Thomas C. Jepsen: My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in Telegraph Office 1846-1950 (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · history of technology, labour, morse code, technology, telegraphy, women
The role of the telegraph operator in the mid-nineteenth century was like that of today’s software programmer/analyst, according to independent scholar Tom Jepsen, who notes that in the “cyberspace” of long ago, male operators were often surprised to learn that the “first-class man” on the other end of the wire was a woman.
Like the computer, the telegraph caused a technological revolution. The telegraph soon worked synergistically with the era’s other mass-scale technology, the railroad, to share facilities as well as provide communications to help trains run on time.
The strategic nature of the telegraph in the Civil War opened opportunities for women, but tension arose as men began to return from military service. However, women telegraphers did not affect male employment or wage levels. Women kept their jobs after the war with support from industry—Western Union in particular—and because they defended and justified their role.
“Although women were predominantly employed in lower-paying positions and in rural offices, women who persisted and made a career of the profession could work up to managerial or senior technical positions that, except for wage discrimination, were identical to those of their male counterparts,” writes Jepsen. “Telegraphy as an occupation became gendered, in the sense that we understand today, only after the introduction of the teletype and the creation of a separate role for women teletype operators.”
My Sisters Telegraphic is a fresh introduction to this pivotal communications technology and its unsung women workers, long neglected by labor and social historians.
Publisher Ohio University Press, 2000
ISBN 0821413449, 9780821413449
231 pages
Gideon Kunda: Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · corporate culture, ethnography, labour, management, organization, post-bureaucracy, software industry, technology
Engineering Culture is an award-winning ethnography of the engineering division of a large American high-tech corporation. Now, this influential book—which has been translated into Japanese, Italian, and Hebrew—has been revised to bring it up to date. In Engineering Culture, Gideon Kunda offers a critical analysis of an American company’s well-known and widely emulated “corporate culture.” Kunda uses detailed descriptions of everyday interactions and rituals in which the culture is brought to life, excerpts from in-depth interviews and a wide variety of corporate texts to vividly portray managerial attempts to design and impose the culture and the ways in which it is experienced by members of the organization.
The company’s management, Kunda reveals, uses a variety of methods to promulgate what it claims is a non-authoritarian, informal, and flexible work environment that enhances and rewards individual commitment, initiative, and creativity while promoting personal growth. The author demonstrates, however, that these pervasive efforts mask an elaborate and subtle form of normative control in which the members’ minds and hearts become the target of corporate influence. Kunda carefully dissects the impact this form of control has on employees’ work behavior and on their sense of self.
In the conclusion written especially for this edition, Kunda reviews the company’s fortunes in the years that followed publication of the first edition, reevaluates the arguments in the book, and explores the relevance of corporate culture and its management today.
Publisher Temple University Press, 2006
Labor And Social Change series
ISBN 1592135471, 9781592135479
320 pages
Georg Simmel: The Philosophy of Money (1900-) [German/English]
Filed under book | Tags: · labour, money, philosophy, sociology, value
In The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel puts money on the couch. He provides us with a classic analysis of the social, psychological and philosophical aspects of the money economy, full of brilliant insights into the forms that social relationships take. He analyzes the relationships of money to exchange, human personality, the position of women, and individual freedom. Simmel also offers us prophetic insights into the consequences of the modern money economy and the division of labour, in particular the processes of alienation and reification in work and urban life.
An immense and profound piece of work it demands to be read today and for years to come as a stunning account of the meaning, use and culture of money.
German edition: Philosophie des Geldes
Publisher Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig, 1900
554 pages
English edition
Translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby from a first draft by Kaethe Mengelberg
First published in 1978
With a Foreword by Charles Lemert
Publisher Routledge, London/New York, 2011
ISBN 9780415610117
596 pages
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