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From: MJackson.Wbst@Xerox.COM (Mark Jackson)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: Examples from Scandinavia
Message-ID: <1815@hplabsc.HP.COM>
Date: Wed, 13-May-87 14:21:32 EDT
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Posted: Wed May 13 14:21:32 1987
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Steve, while it's true that labor unions in this country have been more
focussed on security and pay than on larger workplace issues this has
not been entirely by choice.  The UAW made a bid for something like
"participative management" I think at Ford in the late 40's or early
50's.  The idea was killed essentially by middle managers, who were
jealous of their own "rights" in the workplace.

One might speculate that the ease with which worker participation can
function in a society is inversely proportional to the degree of
rigidity and overtness of that society's class structure.  Thus England
has *terrible* labor relations, whereas in Scandinavia humanization of
the assembly line has a substantial history.

So that this note not be *entirely* unrelated to "Computers and Society"
(although Dave has been inviting us to comment on Gary Hart, so
obviously his standards are rather loose :-), let me note your closing
comment:  "The major question: Who does the computerization of society
benefit, and why?"  Neil Postman, in /Amusing Ourselves to Death/, has
this to say:

    Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology,
I
    mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their
    customary inattention; which means they will use it as they are
told,
    without a whimper.  Thus, a central thesis of computer
technology--that
    the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from
    insufficient data--will go unexamined.  Until, years from now, when
it
    will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light
    retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale
organizations
    but have solved very little of importance to most people and have
    created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.

Now clearly there is a lot to argue with here (I believe, for example,
that the general inability of humans to form effective, humane
organizations on a large scale is an enormous problem for *everyone*),
but I assume that each of us who reads this digest sees *some* such
outcome as a possibility, and is interested in avoiding that eventuality
if possible.

Mark