[SIGCIS-Members] Two works

[Julie Cohn]

Luke et al.,

On other factor to consider when addressing the issue of high skilled workers moving down the occupational ladder is the total number of college graduates entering the workforce and how that changed over time. It may be important, for a particular era of automation and a given industry, to address not only who is filling the jobs but whether the total number of high-skill jobs in that industry is changing and how that compares to the number of qualified applicants entering the workforce. 

-Julie

*****************************
Julie Cohn, Ph.D.
Research Historian
Center for Public History
University of Houston
315 McElhinney Hall
Houston, TX 77204-3007
cohnconnor at comcast.net

On Jun 13, 2015, at 6:18 PM, Luke Fernandez wrote:

> Bjorn (and others),
> 
> Thanks for those cites.  In your recollection which of these texts (or others if they come to mind) best detail what sectors of the labor force find their jobs more interesting as a result of the so-called computer revolution and what sectors find them less interesting?  
> 
> To this concern, in The Glass Cage Nicholas Carr suggests that some jobs, like being an airline pilot or a health worker, have been cognitively degraded by the introduction of automation.  And he worries that this is just a harbinger of more degradation to come.    Barbara Garson, in The Electronic Sweatshop:  How Computers Are Transforming The Office of the Future Into the Factory of the Past made similar observations in 1988, and Matthew Crawford in Shop Craft as Soul Craft (2009) argues (in passages that footnote Braverman and Garson) that the degradation that blue collar workers experienced with the advent of the assembly line and automation are now also being experienced by white collar workers. In a similar vein, Ben Sand, Paul Beaudry and David Green argue in _The great reversal in the demand for skill and cognitive tasks_ that the cognitive challenges that college graduates face in their jobs have been declining significantly since the year 2000:
>  
> “high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers. This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing lowskilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force all together.” [ http://www.economics.ubc.ca/files/2013/05/pdf_paper_paul-beaudry-great-reversal.pdf]
> 
> On the other hand I would guess that most of the people who subscribe to this listserv feel that their jobs are becoming more cognitively demanding rather than less.    So what's going on?  Does automation mean that (as Matthew Crawford argues) "genuine knowledge work comes to be concentrated in an ever smaller elite"  while the rest of white collar workers become subject to a "rising sea of clerkdom?"  Or is the story more complicated than the one Crawford and Carr recount?  What texts should I read to better answer the question in my first paragraph? 
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Luke
> http://lfernandez.org
> 
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Bjorn Westergard <bjornw at gmail.com> wrote:
> A few tangents you might explore:
> 
> It's hard to overstate the influence of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics (and popular writing like The Human use of Human Beings) on subsequent management theorists.
> 
> SHOT's very own David Allen Grier has written quite a lot on the labor processes used in scientific computing before and during the introduction of automatic computing machinery. These are not directly related to "automation" per se (which term was coined circa 1940) but I found them very helpful in providing historical context and illustrating the basic continuity of some tendencies in the technical division of labor from the pre- to post- automatic computing eras.
> 
> Finally, SHOT's own Nathan Ensmenger recently published The Computer Boys Take Over, an invaluable history of some of the changes in occupational structure engendered by "computerization". It's particularly good on gender.
> 
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 6:16 PM, Bjorn Westergard <bjornw at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here are some sources I've found helpful, albeit for a very particular set of questions around automation.
> 
> Marxian Historians, Social Scientists:
> Nobel - Forces of Production (a one-time SHOT member)
> Braverman - Labor and Monopoly Capital
> Pollock -  Automation: A Study of Its Social and Economic Consequences
> 
> Influential Popular Writers:
> Rifkin - The End of Work
> Andre Gorz - Farewell to the Working Class
> 
> Economists:
> Leontief, Autor, Brynjolfsson, McAfee
> Levy - The New Division of Labor
> Vivarelli - Innovation and Employment: A Survey 
> 
> Management Theorists:
> Herbert Simon - The Corporation: Will It be Managed by Machines? (published 1960)
> Drucker - The Practice of Management
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 1:29 PM, Daniel Ferrell <returnofjayhawk at hotmail.com> wrote:
> SIGCIS members,
>     Concerning the subject of automation, and how it relates to modern society--particularly, the economic and psychological effects that ensue, seems to be a thought-provoking topic in our current milieu. Can anyone suggest any good publications on this topic? 
> 
> 
> -Daniel Ferrell
> 
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> Benton, MO 63736
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> 
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