Computer-Mediated Work

Computer-mediated work is a feature of daily life for billions of people around the world. The concept was first articulated over 30 years ago as computer-based technologies began to transform the workplace. The early 1980s marked a watershed in technological and economic history, especially in the United States, as microprocessor-based technologies were rapidly deployed across a wide range of sectors, occupations, and organizational strata. Since that time, the scope and intensity of computer-mediated work have multiplied dramatically, resulting in new skills and forms of literacy, new forms of distributed work, and a fundamental challenge to the concentrated paradigm of the vertically administered enterprise.

The concept of computer-mediated work was first introduced by Shoshana Zuboff in a 1981 MIT working paper, “Psychological and Organizational Implications of Computer-Mediated Work,” elaborated in a 1982 article, “New Worlds of Computer-Mediated Work,” and brought to full expression in the 1988 book In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Tower. The phrase computer-mediated captured a new phenomenon: the experience of accomplishing a work task through the medium of a computer interface. In 1980, it was estimated that about 10 percent of the U.S. workforce interacted with a computer display during their daily tasks.

By 1984, that number had risen to 24 percent, and by 1989, to 37 percent. Zuboff's research consisted of in-depth, multi-year studies of office, factory, professional, executive, and craft workplaces characterized by a recent shift from traditional to computer-mediated task environments. The research demonstrated the tripartite nature of the relationship between information technology and work: (1) technology is not neutral, but embodies intrinsic characteristics that enable new human experiences and foreclose others; (2) within these new “horizons of the possible,” individuals and groups construct meaning and make choices, further shaping the situation; and (3) the interplay of intrinsic qualities and human choices is further shaped by social, political, and economic interests that inscribe the situation with their intended and unintended opportunities and limitations.