On the Fantasies of Control Associated with the New Technologies
For many organizations, digitalization seems to promise salvation. Digitalization, they hope, will produce enormous increases in efficiency. Radically new forms of cooperation within and between organizations will emerge, leading to significant surges in innovation. There is talk of digitalization making possible a ‘mathematization’ that will bring about fundamentally new forms of organization.
How realistic are these ideas? Will the business of the future be run by bots, computer programmes that perform all routinized tasks? Will these bots converse with each other, experiencing any human intervention as mere disturbance? Will electronic copies of the human brain be able, ultimately, to communicate well enough with each other to assume responsibility even for political control?
At first blush, the basic effect of digitalization is the same as that of all other technologies: namely, it makes routine tasks and coordination easier. The introduction of the typewriter, for example, rendered rules for the size and shape of characters superfluous. The introduction of computer graphics meant that engineering students were relieved of the tedious process of learning the standards for the sizing and spacing of characters, because now the precise rules defining the shape and distance between the letters were taken care of by the computer. The introduction of computer software made it possible to represent formal rules and bureaucratic procedures that previously had been laid down in writing. Despite all the hype about artificial intelligence, digitalization is first and foremost a matter of the technical improvement of ‘if–then’ programmes – so-called conditional programmes – within organizations.
When we look more closely, we see that these technologies also create new needs for coordination. A highly automated production process, for instance, only works because of all the ingenuity that has gone into dealing with the potential pitfalls of automation. Anyone who has ever supported the introduction of standard software in a business, university, or any other organization will probably recall not so much the gains in efficiency it brought about but rather the extraordinary creativity, even rule-breaking, of employees ‘outwitting’ the software in order to make it work with sufficient flexibility.
Paradoxically, perhaps, the simplification of processes brought about by digitalization also creates a new complexity at a higher level. On the one hand, digitalization can relieve an organization of some of its burdens, but on the other hand the organization needs to deal with the new coordination problems that this relief creates. Elementary processes are simplified through digitalization, but at the same time digitalization creates the need for adaptations at a higher level, adjustments that have to be carried out by humans. More than three decades ago, the sociologist Lisanne Bainbridge already labelled this effect one of the ‘ironies of automation’.