During the 1980s and 1990s, the adoption of personal computers and the Internet changed both the practice of business and how people understood it. A range of historical actors—from politicians to business leaders, from economists to journalists—put forward new visions of economies, organizational forms, and work, for households and for small and large businesses alike. They imagined a world that was less bureaucratic, hierarchical, and unequal; and more entrepreneurial, expressive, and free. The three papers in this panel explore this critical ideological and cultural development in recent business history, sitting at the intersection of technology, labor, and the history of ideas.
Benjamin Waterhouse will discuss the ideal of self-employment since the 1970s, to explore how the Internet built on and exacerbated myth-making around independent business ownership in the 1990s. Erica Robles-Anderson will tell a story about business accounting software in the 1980s. Through the case of TurboTax and Intuit, she analyzed software history through the lens of Reagan era tax reforms to make the case for attending to the material culture of personal computing as part of a move to reimagine the interface between small businesses and home businesses, and the administrative state. Lee Vinsel will examine the question, "What was the New Economy?", to look at how economist Robert Reich, Vice President Al Gore, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and others experienced the economy, technology, business changes of the 1990s and charted a course for their future.
Finally, we believe that JoAnne Yates will make an ideal chair and commentator because she has been studying how organizations adopt computers and other information technologies since the 1980s, both as a historian and as a scholar of organizational studies.