Papers presented by Ella Coon since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"The Struggle to Bring a Global Assembly Model to Computer Services: Control Data Corporation and Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative "

Abstract:

This paper looks at Control Data Corporation’s attempt to export a global assembly business model to the budding computer services industry in Jamaica during the early 1980s. This investment occurred in conjunction with Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative—a kind of post-NIEO, proto-NAFTA developmental program for Caribbean centered on regional preferential trade privileges. The paper explores how Control Data’s investment in Jamaica was pulled by conflicting objectives: currying favor with Reagan administration in light of an increase in Defense allocations; the geopolitical goals of Reagan’s “Second” Cold War; Prime Minister Edward Seaga’s own political-economic program for Jamaica in the wake of Structural Adjustment; and, finally, the economics of computer services, in particular data entry. Unlike subassembly and assembly work in computer hardware, the labor requirements in computers services were (and are) such that revenue couldn’t (and can’t) increase faster than costs. This economic challenge stood in contrast to the company’s assembly line in computer hardware, which facilitated economies of scale and low-wages. To counterbalance these limitations, Control Data management pursued a dual-objective to computerize Jamaica’s financial services industry. For context, Control Data—the smaller Midwestern rival of IBM—produced some of the fastest and most powerful mainframes in the twentieth century, was a major player in computer services, and became the world’s foremost producer of computer peripherals—disk packs, card readers, terminals, and printers—in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. The firm’s multi-billion-dollar business in computer hardware—a global assembly line—reached across research facilities in the Minneapolis suburbs to manufacturing operations in urban neighborhoods of the Midwest and Rust Belt, eastern Kentucky, Mexico, Portugal, South Korea, the Eastern Bloc, among others.

Keywords:

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

"The Struggle to Bring a Global Assembly Model to Computer Services: Control Data Corporation and Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative "

Abstract:

This paper looks at Control Data Corporation’s attempt to export a global assembly business model to the budding computer services industry in Jamaica during the early 1980s. This investment occurred in conjunction with Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative—a kind of post-NIEO, proto-NAFTA developmental program for Caribbean centered on regional preferential trade privileges. The paper explores how Control Data’s investment in Jamaica was pulled by conflicting objectives: currying favor with Reagan administration in light of an increase in Defense allocations; the geopolitical goals of Reagan’s “Second” Cold War; Prime Minister Edward Seaga’s own political-economic program for Jamaica in the wake of Structural Adjustment; and, finally, the economics of computer services, in particular data entry. Unlike subassembly and assembly work in computer hardware, the labor requirements in computers services were (and are) such that revenue couldn’t (and can’t) increase faster than costs. This economic challenge stood in contrast to the company’s assembly line in computer hardware, which facilitated economies of scale and low-wages. To counterbalance these limitations, Control Data management pursued a dual-objective to computerize Jamaica’s financial services industry. For context, Control Data—the smaller Midwestern rival of IBM—produced some of the fastest and most powerful mainframes in the twentieth century, was a major player in computer services, and became the world’s foremost producer of computer peripherals—disk packs, card readers, terminals, and printers—in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. The firm’s multi-billion-dollar business in computer hardware—a global assembly line—reached across research facilities in the Minneapolis suburbs to manufacturing operations in urban neighborhoods of the Midwest and Rust Belt, eastern Kentucky, Mexico, Portugal, South Korea, the Eastern Bloc, among others.

Keywords:

2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

"Hardliners and High Technology: Conflicts over the Globalization of Computer Technology in the Communist World"

Abstract:

This paper looks at the political economy of technology transfers between the US-based supercomputer firm, Control Data Corporation (CDC), and Central and Eastern Europe during détente. CDC was the preeminent producer of supercomputers in the 1970s. The firm also had a large market in computer peripherals (e.g. disk packs and printers), technologies which had strategic applications. Combining business history, diplomatic history, and legal history, the study traces the firm’s export of computer peripherals to Central and Eastern Europe, highlighting how these transfers worked with and against various states interests in light of the heightened Cold War context. This project in balancing interests demonstrates the firm’s geopolitical clout, providing a necessary counterpoint to literature in the social sciences that frames multinational firms a either stateless or an arm of the state. Moreover, the study illustrates how the firm’s efforts to (what we would now call) ‘globalize’ production exacerbated tensions with the US Defense establishment in the 1970s. In 1976, the US Defense Department released the Bucy Report, a study calling for the restriction of intellectual property to the Communist world for potentially strategic technologies on national security grounds. This suggestion, which led to a series of debates between the federal agency and the firm at the Pentagon, cut against CDC’s commercial project in Central and Eastern Europe, as the corporation was using licensing agreements to export their designs. This research considers collaboration in that it explicates how a firm worked with and against interested parties and communities (e.g. ministries, agencies, and research centers) across ideological, political, and economic boundaries, establishing an early, global supply chain. Moreover, the study demonstrate how this collaboration was ultimately shaped by power, domination, and accumulation.

Keywords: