s Bay Company, from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries. The headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company lay in London, yet its employees were distributed thousands of miles away in the icy American north. The Company deployed many different means of control (direct oversight, contract, communication by letters, and other information technologies) alongside relationships built on personal contact and trust (such as recruiting servants often from one group of islands off Scotland, Orkney, with which Company staff had contacts). Yates will be well known to Annals readers as the author of the excellent study of systematic management, Control through Communication (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). She, with her coauthors, continues that book’s theme of looking at the techniques of information management within organizations. Their core argument is that trust and control should not be seen as opposites—with control being asserted where trust has broken down or otherwise removed—but instead as closely intertwined. This thought-provoking paper reads like the first foray into a fascinating study, and many of the conclusions are suggestive rather than demonstrated. I hope their project is pursued further. If so, an important aspect they might explore would be the extent that the model of control over a geographically dispersed organization exhibited by the Hudson’s Bay Company anticipates and departs from the classic Chandlerian organizational form. What are the lessons for the historian of computing? These papers remind us that there is a rich history of information management that the history of computing is just part of (within the history of information, the history of computing becomes the task of accounting for a particular form of mechanization). This route provides the best means, in my opinion, of demonstrating the importance of our subject as a central component of general history. Jon Agar Cambridge University [email protected]