"Automation: The Past, Present, and Possible Futures of a Concept"

In its inaugural March 2000 issue, Enterprise & Society took up the topic 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—rather than a contingent and socially-rhizomatic process that requires historicization, the phenomenon was apparently self-explanatory. Frustratingly, this intellectual approach remains dominant, both inside and outside of business and labor history. To address this, the paper will provide a historical foundation for exploring ‘automation’ as not just a thing or process, but also as a concept and analytic. Building off classic work in the history of technology (such as 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 (such as Aaron Benanav and Jason Resnikoff), the paper will first provide a brief overview of the concept’s emergence from the mid-century United States to its present day imaginaries of a fully-automated future; second, it will sketch out a spatial and temporal map of the actors, institutions, and structures that shaped the evolution of automation; and third, it will offer a handful of approaches and questions to help historians and other scholars navigate automation’s past, present, and possible futures.