A sobering, important book.
A dark, revealing view of computerized control and monitoring of the workplace.
Head (Senior Fellow/Institute for Public Knowledge, New York Univ.; The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age, 2003) argues that Computer Business Systems—computerized management programs that Amazon and other large organizations use to measure everything that happens in factories, warehouses and depots—are turning workers into “digital chain gang” members who work harder and earn less. Once limited to tracking blue-collar productivity, CBSs now engulf much of the white-collar world, where they control the complex work of physicians, teachers and others in the professional and administrative middle class. By combining scientific management with IT systems, writes Head, they are recreating the “harsh, driven capitalism of the pre-New Deal era.” The author describes the hidden world of CBSs in several outstanding case studies. Walmart, for instance, achieves spectacular results with a targeting and monitoring system that tells employees what to do, how long they have to do it and whether they have met target times. Similarly, Amazon drives employee productivity while keeping a lid on low wages. At Goldman Sachs, such systems were a critical factor in manipulating subprime mortgages, a major component of the 2008 economic crisis. Other organizations using networked computers with monitoring software attached include Toyota, FedEx, UPS and Dell, as well as the military and academia, where scholars’ research outputs are measured and targeted. To a degree undreamed of in the past, the computerized systems are now monitoring nuanced human interactions in health care, financial services, human resources and customer relations. While this simplifies and accelerates processes like tracking loans and managing hospitals, it also has the effect of deskilling labor, diminishing its role and weakening its earning power.
A sobering, important book.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-01844-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
A suspenseful, user-friendly account of Microsoft's five-year effort to develop Windows NT (for new technology). Wall Street Journal correspondent Zachary delineates the blood, toil, tears, and sweat required to produce a breakthrough operating system that would not only work on all available personal computers but also allow customers to retain familiar applications programs. Throughout his accessible text, Zachary tries to keep readers in the loop. He provides illuminating reminders of how operating systems (which control a processor's basic functions) differ from applications software (the visible programs that retrieve information, maintain databases, prepare documents for printing, and otherwise satisfy human needs). While NT, which reached the marketplace last summer, has yet to achieve critical sales mass, the author leaves little doubt that the $150 million project yielded its creator a host of payoffs: by advancing the state of the networking art, defining the shape of software to come, and giving Microsoft (which last month settled potentially troublesome antitrust charges) an inside track on the interactive information highway. The bulk of the narrative is devoted to anecdotal reportage on how a consequential enterprise managed to harness its varied, volatile, very human resources (many of whom had become independently wealthy by cashing in options on the company's common stock) and meet the self-imposed schedule for NT's introduction. Covered as well are the time and technical tradeoffs made in the course of an undertaking whose final features included more compromises than indisputably correct answers. Nor does the author ignore the human costs of economic and scientific success in his reckoning of the NT balance sheet. An engrossing and instructive case history of programming under fire on the front lines of software technology. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-935671-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lively writing and colorful anecdotes enhance this insightful look at an unexpected side of agriculture.
We’ve cultivated plants since the dawn of time; but all along, the plants have been cultivating us as well.
Pollan (A Place of My Own, 1997) uses four plant species to support his thesis: apples, tulips, cannabis, and potatoes. Each, by offering some quality that we humans find valuable, has managed to propagate itself throughout the world. In the process, each has generated more than its share of fascinating lore. Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) has become an icon of early American enterprise, creating orchards out of untamed forest. But the apples Chapman planted were meant not for eating, but for cider, the ubiquitous tipple of early America. Only when temperance began to give the apple a bad name did orchardmen switch to the sweet varieties for eating. The tulip boom in early 18th-century Holland saw prize bulbs selling for the price of a fashionable house in Amsterdam. Now, ironically, the plant that commands high prices in Amsterdam is marijuana, over the last few decades the focus of some of the most intense research in the botanical sciences (most of it conducted indoors, away from official eyes). The humble potato, for its part, has come a long way since its origins as an Andean weed: The russet Burbank, for example, which yields perfect fries for the fast-food trade, dominates the US market almost to the exclusion of all other taters, and its cultivation depends heavily on chemicals nastier than anything the cannabis bud secretes. Pollan keeps the reader aware of how the plants induce us to spread their genetic material to new environments—and how the preservation of natural variability is a key to keeping them (and us) healthy.
Lively writing and colorful anecdotes enhance this insightful look at an unexpected side of agriculture.Pub Date: May 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50129-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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