Structuring The Information Age

Structuring the Information Age

Structuring the Information Age provides insight into the largely unexplored evolution of information processing in the commercial sector and the underrated influence of corporate users in shaping the history of modern technology. JoAnne Yates examines how life insurance firms—where good record-keeping and repeated use of massive amounts of data were crucial—adopted and shaped information processing technology through most of the twentieth century. The book analyzes this process beginning with tabulating technology, the most immediate predecessor of the computer, and continuing through the 1970s with early computers. Yates elaborates two major themes: the reciprocal influence of information technology and its use, and the influence of past practices on the adoption and use of new technologies. In the 1950s, insurance industry leaders recognized that computers would enable them to integrate processes previously handled separately, but they also understood that they would have to change their ways of working profoundly to achieve this integration. When it came to choosing equipment and applications, most companies ultimately preferred a gradual, incremental migration to an immediate and radical transformation. In tracing this process, Yates shows that IBM's successful transition from tabulators to computers in part reflected that vendor's ability to provide large customers such as insurance companies with the necessary products to allow gradual change. In addition, this detailed industry case study helps explain information technology's so-called productivity paradox, showing that firms took roughly two decades to achieve the initial computerization and process integration that the industry set as objectives in the 1950s.

Building Information for Age Organization

Structuring the Thesis

The book is a collective investigation of the structuring of theses in education, the social sciences and other disciplines that commonly do not follow the standard procedures of the scientific method. To help research students design a structure for their own thesis and liberate their investigations from the constraints associated with the use of the conventional structure, it explains how the structures adopted were designed to suit the topic, methodology and paradigm. It also provides a wide range of examples to draw upon, which suit a broad spectrum of theory, methodological approaches, research methods and paradigms. Additionally, by analyzing the methodologies and paradigms, and reviewing the methodological and paradigmatic spectrum, it offers a significant contribution to the way research is conceptualized. The book addresses a number of key questions faced by students, supervisors and examiners: •Why do examiners often find it difficult to read work in non-scientific disciplines when theses are structured in accordance with the conventional scientific method? •Why do students in non-scientific disciplines struggle to write up the outcomes of their research in the conventional structure? •What alternative thesis structures can be devised to better suit the wide range of methods? •Which theories and paradigms are commonly followed in education and the social sciences and how do these perspectives influence the research process? •What methods, theories and paradigms are commonly adopted by education and social science students and what problems do these pose when students write their theses?