Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
and tend to regard computer people either as mere technicians or as
threats to their position and status—in either case they resist their pres-
ence in the halls of power.”
81
In that same year, Michael Rose, in his
Computers, Managers, and Society
, suggested that local departmental
managers
obviously tend to resist the change. For a start, it threatens to transform the
concern as they know and like it. . . . At the same time the local's unfamiliarity
with and suspicion of theoretical notions leave him ill-equipped to appreciate
the rationale and benefi ts of computerization. It all sounds like dangerously
far-fetched nonsense divorced from the working world as he understands it.
He is hardly likely to hit it off with the computer experts who arrive to
procure the organizational transformation. Genuine skepticism of the relevance
of the machine, reinforced by emotional factors, will drive him towards
non-cooperation.
82
It is not diffi cult to understand why many managers came to fear and
dislike computer programmers and other software specialists. In addition
to the usual suspicion with which established professionals generally
regarded unsolicited changes in the status quo, managers had particular
reasons to resent EDP departments. The unprecedented degree of auton-
omy that corporate executives granted to computer people seemed a
deliberate affront to the local authority of departmental managers. The
“inability or unwillingness of top management to clearly defi ne the objec-
tives of the computer department and how it will be utilized to the benefi t
of the rest of the organization” lead many operational managers to
“expect the worst and, therefore, begin to react defensively to the possi-
bility of change”
83
In the eyes of many nontechnical managers, the per-
sonnel most closely identifi ed with the digital computer “have been the
most arrogant in their willful disregard of the nature of the manager's
job. These technicians have clothed themselves in the garb of the arcane
wherever they could do so, thus alienating those whom they would
serve.”
84
The Revolt of the Managers
In response to this perceived challenge to their authority, managers
developed a number of interrelated responses intended to restore them
to their proper role in the organizational hierarchy.
The fi rst was to defi ne programming as an activity, and by defi nition
programmers as professionals, in such a way as to assign it and them a
subordinate role as mere technicians or service staff workers. As
the sociologists Haroun Jamous and Bernard Peloille argued in their
