New Technology, Old Jobs: Secretarial Labour in Automated Offices

This working paper looks at the ways in which, when it first emerged, word processing was expected to restructure women's office work and alter their jobs. It considers pessimistic forecasts which were heavily influenced by Braverman's writings and which predicted the degradation, deskilling and intensification of office work, and compares these forecasts with case study evidence of the experience of word processing and with evidence from other studies. The paper shows how the introduction of word processing technologies has in fact been responsible for very little change in the content and structure of women's office jobs. It identifies continuities in the characteristics of both secretarial and typing jobs, and suggests that theories of the deskilling of office workers tend to over-romanticise their former position. It also argues that the origins of present day word processing can be identified in previous rounds of technology, which in their turn are reflections of principles of organising office work which long predate microelectronic technologies and which are actually features of management practices and uses of labour within particular sectors, geographical areas and local economies. The paper concludes that it is these principles, rather than the use of automation, which have critically shaped the office labour processes which predominate today.