Abstract
In their bold, provocative paper, “Software as Labor Process,” Nathan Ensmenger and William Aspray examine the history of software production through the lens of labor history. They do so to make sense of the ever-present “software crisis” that has attended society almost from the outset of the electronic digital computer. They do so employing principally the framework of the now-OLD “new labor history”—i.e., “labor process” study in which what takes place “on the shop floor” becomes central and how struggle for control of the shop floor takes priority over other parts of the story such as the union organizing campaigns and politics of the old labor history. Their deployment of the old new labor history in writing the history of software distinguishes this paper as a pioneering effort, though like most pioneering enterprises, it is not without problems. Ensmenger and Aspray also employ some of the framework of the NEW “new labor history” in which attention is focused on how matters of gender and race, not just class, play out on the shop floor. Here, again, their effort is bold but not without problems. In what follows, I critique this paper by addressing the paper’s discussion of early software workers, the relevance of the deskilling framework for software history, and the relevance of the NEW new labor history for software history. I will conclude by suggesting what the labor history of software should include were one to be executed fully.
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References
The eighteenth-century British engineer John Smeaton coined the term “civil engineering” to distinguish the activities he and a growing number of engineers in England were engaged in (building roads, canals, bridges, lighthouses, harbor facilities, etc.) from military engineering. Later, as new areas of civil engineering activity opened up, such as machine design (“mechanical engineering”) and laying out electric light and power systems (electrical engineering), “civil engineering” took on its present-day connotations.
Daniel Hovey Calhoun, The American Civil Engineer: Origins and Conflict (Boston, 1960).
Monte A. Calvert, The Mechanical Engineer in America, 1830–1910 (Baltimore, 1967);
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David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977);
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Layton’s bibliographic essay identifies some of the pre-1970 landmarks in the literature; see Layton, 259–63. See also Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976);
Andrew D. Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988);
and Michael Burrage and Rolf Torstendahl, eds., Professions in Theory and History: Rethinking the Study of the Professions (London, 1990).
Ensmenger and Aspray briefly treat attempts at certification in their paper. Most recently, in response to the “software crisis” and as part of its attempt to overcome this problem, the United States Department of Defense (DoD), through the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, has mandated that firms producing software for DoD become certified within what SEI has developed as the Capabilities Maturity Model. Although the Capabilities Maturity Model seeks to certify firms in the production of software, it has the effect of pushing elements of certification down to the level of individual programmers.
Layton, Revolt of the Engineers, deals with this issue quite thoroughly.
On the history of dual ladders within R&D organizations, see David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D, 1902–1980 (New York, 1988), 371–2.
On Developers at Microsoft, see Michael A. Cusumano and Richard W. Selby, Microsoft Secrets: How the World’s Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets, and Manages People (New York, 1998).
Philip Kraft, Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States (New York, 1977).
Philip Kraft, “The Development of Planning: Class and State in India,” Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1971. The quotation appears in Kraft, Programmers and Managers, vii.
Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N.Y., 1969)
and Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (Garden City, N.Y., 1972);
Ida R. Hoos, Systems Analysis in Public Policy: A Critique (Berkeley, 1972). Interestingly, Langdon Winner saw Boguslaw as a Taylor-like technocrat and The New Utopians as a “panegyric” for systems analysis “Although under the guise of warning the public about the possible dangers of such people.”
Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, 1977), 143.
The quotation appears in Robert Boguslaw, “Foreword to Kraft”, Programmers and Managers, v.
Ibid.
Kraft discusses the separation of head and hand in his first chapter in a section entitled “Programmers as Engineers,” 18–22.
Capers Jones, ed., Tutorial, Programming Productivity: Issues for the Eighties (Los Angeles, 1981). See Endres’s 1975 paper, “An Analysis of Errors and Their Causes in Systems Programs,” in ibid., 86–95.
In the discussion following the oral delivery of my remarks at the Paderborn Conference, Michael S. Mahoney, a scholar who has been thinking and writing deeply on the history of software, offered what he believes is the best candidate for the “Taylor of software”: Robert W. Bemer, “Position Paper for [the] Panel Discussion [on] the Economics of Program Production,” Information Processing 68, vol. II (Amsterdam, 1969), 1626–27. Bemer was employed at the time by the General Electric Company. Mahoney’s nomination seems sound to me, and he is working on a paper that will show more clearly the parallels between Bemer’s thinking and that of Taylor.
Bernadette Mary Tarallo, “The Production of Information: An Examination of the Employment Relations of Software Engineers and Computer Programmers,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 1987.
Nathan David Ainspan, “‘The Geek Shall Inherit’ or Leave the Money and Run? Role Identities and Turnover Decisions among Software Programmers and the High-Technology Employees,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1999. Obviously, the title of my comment derives inspiration from the title of this dissertation.
Jennifer Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40 (July 1999): 455–83.
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Hounshell, D.A. (2002). Are Programmers Oppressed by Monopoly Capital, or Shall the Geeks Inherit the Earth? Commentary on Nathan Ensmenger & William Aspray, “Software as Labor Process”. In: Hashagen, U., Keil-Slawik, R., Norberg, A.L. (eds) History of Computing: Software Issues. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04954-9_13
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