Dissertation Award: Post-Industrial Engineering: Computer Science and the Organization of Work, 1950-1975

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This dissertation research, supported by the Science, Technology, and Society Program at NSF, investigates the relationship of computer development to management theory in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. The goal of the interview and archival research is to examine how the designs of early artificial intelligence machines, such as Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver at Carnegie Mellon, and of interactive, time-shared computing systems, such as Project MAC at MIT, were part of contemporary efforts to redefine the roles of clerical workers and middle management. These research programs involved major figures who contributed both to management theory and to computer engineering, such as Herbert Simon, Jay Forrester, and J. C. R. Licklider. This dissertation therefore seeks out the connections between technical research and analyses of industrial management in the Cold War years, examining how computer design was a site for conflict among competing social ideals.The archival work supported by this grant will be carried out at Carnegie Mellon University, where innovations in computation in the Graduate School of Industrial Administration were part of a larger project of creating a scientific basis for management theory; and at the Charles Babbage Institute in Minneapolis, a major repository for diverse collections from the information processing industry. Oral history interviews will be carried out with several prominent computer scientists and social theorists from the period.By considering social thought and technology as fundamentally intertwined, the research supported by this grant reframes the development of interactive computing from being primarily a story of mathematical logic to one of organizational theory. As modern information technology creates new spaces for economic and political engagement and new forms of social organization, this project helps create a theoretical framework and a historical context for understanding how expanding access to technology can be related to evolving social ideals.