The Digital Hand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Manufacturing, Transportation, and Retail Industries (review)

The Digital Hand is an ambitious book with a laudable goal—to explore the influence of digital computing on three sets of industries. Cortada starts from an assumption with which I very much agree—that computers do not have any influence on the economy independent of their use. Most historical treatments of computers focus on the supply side—inventors and vendors of computers. Cortada focuses instead on the demand side—the commercial users of computers and other digital technologies. He also argues that to understand this demand side, we must look at patterns at the level of the industry, not just that of the economy. This book is the first of a projected three-book series, each dealing with different groups of industries. Here, Cortada covers manufacturing, transportation, and retailing, cataloging computer applications used by several specific industries within each sector. This sweeping book will be essential background for historians working in this area for quite a while. Still, it suffers from a range of problems that makes it less effective than it might have been.

In this book, as in his earlier book Before the Computer (Princeton, N.J., 1993), Cortada performs a valuable service in beginning to map this woefully underexplored terrain. He catalogs many business applications, sequenced by the order in which most firms in an industry adopted them. He demonstrates, for example, that industries often differ in both when they adopted digital applications and which applications they adopted. Indeed, some applications were designed with and for particular user industries. Perhaps most fascinating in this regard is the story of the Universal Product Code (UPC), or bar code. Grocers, through their trade associations, spearheaded its development, and then as suppliers gradually adopted the bar codes, grocers adopted the Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals necessary to take advantage of them, with other retail businesses such as apparel ultimately following suit. Cortada also shows that different specific applications adopted by members of all three sectors traced in this book converged by the 1990s to provide integrated supply chain management, which he refers to as the "killer app" of the second half of the twentieth century (p. 356). By linking the manufacturing, transportation, and retail industries over the past few decades, he argues, supply chain management has gradually shifted power from manufacturers to consumers.

Although the book's purpose is laudable, it also suffers from problems that limit its usefulness and appeal. One such issue is a tendency to overstate his position and to contradict himself. The title, The Digital Hand, is intended to evoke a sequence beginning with Adam Smith's invisible hand, going through Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s Visible Hand (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), and culminating in his own Digital Hand (e.g., pp. viii, 361). This juxtaposition suggests that computers and other digital technology today play a role comparable to that of the invisible hand of the market and the visible hand of management. Yet, as Cortada himself acknowledges in the preface, "I recognize that the title may be overstating the influence of computers since they did not replace preexisting mechanisms in the economy, such as management" (p. viii). Although at some points he notes that computers are just tools that managers use for their business ends, at others he argues a more deterministic line. In the conclusion, he sums up as follows: "The short answer to the question, did a digital hand exist, is yes" (p. 357). A few pages later, however, he acknowledges that the digital hand did not change the business purposes followed by managers—just their capabilities. A more modest (and consistent) claim might have strengthened the book.

The book also suffers from too little detail in some areas and too much in others. Accounting applications, for example, were apparently adopted by most of the industries studied here; unfortunately for the completeness of his map, however...