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

2013; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 58; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0002764213503339

1552-3381

Caroline Hanley,

Labor Movements and Unions

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.