Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945

At a time when Internet use is closely tracked and social networking sites supply data for targeted advertising, Lars Heide presents the first academic study of the invention that fueled today’s information revolution: the punched card. Early punched cards helped to process the United States census in 1890. They soon proved useful in calculating invoices and issuing pay slips. As demand for more sophisticated systems and reading machines increased in both the United States and Europe, punched cards served ever-larger data-processing purposes. Insurance companies, public utilities, businesses, and governments all used them to keep detailed records of their customers, competitors, employees, citizens, and enemies. The United States used punched-card registers in the late 1930s to pay roughly 21 million Americans their Social Security pensions, Vichy France used similar technologies in an attempt to mobilize an army against the occupying German forces, and the Germans in 1941 developed several punched-card registers to make the war effort—and surveillance of minorities—more effective. Heide’s analysis of these three major punched-card systems, as well as the impact of the invention on Great Britain, illustrates how different cultures collected personal and financial data and how they adapted to new technologies.This comparative study will interest students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including the history of technology, computer science, business history, and management and organizational studies

Turbulence, Inequality, and Cheap Steel

Iron and steel production grew dramatically in the U.S. when mass production technologies for steel were adopted in the 1860s. According to new measures presented in this study, earnings inequality rose within the iron and steel industries about 1870, perhaps because technological uncertainty led to gambles and turbulence. Firms made a variety of technological choices and began formal research and development. Professional associations and journals for mechanical engineers and chemists appeared. A national market replaced local markets for iron and steel. An industrial union replaced craft unions. As new ore sources and cheap water transportation were introduced, new plants along the Great Lakes outcompeted existing plants elsewhere. Because new iron and steel plants in the 1870s were larger than any U.S. plants had ever been, cost accounting appeared in the industry and grew in importance. Uncertainty explains the rise in inequality better than a skill bias account, according to which differences among individuals generate greater differences in wages. Analogous issues of inequality come up with respect to recent information technology.technological change, Bessemer steel, technological uncertainty, turbulence, inequality, innovation

Shifts in agrarian entrepreneurship in mid-Victorian England and Wales

This paper provides the first full-population analysis of changes in the entrepreneurial status of farmers during the mid-nineteenth century: between being employers or sole proprietors with no workforce. Using a unique dataset of all farmers and workforces in the 1851-81 English and Welsh censuses, this paper explores the effects of changes in agriculture on entrepreneur choices. A short ‘Golden Age’ was followed by increasing technical changes and then onset of an agricultural depression causing an important shift in agricultural entrepreneurial activity: initially the employer proportion increased slowly, but from the 1860s employers reduced labour and more worked as sole proprietors. Our findings show that farmers were adaptable and resilient to change through shifts in entrepreneurial status, supporting the conclusions of earlier researchers who took an optimistic interpretation of the flexibility and robustness of farmers. We also show the adaptations to be highly geographically variegated, depending on land quality, distance to local markets, and rail lines.ESRC grant ES/M01095

A Geographical Perspective on United States Capital Punishment, 1801-1960.

Geographical anomalies in American capital punishment are a key to interpreting this social practice. A nationwide change occurred after the 1830s from public execution to sequestered penitentiary execution. A regional contrast began developing during the same period that has lasted until now, with some states holding 20 or more executions annually, while others abolished the death penalty 75-125 years ago. The United States furnishes historical geographical conditions for persistence of capital punishment whose aftereffects are unlikely to be overcome. Popular support for the death penalty is efficacious in a democratized, decentralized decision-making process. Popular support has been particularly strong when communities had to be formed among heterogeneous, often socially unmotivated individuals, as on the frontier. Discriminatory popular support, which continues, has been stimulated by historical resentment arising in part from the exploitative competition between White labor and Black or immigrant labor. The study contrasts the success of abolition in parts of New England and the upper Midwest after 1846 with later failures elsewhere, and concludes that success came in part from a true culture of liberalism. . The study develops an account of space as a socially created and manipulated element in these issues. The theoretical strategy is an integration of phenomenological theories of place and region with classical sociological theory of Durkheim and of the conflict tradition. The role of spatial elements, place and region, has been an ideological one. Public space, with its slowly changing landscape elements and its larger-than-human scale, forwards the suggestion of authority, continuity, and normalcy. Regionally, characterizations are created: the South is the locus of racial discrimination; the West is lawless. However, when the social, economic, and political relationships making up a given social order change, the use and labeling of space, or the choice of locale, changes with them. Public space, when its inherently legitimating connotation cannot support the morally controversial functions, is simply discarded as a locus. Region and place as social players do not announce such changes and statistical realities, and they can act to retard the recognition of them

