Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century (review)

With millions of policies to track and a vast assortment of demographic data to process, insurance companies are among the most intensive business users of information. JoAnne Yates explores their adoption of information technology, mostly mainframe computers and accompanying database software, from the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1970s. In great detail she describes how firms made decisions, highlighting the interaction between producers of technology, notably IBM, and these technology users.

While decisions to adopt information technology (IT) reflected basic economic criteria, such as the growing costs of storing policies, processing claims, and billing clients, insurance firms also responded to their political environment. Lambasted in the Armstrong Hearings in 1905 for their high profits and questionable service to the public, they saw technology as a way to professionalize through the institution of set procedures of systematic management. Individual company leaders and emerging IT departments within firms played important roles in the decision-making process, as did bodies responsible for setting standards and trade and professional associations. But for historians of technology, the biggest contribution here is Yates's careful reconsideration of the process of technology adoption.

Contrary to enthusiasts who view every new bit of electronic hardware as the harbinger of a social revolution, Yates shows that insurance firms adopted computers and related products slowly and incrementally. They feared being locked into obsolete systems and worked with producers to design technologies that met their needs. In this regard, she finds in an earlier era what economists had puzzled over in the 1980s and 1990s: despite massive spending on computers and related office equipment, it took firms quite a while to shift their internal mechanisms and structures to take full advantage of new technology so that the investment showed up in improved productivity figures.

Although historians of business and technology have placed emphasis on "user–producer" interactions for some time, Yates breaks new ground in two ways. First, by concentrating on businesses as users, she questions the often implicit assumption that businesses are producers and ordinary citizens the consumers of technology. In this, she challenges the soft romanticism of consumption-oriented studies, which frequently code users or consumers as agents resisting the designs of producers and adapting technology to their own purposes. If, as Yates proposes, some of the most important user–producer interactions take place between large firms, then notions of consumer agency as resistance will have to be modified. Insurance firms and computer manufacturers may not have had identical interests, but the process described in this book is more collaborative than conflicting.

Yates's second contribution is to move beyond the consumption junction. Although important things happen at the point of purchase, the long, slow, and incremental process whereby insurance companies adopted information technology speaks not just to consumption but also to technology in use. Some historians have followed the use of technologies such as telephones and electricity over time. Less common are studies of how business firms use and adapt technology to fit their needs and to discover new opportunities that they had not recognized before. Insurance firms with legacy databases that must be maintained for decades may be somewhat special in this regard. Their interaction with purveyors of information products is ongoing. But it might be worth taking a similar approach to other firms in other industries to gain perspective on how technology actually makes its way into business and economic processes, rather than assuming that "investment" is simply the purchasing of new hardware.

Fans of Yates's earlier work on pre-electronic office technology will not be disappointed in this book. It has the same painstaking attention to detail and grounding of high theoretical concepts, such as Anthony Giddens's notion of structuration, in rich historical case studies. There may be a bit...