Reading :: Control through Communication

Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management
By JoAnne Yates 

I read this 1989 book in grad school and still go back to it sometimes. Recently I returned to it again on advice of an anonymous reviewer of a manuscript I had submitted. It's an excellent book and well worth reading, and I'll only touch the surface of it in this brief review.

In a nutshell, Yates examines the revolution in managerial communications between 1850-1920, examining primarily the archives of the Illinois Central Railroad, Scovill Manufacturing Company, and DuPont. 

The book falls into two parts.

In the first part (Ch.1-3), Yates takes a broad view of the era, examining the rise and development of managerial methods and the need for internal communications (Ch.1), the emerging communication technologies that enabled a rise in internal communication (Ch.2), and the explosion of internal communication genres (Ch.3). Importantly, these innovations (technologies, genres) did not stay inside corporations, but made their way to other parts of our lives.

In the second part (Ch.4-8), Yates conducts closer analyses of the three organizations whose archives she studied. These chapters provide necessary detail, but frankly did not hold my attention as well.

In my first read-through in graduate school, I was mainly focused on Chapters 2-3. (For what it's worth, I think this book exerted a stronger influence on my grad school office mate Mark Zachry, who went on to write his dissertation based on the archives of a meatpacking company.) Reading through it again, I focused on those same chapters again, this time with a couple of decades of theory and research to help me understand them. Predictably, I now see new connections: to genre assemblages, to cultural heritage as represented in genres, to Latour's archival research. 

The book is still about 1850-1920, but as we undergo new changes in how we communicate at work, it seems more relevant than ever. I can imagine it being a blueprint for some doctoral student, writing in 2035, examining the profound shifts we have undergone from the introduction of the IBM PC in 1980 to the present. 

If you're interested in workplace communication, and especially in how technologies and genres change how we understand our work and ourselves, definitely pick this book up.