Innovative Junctions: Office Technologies in the Netherlands, 1880-1980

One striking aspect of the twentieth century is the rise of a number of organizationally and geographically distinct spaces--cities, factories, households, hospitals, harbors, supermarkets, airports, offices, to name some of them--as important sites for technology development. As the century progressed, the number of different technologies in simultaneous use in these spaces increased. This collocation of technologies encouraged various actors to develop mechanisms and arrangements by which they could coordinate the interaction of these technologies. Typically these actors also developed mediating technologies that facilitated and stimulated the interaction of different technologies.

A number of scholars have reflected on the management activities required to deal with the complex interactions of collocated technologies. Joel Tarr and Gabriel Dupuy have shown how, at the end of the nineteenth century, as the growth of Western cities spawned serious logistical challenges concerning energy and water supplies, waste handling, transportation, and communications, municipal bureaucrats responded by beginning to coordinate and plan the layout of urban areas. ¹ Lindy Biggs has presented a picture of a new kind of industrial engineer starting to systematically plan the physical design of factories and develop assembly lines and conveyors to handle the flow of materials between machines and work stations in the factory. ² In fact, the concepts of "urban technology" and "factory technology" gained currency by the increased collocation of technologies at specific sites. As the city and factory shaped technologies, so in turn did technologies shape the city and the factory.

In this article we analyze the collocation of technologies and the resultant patterns of development created in a specific site: the office. For this purpose we advance the concept of the "innovation junction," which we define as a space in which different sets of heterogeneous technologies are mobilized in support of social and economic activities and in which, as a result of their collocation, interactions and exchanges among these technologies occur. These interactions and exchanges lead to location-specific innovation patterns. The problems posed and opportunities offered by the collocation and interaction of different sets of technologies in bounded spaces create a need for coordination. This need is defined not only by users themselves (companies, managers, employees) but also by a new type of intermediate actor positioned between producers and users of technologies, working and reflecting on their interaction. Like the city and the factory, the office became the subject of intense analysis and intervention by these reflexive actors. Two forms of interaction among artifacts resulted as well: the combined use of two or more technologies and the extension of the functional characteristics of technologies, including the transfer of functional characteristics from one technology to another.

Innovation junctions are not exclusively twentieth-century phenomena; many factory and harbor technologies (to name only two possibilities) were applied concurrently in earlier eras. However, in the twentieth century innovation junctions became increasingly important to the development of technology and society. Their impact on twentieth-century society is comparable to that of large, geographically dispersed, infrastructural systems, such as electrical grids, communication networks, and transportation systems. ³ They led to the emergence of a new range of infrastructures, products, activities, services, and industries, and to new sets of user patterns and identities. However, innovation junctions differ in fundamental ways from the infrastructure-based systems that have been studied using the large technical systems perspective inspired by Thomas Hughes's classic Networks of Power. ⁴ Hughes's study offers a generalized model of the process of large system development, arguing that a number of characteristic phases in that development can be distinguished: invention, development and innovation, transfer, growth, and momentum. During each phase specific groups are foregrounded--engineers-entrepreneurs, manager-entrepreneurs, and finally financier-entrepreneurs--to produce solutions to the problems encountered in building the system. In addition, in Hughes's model...