Exploitation quotes

From Motley Bytes Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Edsger_Wybe_Dijkstra

Powers of Abstraction

“The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.”
  • Source: The Humble Programmer (1972), 1972 Turing Award Lecture[1], Communications of the ACM 15 (10), October 1972: pp. 859–866.

Frederick_Winslow_Taylor

Workman Soldiering

“After a workman has had the price per piece of the work he is doing lowered two or three times as a result of his having worked harder and increased his output, he is likely to entirely lose sight of his employer's side of the case and to become imbued with a grim determination to have no more cuts if soldiering can prevent it.”
  • Source: F.W. Taylor (1903) "Shop management; a paper read before the American society of mechanical engineers, " in: Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 24: 1337-1480. p. 1352.

Shoshana_Zuboff

Technology Leadership

“The questions that we face today are finally about leadership. Will there be leaders who are able to recognize the historical moment and the choices it presents? Will they find ways to create the organizational conditions in which new visions, new concepts, and a new language of workplace relations can emerge? Will they be able to create organizational innovations that can exploit the unique capacities of the new technology and thus mobilize their organization's productive potential to meet the heightened rigors of global competition? Will there be leaders who understand the crucial role that human beings from each organizational stratum can play in adding value to the production of goods and services? If not, we will be stranded in a new world with old solutions. We will suffer through the unintended consequences of change, because we have failed to understand this technology and how it differs from what came before.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 12. ISBN:0465032125.

Share the Fruits

“Taylor believed it was necessary to share the fruits of such productivity increases and saw the differential piece-rate system, a central tenet of scientific management, as a method of uniting workers and managers in a bond of common interest. But incentive wages are devilishly hard to administer, and all too often, managers attracted to differential wage schemes succumbed to shortcuts that promised fast gains. Managers would frequently change piece rates as workers learned to meet the standards. This led to the complaints of overwork with which unions relentlessly dogged proponents of Taylorism. Scientific management frequently meant not only that individual effort was simplified (either because of labor-saving equipment or new organizational methods that fragmented tasks into their simplest components), but also that the pace of effort was intensified, thus raising the level of fatigue and stress.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 45. ISBN:0465032125.

Education

“The cognitive demands of intellective skill suggest that computerization should be accompanied by a serious educational effort, if the information capacity of the technology is to be exploited.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 217. ISBN:0465032125.

Informating Innovation

“If the informating process is to be exploited for its competitive opportunities, then widely distributed mastery over the new intellective grounds of knowledge becomes an acute demand. For this to occur, organizational innovation is required.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 217. ISBN:0465032125.

Information and Automating

“To the extent that technology is used only to intensify the automaticity of work, it can reduce skill levels and dampen the urge toward more participatory and decentralized forms of management... However, this approach cannot exploit the unique power of an informating technology. In contrast, an approach to technology deployment that emphasizes its informating capacity uses technology to do far more than routinize, fragment, or eliminate jobs. It uses the new technology to increase the intellectual content of work at virtually every organizational level, as the ability to decipher explicit information and make decisions informed by that understanding becomes broadly distributed among organizational members.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 243. ISBN:0465032125.

The Panopticon

“The Panopticon was an architectural innovation developed by the moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In Foucault's view, it is both a sign of and metaphor for this new disciplinary society. Bentham extolled the Panopticon as a technological triumph capable of exploiting the productive potential of those who had flouted, thwarted, or otherwise escaped social authority. His initial targets were convicts and paupers, though he did not fail to see the potential usefulness of the Panopticon for students, asylum inmates, and workers. The architectural plan conceived by Bentham was first constructed by his brother Samuel, an engineer, in 1787 for a factory at Critchef in Russia. It was later adapted to the problems of housing convicts and paupers. The structure consisted of a twelve-sided polygon formed in iron and sheathed in glass in order to create the effect of what Bentham called 'universal transparency.' A central tower, pierced with wide windows, opened onto the inner wall of the surrounding polygonal structure, which itself was divided into narrow cells extending across the width of the building. Each cell had a window on both the inner and outer walls, allowing light to cross it and illuminate all the inhabitants to an observer in the central tower, while that observer could not be seen from any one of the cells. Mirrors were fixed around the tower to direct extra light into these apartments.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 320. ISBN:0465032125.