Putting the Bias in Skill-Biased Technological Change? A Relational Perspective on White-Collar Automation at General Electric

Abstract

The skill-biased technological change (SBTC) theory of rising inequality rests on assumptions that are challenged by a relational perspective. This article develops a historical case study of the design and implementation of technologies to automate white-collar work at the General Electric Company (GE) starting in the 1950s in order to interrogate the assumptions on which the SBTC thesis rests. Executives at GE resisted framing computer technologies as automation and sought to neutralize the class-based implications of the term. Yet they actively pursued white-collar automation technologies designed to prevent the industrial relations of the heavily unionized manufacturing sector from being replicated in the growing service sector. A new conception of productivity that locates managers as the core productive workers of the firm is embedded in the company’s internal definition of white-collar automation as information handling, lending legitimacy to the changing distribution of earnings in the following decades. By embedding the history of white-collar workplace computers in an analysis of the labor relations and other business administration problems the technologies were designed to address, this article lends a critical perspective to the SBTC theory of rising inequality.

Organizations as the building blocks of social inequalities

“…The most compelling research on claims-making tracks the actual claims that actors make, comparing them over time or across organizational contexts (Godechot, 2016;Hanley, 2014). Here, we can see that actors construct their claims similarly to social movement actors, framing them within dominant discursive frameworks in the organization to increase the likelihood of them being legitimated (Avent-Holt, 2018;Avent-Holt & Tomaskovic-Devey, 2012;Rosenfeld & Denice, 2015;Schweiker & Groß, 2017).…”

Rising Intragenerational Occupational Mobility in the United States, 1969 to 2011

“…Sociologists have long maintained that technological change, de-unionization, and precarious work are integrally related (Braverman 1974; Fernandez 2001; Hanley 2014; Kristal 2013; Kristal and Cohen 2015). Which occupations are targeted for computerization or automation and how new technologies are deployed in the workplace are often related to management efforts to obtain a better bargaining position relative to their labor force, control the labor process, and defuse labor organization.…”

Why Has Computerization Increased Wage Inequality? Information, Occupational Structural Power, and Wage Inequality

“…The second mechanism that "can be essential to realizing the value buried in the holes" (Burt, 1992) is closure within a network of production as a device to extract higher wages. Here too, organizational (Barley, 1986;Bechky, 2003;Burkhardt & Brass, 1990;Vallas, 1998Vallas, , 2001) and historical (Hanley, 2014) studies show that by closing ranks on access to and control of information when new computerized technologies are adopted by an organization, experts gain power at the expense of rank-and-file workers. Accordingly, the concepts of social capital and social closure yield the following hypothesis:…”