Hands and Minds: Clerical Work in the First “Information Society”

Abstract

à E v e R o s e n h a f tThis article examines some aspects of the labour involved in generating, recording and transmitting information in eighteenth-century Europe. It centres on the study of a particular occupational group: the men involved in the day-to-day operations of the schemes for the marketing of lifecontingent pensions which would develop into modern life insurance, a form of enterprise whose growth was deeply implicated in the emerging ''information society''. The bulk of the work these men did was what we would now call clerical work: keeping and processing records and accounts, managing correspondence, preparing reports for publication. It was in the nature of the information regimes within which they worked and the kind of information they were handling, though, that the responsibilities and demands placed on them went beyond those associated with the mechanical function of recording and reproducing. This made for an occupational profile which was relatively fluid, and only gradually came to be distinguishable from other contemporary forms of middle-class employment, in terms of the disciplines peculiar to it and the hazards it incurred. Among the hazards were forms of mental and physical strain that accompanied rapid increases in the volume of data that had to be handled and in the speed of its circulation, as a direct consequence of its character as ''information''. While the account focuses on the study of a particular kind of enterprise in a particular place, northwest Germany, it draws on comparative data for officers and staff in analogous forms of commercial and administrative employment in Britain. The article concludes with a consideration of how their occupational profile might fit into an extended account of the historical development of information work.à This article is based on research towards a wider study of life insurance and middle-class culture in eighteenth-century Germany. Research to date has been funded by the British Academy, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the University of Liverpool. I am grateful to William J. Ashworth, Jü rgen Schlumbohm, and Richard Waller for their advice and comments, and to Sylvia Mö hle for inspired assistance with genealogical research on Anton Dies.

Protocological Rhetoric: Intervening in Institutions

“…While these computer technologies provide easy examples of infrastructural components like standards and protocols, it's also important to recognize the consistency provided by standardized, classified, algorithmic, and protocological techniques that are grounded in other ways. These include standardized paper forms, standardized rules and classifications, and standardized methods for collecting population information (Foucault, 1977, Hacking, 1990Rosenhaft, 2003;Timmermans & Berg, 2003). The long history of the words protocol and standard are suggestive of just how long infrastructure has influenced social worlds (Feng, 2003;Timmermans & Berg, 2003).…”

Commentary: The Place of Labor in the History of Information-Technology Revolutions

“…For example, Eve Rosenhaft's ''Hands and Minds'' piece, in describing the eighteenthcentury German survivor's pension funds, shows how pension clerks were implicated in two important new informational processes: the application of state-gathered mathematical statistics to profit-making business, and the advertising of investment opportunities to a population through the mass media. 110 Bernard Dubbeld, in his article on ''Breaking the Buffalo'', considers the containerized commodity-shipping network and its manifestation in Durban, South Africa. His narrative describes a key turning point in both a nation and an industry, on one hand representative of a shift to a global, real-time, networked information economy, but on the other hand quite historically, geographically and culturally contingent on a cultural legacy of apartheid and a local history of stevedoring.…”