The British Army, information management and the First World War revolution in military affairs

Information Management (IM) – the systematic ordering, processing and channelling of information within organisations – forms a critical component of modern military command and control systems. As a subject of scholarly enquiry, however, the history of military IM has been relatively poorly served. Employing new and under-utilised archival sources, this article takes the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of the First World War as its case study and assesses the extent to which its IM system contributed to the emergence of the modern battlefield in 1918. It argues that the demands of fighting a modern war resulted in a general, but not universal, improvement in the BEF’s IM techniques, which in turn laid the groundwork, albeit in embryonic form, for the IM systems of modern armies. KEY WORDS: British Army, Information Management, First World War, Revolution in Military Affairs, Adaptatio

Responding to Technology-Enabled Organizational Transformation

As a result of the emergence of the Internet and net-enabled business processes, many industries have experienced a period of IT-enabled transformation in which organizations and business operations changed very rapidly. A natural question that arises is how can firms survive and even thrive during such transformations? In addressing this question, we show how a firm’s strategic change orientation—a meta-construct consisting of technological opportunism, market orientation, and entrepreneurial orientation—can influence the assimilation of IT and the resulting performance of business processes. We identify and examine two separate change enablers through which this influence occurs: (1) the development of IT capabilities; (2) the creation of a positive climate for IT use. These two change enablers influence the assimilation of technology within the organization and the resulting business process performance. We test the proposed model using a survey of 153 organizations in the retail auto industry, a compelling example of an industry that has undergone an IT-enabled transformation. Results explain 34% of the variance in process performance, and 34% of the variance in financial performance

Historical Roots of Canadian Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Maple Practices

This research is concerned with developing a historical baseline of Canadian Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal maple practices and the contribution of these activities to the well-being (WB) of communities up to approximately 1950. This research measures WB using two unique frameworks developed for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities associated with maple products and practices. In order to describe WB in historical contexts the research used archival data obtained primarily from Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and Early Canadiana Online (ECO). Results from the research showed that in Aboriginal communities, dynamics related to emotional, physical and mental WB were referenced the most often among results. In non-Aboriginal communities economic and social dynamics of WB were identified as important influences of WB. Dynamics related to resilience were also found in the non-Aboriginal results. Furthermore, the research identified dynamics related to governance as important pieces of the historical contexts of maple products within Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities. The role of early government rules and regulations associated with maple products and the impacts of the Indian Act on Aboriginal maple producers are further explored and discussed. This research concludes by outlining the areas where more research remains to be completed

The Potential and Problems in using High Performance Computing in the Arts and Humanities: the Researching e-Science Analysis of Census Holdings (ReACH) Project

e-Science and high performance computing (HPC) have the potential to allow large datasets to be searched and analysed quickly, efficiently, and in complex and novel ways. Little application has been made of the processing power of grid technologies to humanities data, due to lack of available large-scale datasets, and little understanding of or access to e-Science technologies. The Researching e-Science Analysis of Census Holdings (ReACH) scoping study, an AHRC-funded e-science workshop series, was established to investigate the potential application of grid computing to a large dataset of interest to historians, humanists, digital consumers, and the general public: historical census records. Consisting of three one-day workshops held at UCL in Summer 2006, the workshop series brought together expertise across different domains to ascertain how useful, possible, or feasible it would be to analyse datasets from Ancestry and The National Archives using the HPC facilities available at UCL. This article details the academic, technical, managerial, and legal issues highlighted in the project when attempting to apply HPC to historical data sets. Additionally, generic issues facing humanities researchers attempting to utilise HPC technologies in their research are presented