“We are seeking high achievers. And high achievers love to be measured, because otherwise they can't prove to themselves that they are achieving. Measuring them says you care about them.”-Robert Noyce of Intel, cited by Quinn (1992, p. 273).
Abstract
“Empowerment” has become a pervasive term of art in business practice, particularly in the United States. The term traces its roots to the organizing models evolved by populist social movements, but within business discourse it refers to an emerging organizational philosophy that largely replaces conventional hierarchies with nominally autonomous teams. Proponents of empowerment frequently cite information technology as a crucial enabler of this shift without, however, spelling out fully the logic of the connection. A reconstruction of this logic provides evidence for the emergence of a novel vision of work-discipline, the empowerment and measurement regime. This regime is discussed in relation to market dynamics, Taylorism, and research on the social organization of information technology and its use.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adler, P. S. (1993): Time-and-motion regained.Harvard Business Review, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 97–108.
Agre, P. E. (1994): Surveillance and capture: Two models of privacy.The Information Society, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 101–127.
Agre, P. E. (1995): Accountability and discipline: A comment on Suchman and Winograd.Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 31–35.
Allen, J. (1994): Mutual control in the newly integrated work environments.The Information Society, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 129–138.
Armstrong, D. M. (1992):Managing by Storying Around. New York: Doubleday.
Bachrach, P. and Botwinick, A. (1992):Power and Empowerment: A Radical Theory of Participatory Democracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Bannon, L. (1991): From human factors to human actors: The role of psychology and human-computer interaction studies in systems design. InDesign at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems, eds. Joan M. Greenbaum and Morten Kyng. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Barker, J. R. (1993): Tightening the iron cage: Concertive control in self-managing teams.Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 408–437.
Barnard, C. I. (1962):The Functions of the Executive, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (Originally published in 1938).
Bendix, R. (1956):Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Berk, J. and Berk, S. (1993):Total Quality Management: Implementing Continuous Improvement. New York: Sterling.
Blanchard, K., Carew, D. and Parisi-Carew, E., eds (1990):The One Minute Manager Builds High-Performance Teams. New York: Morrow.
Block, P. (1981):Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used. Austin: Learning Concepts.
Block, P. (1987):The Empowered Manager: Positive Political Skills at Work. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Bowers, J. (1992): The politics of formalism. InContexts of Computer-Mediated Communication, ed. Martin Lea. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 232–261.
Boyett, J. H., Schwartz, S., Osterwise, L. and Bauer, R. (1993):The Quality Journey: How Wining the Baldrige Sparked the Remaking of IBM. New York: Dutton.
Braverman, H. (1974):Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Butler, S. M. ed. (1990):Agenda for Empowerment:Readings in American Government and the Policy Process. Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation.
Button, G. (1990): Going up a blind alley: Conflating conversation analysis and computational modelling. InComputers and Conversation, eds. Paul Luff, Nigel Gilbert, and David Frohlich. London: Academic Press.
Button, G. (1993):Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology: London: Routledge.
Byham, W. C. (1988):Zapp!: The Lightning of Empowerment. New York: Harmony.
Clarke, R. A. (1989): Information technology and dataveillance.Communications of the ACM, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 498–512.
Clement, A. (1994): Computing at work: Empowering action by “low-level users”.Communications of the ACM, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 53–63, 105.
Collins, J. C. and Porras, J. I. (1995):Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. New York: HarperCollins.
Conrad, C. (1990):Strategic Organizational Communication: An Integrated Perspective. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Cyert, R. M. and March, J. G. (1963):A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Davidow, W. H. and Uttal, B. (1990):Total Customer Service: The Ultimate Weapon. New York: Harper.
Derrida, J. (1978):Writing and Difference, translated from the French by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Drucker, P. F. (1988): The coming of the new organization.Harvard Business Review, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 45–53.
Edwards, P. (1995):The Closed World Computers and the Politics of Discourse. MIT Press.
Edwards, R. (1979):Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books.
Feigenbaum, A. V. (1983):Total Quality, Control, third edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Feenberg, A., (1991)Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fisher, K. (1993):Leading Self-Directed Work Teams: A Guide to Developing New Team Leadership Skills. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Fligstein, N. (1990):The Transformation of Corporate Control. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Flores, F. Graves, M., Hartfield, B. and T. Winograd (1988): Computer systems and the design of organizational interaction.ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 153–172.
Forsythe, D. (1993): Engineering knowledge: The construction of knowledge in artificial intelligence.Social Studies of Science vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 445–477.
Foucault, M. (1988): Technologies of the self. InTechnologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Frey, R. (1993): Empowerment or else.Harvard Business Review, vol. 71, no. 5, pp. 80–82, 84, 86–89, 92, 94.
