Abstract

"Wired for Profit: Computer Infrastructure and the Financial Vision of the Firm, 1950-1970"

Devin Kennedy, University of Wisconsin, Madison (dbkennedy@wisc.edu)

In the second half of the 1950s, large, diversified manufacturing businesses were among the earliest adopters of computer technology. Beyond the automation of clerical work, businesses like the electric products manufacturer Sylvania saw in computing technology a means to consolidate control over a geographically dispersed and organizationally decentralized firm by tethering the new machines to long-distance data processing networks. With this computer infrastructure, a suburban Syracuse data center could become the information hub for an entire company, consolidating, via “electronic arms,” information from far-flung sales offices, warehouses, and factories.

This presentation, a chapter from a forthcoming book on computer technology in the history of postwar capitalism, examines the role of long-distance tele-data processing in the management of large businesses in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on computer and peripheral sales material, business records, and management literature, I show how centralized information technology responded to issues in the management of large, multidivisional business in the era and, more broadly, supported new ways of thinking about the firm. In particular, I argue that computer based information technology played an important role in the emerging “financial conception” of management control described by Fligstein (1990), providing an infrastructure for gathering facts about autonomous business units and enabling their analysis and comparison through financial metrics.