Cognitive Foundations of Work: The Workplace as Information

Abstract

The idea that computer-based technology profoundly affects the constitution of contemporary work along cognitive lines must be attributed to Zuboff (1988). She was the first to suggest in a systematic and comprehensive fashion that the diffusion and organizational embeddedness of computer technology tends to transform the physical and social nature of work to an extended encounter with data items of various kinds. In this process, information becomes the predominant medium whereby social and material relations in the workplace are mediated, comprehended and acted upon. A huge and growing electronic text (verbal descriptions, codes and indices, numerical or other relations) engulfs work operations and the social encounters that develop around them. In her own terms, the growing involvement of computer-based technologies textualizes social and material relations and thus radically transforms the tangible and social character of work. Several other authors have over the years also delivered scattered observations regarding the cognitive significance of information in restructuring perceptual and action habits at work.¹ However, the theme of the comprehensive cognitive reconstitution of work has still not been pursued systematically. Much cited as it is,² Zuboff’s work remains, more than two decades after its publication, largely without a companion.