Friedman, A. L. (1977):Industry and Labour: Class Struggle at Work and Monopoly Capitalism. London: Macmillan.
Friedmann, J. (1992):Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Garfinkel, H. (1984):Studies in Ethnomethodology. Polity Press. (Originally published in 1967.)
Gasser, L. (1986): The integration of computing and routine work.ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 205–225.
George, J. F. and King, J. L.. (1991): Examining, the computing and decentralization debate.Communications of the ACM, vol. 34, no. 7, pp. 63–72.
Gilbreth, F. B. (1912):Primer of Scientific Management. New York: Van Nostrand.
Gilbreth, L. M. (1921):The Psychology of Management: The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and Installing Methods of Least Waste. New York: Macmillan.
Gordon, D. M., Edwards, R. and M. Reich (1982):Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grant, R. A., Higgins, C. A. and R. H. Irving (1988): Computerized performance monitors: Are they costing you customers?Sloan Management Review, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 39–45.
Guillén, M. F. (1994):Models of Management: Work, Authority, and Organization in a Comparative Prespective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Habermas, J. (1987):The Theory of Communicative Action, volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hales, M. (1986): Management science and the ‘second industrial revolution’. InRadical Science Essays, ed. Les Levidow. London: Free Association Books, pp. 62–87.
Halpern, D., Osofsky, S. and M. I. Peskin (1989): Taylorism revisited for the 1990s.Industrial Management, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 20–23.
Haraway, D. (1991):A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century, inSimians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books.
Henderson, A. (1991): A development perspective on interface, design, and theory. InDesigning Interaction: Psychology at the Human-Computer Interface, ed. John M. Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hirschhorn, L.. (1984):Beyond Mechanization: Work and Technology in a Postindustrial Age. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Holmes, W. G. (1938):Applied Time and Motion Study. New York: Ronald Press.
Jablonski, J. R. (1992):Implementing TQM: Competing in the Nineties through Total Quality Management. Second edition. Albuquerque: Technical Management Consortium.
Johnson, H. T. and R. S. Kaplan (1987):Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Johnson, H. T. (1992):Relevance Regained: From Top-Down Control to Bottom-Up Empowerment. New York: Free Press.
Kaplan, R. S. ed. (1990:Measures for Manufacturing Excellence. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Kaplan, R. S. and D. P. Norton (1993): Putting the balanced scorecard to workHarvard Business Review, vol. 71, no. 5, pp. 134–149.
Kearns, D. T., and D. A. Nadler (1992):Prophets in the Dark: How Xerox Reinvented Itself and Beat Back the Japanese. New York: Harper.
Kling, R. and W. Scacchi (1979): Recurrent dilemmas of routine computer use in complex organizations. InProceedings of the AFIPS National Computer Conference 48 Arlington, VA: AFIPS Press, pp. 107–115.
Kunda, G. (1992):Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Lawler III, E. E. (1992):The Ultimate Advantage: Creating the High-Involvement Organization. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Leavitt, H. J. and T. L. Whisler (1958): Management in the 1980's.Harvard Management Review, vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 41–48.
Levitt, B. and J. G. March (1988): Organizational learningAnnual Review of Sociology, vol. 14, pp. 319–340.
Lewin, K. (1951):Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers, ed. Dorwin Cartwright. New York: Harper.
Lilienfeld, R. (1978):The Rise of Systems Theory: An Ideological Analysis New York: Wiley.
Luff, P. Gilbert, N. and D. Frohlich eds. (1990):Computers and Conversation. London: Academic Press.
Lukács, G. (1971):History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT Press (Originally published in German in 1923).
Malone, T. W. and J. F. Rockart (1993): How will information technology reshape organizations?: Computers as coordination technology. InGlobalization, Technology, and Competition: The Fusion of Computers and Telecommunications in the 1990s, eds. Stephen P. Bradley, Jerry A. Hausman, and Richard L. Nolan. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, pp. 37–56.
Maslow, A. H. (1954):Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper.
McGregor, D. (1960):The Human Side of Enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Mayo, E. (1933):The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization New York: Macmillan.
Medina-Mora, R. Winograd, T. Flores, R. and F. Flores (1992): The action workflow approach to workflow management technology. InProceedings of CSCW-92, Toronto, 1992, pp. 281–288.
Meyer, C. (1994): How the right measures help teams excel.Harvard Business Review, vol. 72, no. 3, pp. 95–103.
Miller, A. G. (1991): Transformations of time and space: Oaxaca, Mexico, circa 1500–1700. InImages of Memory: On Remembering and Representation, eds. Susanne Kuchler and Walter Melion. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Montgomery, D. (1987):The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mullender, A. and D. Ward (1991):Self-Directed Groupwork: Users Take Action, for Empowerment. London: Whiting and Birch.
