Abstract

"Reinventing Automation: The Past, Present, and Future of a Concept"

Salem Elzway, University of Michigan (salem.elzway@gmail.com)

In its inaugural issue (March 2000), Enterprise & Society took up the issue of automation and “flexible manufacturing” in the post-WWII American, British, and Japanese auto industries. The collected articles provided a foundation for understanding the evolution of automation in the ‘Chandlerian synthesis’ tradition and, as issue editor Jonathan Zeitlin described them, “​​these essays represent a fresh and insightful comparative overview of the shifting relationship and complex trade-offs between the advance of productivity through mechanical automation and the pursuit of manufacturing flexibility in the international motor vehicle industry during the ‘age of Fordism.’” The authors, however, neither defined “automation” nor explored the concept in any sense outside of its technical and organizational manifestations. Automation, rather than a contingent and socially-rhizomatic process that requires historicization, was a given. Inside and outside of business history, this intellectual approach remains dominant. Nonetheless, corporations and the broader business community played critical roles in shaping the discourse of automation as well as exercising their economic and sociopolitical power to construct a world conducive to it. This paper, therefore, will argue that the concept and its analytical affordances need to be reinvented for the twenty-first century. Building off the work of Amy Sue Bix and David Noble, and riding a wave of new scholarship that takes a much more capacious and interdisciplinary approach to the study of automation, the paper will first provide a brief overview of the concept’s emergence and evolution from the mid-century United States to its present day imaginaries of a fully-automated future; second, sticking with the automotive industry, it will sketch out a spatial and temporal map of the actors, institutions, and structures—a practice I (pretentiously) call diachronic cartography—that drove (pun intended) automation. And third, it will offer a handful of approaches and questions to help navigate automation’s past, present, and future.