The Impact of National Characteristics & Technology on the Commodity Composition of Trade in Manufactured Goods

Organization of any kind, from prehistorichunting societies to companies working through theworldwide web, operate with a distribution of influenceand power among their members. This distribution of influence has consequences at three levels: forthe people working in the organization, for theorganization itself, and, from time to time, for membersof society outside the organization. A series of action- and policy-oriented projects on thedistribution of influence were developed by or incollaboration with the Centre for Decision MakingStudies of The Tavistock Institute over a quarter of acentury. They started with a seven-country comparativeresearch on top management decision making, followed bytwo 12-country studies on Industrial Democracy and a5-year longitudinal program in seven companies in three countries. These and two longitudinalprojects in Britian, one on a motor car manufacturer andthe other on an airport, used a similar conceptualframework. The article draws on the evidence from this program of work, describes the evolvingtheoretical model and concludes that organizationalinfluence sharing appears to have made only limitedprogress during the last 50 years. Four explanations are put forward: overidealistic expectations;a tendency to ignore the need for certain necessaryantecedents, like competence; a tendency to act as ifinfluence sharing is not subject to contingencies like the nature of tasks; and probably mostimportantly, the almost universal tendency to designinfluence sharing measures through uncoordinatedmechanistic social engineering.

Influence at Work: A 25-Year Program of Research

In November 1981, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed 1982 as "Information Technology Year, IT-82." Her government aimed to reinvigorate the country's electronics industry to keep it from falling farther behind the United States and Japan in the booming markets of microelectronics, computers, and telecommunications. To celebrate IT-82, the British government issued an IT stamp and commissioned an IT play and an IT ballet. In writing about these events, science journalist John Lamb attributed the concept of an "information society" to American mathematician Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics. Lamb claimed that the phrase information technology was "coined only about two years ago."1 Lamb's attribution of the concept appears accurate: in Cybernetics (1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), Wiener had written about the coming of a "second industrial revolution" based on the processing of information in computerized, automated factories. Lamb was wrong about the coinage, however. The term information technology arose in management science in the United States in the 1960s, where it signified computer-based mathematical techniques designed to replace mid-level

Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Policy: The Emergence of "Information Technology" as a Keyword, 1948-1985

Social implications of computer/telecoms systems

T HE FOCUS HERE is on new or changing information technology. This is consistent with the social science research strategy of deviant case analysis or examining variance. In stable situations, the relevant variables are confounded; it is when things begin to change that we often get an insight into the function and significance of previously stable components. Changes in information technology can be examined either as a dependent variable of social science interest (what are the causal factors in our culture leading to changes in information technology?) or as an independent variable (what social effects follow from changes in information technology?). From the perspective of the larger society, examining the major social impacts or trends that follow from changes in information technology is most significant, although we ought not focus too narrowly on the media of traditional interest to mass communication research. Print and broadcast mass media are undergoing technological change, but the major social impact of changes in information technology is likely to follow from changes in computer information-processing or office copying machines. The greatest social impact is likely to follow from the media undergoing the greatest change. The key change that influences how widely new information technology diffuses through the society seems to be the reduction of the amount of matter-energy required to transmit or store information. Major reductions in the unit cost of the matter-energy component of information storage and transmission can lead to wide diffusion and major social impact. The computer information utility* is still some years away, but the unit costs of computer information processing are dropping faster than costs of conventional media and hence deserve careful examination (Sack

John Diebold

Papers

Is the Gap Technological

Business, Government and Science: The Need for a Fresh Look

Computers, Program Management and Foreign Affairs