Automation in the Social Office: Women’s Skills and New Technology

Abstract

This paper examines the location of skills, technical expertise and organisational knowledge, and particularly the value accorded to these skills by bosses and their secretaries in the non-automated office. It considers whether new office technologies, specifically word processing, have changed patterns of expertise, routinised office operations and so radically altered the social and power relations of yesterday's office. It concludes that, on the contrary, the character of the technological office is determined by the social relations that exist before the automation process - that structures of power and expertise condition the application of technology, rather than vice versa.