Nelson, D. (1980):Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Nelson, R. R. and S. G. Winter, (1982):An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Noble, D. D. (1989): Cockpit cognition: Education, the military, and cognitive engineering.AI and Society, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 271–296.
Norman, D. A. (1993):Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine, Reading. MA: Addison-Wesley.
O'Reilly, C. (1989): Corporations, culture, and commitment: Motivation and social control in organizations.California Management Review, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 9–25.
Parker, M. (1985):Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to QWL. Boston: South End Press.
Parsons, T. (1937):The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Pfaffenberger, B. (1988): The social meaning of the personal computer: or Why the personal computer revolution was no revolution.Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 1, pp. 39–47.
Quinn, J. B. (1992):Intelligent Enterprise: A Knowledge and Service Based Paradigm for Industry. New York: Free Press.
Riessman, F. (1986): The new populism and the empowerment ethos. InThe New Populism: The Politics of Empowerment, eds. Harry C. Boyte and Frank Riessman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Robinson, M. and L. Bannon (1991): Questioning representations. InECSCW'91: Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, eds. Liam Bannon, Mike Robinson, and Kjeld Schmidt. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Rose, N. (1990):Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge.
Roszak, T. (1986):From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture. San Francisco: Don't Call It Frisco Press.
Sabel, C. F. (1982):Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schmidt, K. (1991): Riding the tiger, or computer supported cooperative work. InECSCW'91: Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, eds. Liam Bannon, Mike Robinson, and Kjeld Schmidt Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Schmidt, K. and L. Bannon (1992): Taking CSCW seriously: Supporting articulation work.Computer Supported Cooperative Work, vol. 1, nos. 1–2 pp. 7–40.
Schutz, A. (1967):The Phenomenology of the Social World (translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert). Evanston: Northwestern University Press (Originally published in German in 1932).
Scribner, S. (1984): Studying working intelligence InEveryday Cognition: Its Development in Social Context eds. Barbara Rogoff and Jean Lave. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Shaw, A. G. (1952):The Purpose and Practice of Motion Study. Manchester: Harlequin.
Shores, A. R. (1990):A TQM Approach to Achieving Manufacturing Excellence. Milwaukee: Quality Press.
Simon, H. A. (1947):Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization. New York: Macmillan.
Simon, H. A. (1960): The New Science of Management Decision, New York: Harper and Row.
Simondon, G. (1958):La Mode d'Existence, des Objets Techniques Paris: Aubier.
Simons, R. (1995): Control in an age of empowerment.Harvard Business Review, vol. 73, no. 2, pp. 80–88.
Star, S. Leigh (1989a): Layered space, formal representations and long-distance control: The politics of information.Fundamenta Scientiae, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 125–155.
Star, S. Leigh (1989b): The structure of ill-strured solutions: boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving. InDistributed Artificial Intelligence, Volume II, eds. Les Gasser and Michael N. Huhns. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann pp. 37–54.
Stinchcombe, A. L. (1990):Information and Organizations Berkeley: University of California Press.
Suchman, L. and B. Jordan (1989): Computerization and women's knowledge. InWomen, Work and computerization: Forming New Alliances, eds. Kea Tijdens, Mary Jennings, Ina Wagner, and Margaret Weggelaar. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Suchman, L. (1992): Technologies of accountability: Of lizards and aeroplanes. InTechnology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology, ed. Graham Button London: Routledge.
Suchman, L. (1994): Do categories have politics?: The language/action perspective reconsidered.Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 177–190.
Szasz, A. (1994):Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the movement for Environmental Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Taylor, F.W. (1923):The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper.
Thompson, P. (1989):The Nature of Work: An Introduction to Debates on the Labour Process, second edition. London: Macmillan.
Trist, E. (1981).The Evolution of Socio-Technical Systems: A Conceptual Framework and an Action Research Program. Toronto: Ontario Ministry of Labour.
Waring, S. P. (1991):Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory Since 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Weisbord, M. R. (1991):Productive Workplaces: Organizing and Managing for Dignity, Meaning, and Community. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Wellins, R. S. Byham, W. C. and J. M. Wilson (1991):Empowered Teams: Creating Self-Directed Work Groups that Improve Quality, Productivity, and Participation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Whalley, P. (1986): Markets, managers, and technical autonomy.Theory and Society, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 223–247.
Winograd, T. (1994): Categories, descriptions, and social coordination,Computer Supported Cooperative Work vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 191–197.
Zimbalist, A. (1975): The limits of work humanization.Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 50–59.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Agre, P.E. From high tech to human tech: Empowerment, measurement, and social studies of computing. Comput Supported Coop Work 3, 167–195 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00773446
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00773446