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

by JoAnne Yates

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801890864
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	03/25/2009
Series:	Studies in Industry and Society
Pages:	364
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

JoAnne Yates, Deputy Dean and Distinguished Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is the author of Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management, also published by Johns Hopkins.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Life Insurance in the Tabulator Era
1. Insurance at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
2. First Impressions of Tabulating, 1890–1910
3. The Push toward Printing, 1910–1924
4. Insurance Associations and the Flowering of the Tabulator Era
Part II: Life Insurance Enters the Computer Era
5. Early Engagement between Insurance and Computing
6. Insurance Adoption and Use of Early Computers
7. Incremental Migration during the 1960s and 1970s
8. Case Studies in Insurance Computing: New England Mutual Life and Aetna Life
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Thomas P. Hughes

JoAnne Yates writes with impressive clarity about the incredibly complex origins of the information age. By focusing on the life insurance industry and by stressing both continuity and change, she provides a key to understanding the crucial relationship between technology vendors and users.

— Thomas P. Hughes, author of Human-Built World

Arthur Norberg

A superb study. Yates provides a well-constructed and convincing study of the application of computer systems to business functioning, the people who brought about the change, and the specific gains in insurance from that application. An excellent contribution to the literature on business history and the history of technology.

— Arthur Norberg, University of Minnesota

From the Publisher

A superb study. Yates provides a well-constructed and convincing study of the application of computer systems to business functioning, the people who brought about the change, and the specific gains in insurance from that application. An excellent contribution to the literature on business history and the history of technology.
—Arthur Norberg, University of Minnesota

JoAnne Yates writes with impressive clarity about the incredibly complex origins of the information age. By focusing on the life insurance industry and by stressing both continuity and change, she provides a key to understanding the crucial relationship between technology vendors and users.
—Thomas P. Hughes, author of Human-Built World

Editorial Reviews

Structuring the Information Age makes educating reading and is an important contribution to our understanding of the connection between past and present in the transformation of socio-economic systems.
—Asaf Darr, Administrative Science Quarterly

Brilliant volume . . . Yate's study of the adaptation of information-processing resources in insurance has greatly widened the horizons of our understanding of the dynamics of technological development in a business setting.
—Business History Review

Yates has contributed another original study to the history of information technology.
—Kenneth Lipartito, Technology and Culture

A welcome addition to a growing body of literature on the history of the use of computers by businesses, and a good model for other scholars to use.
—James W. Cortada, American Historical Review

Structuring the Information Age examines the history of information technology in the United States by shifting focus away from the producers of that technology and toward a kind of end user that has heretofore received little attention—large-scale corporations, which easily rank among the leading information-technology (it) consumers.
—Timothy Alborn, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

This timely and important work is the first scholarly history devoted to the use of information technology within a single American industry.
—Thomas Haigh, EH.Net

This valuable addition to the historiography of the computer looks at new technologies from a user’s viewpoint. Here the user is the life insurance business, which is an appropriate choice because it has always been an information-intense business.
—IEEE History Center Newsletter

Structuring the Information Age will interest two types of readers: those who are concerned with the development, adoption, and impact of technology and those who are concerned with the growth, strategies, and economic influence of business organizations.
—Daphne A. Jameson, Journal of Business and Technical Communication

From the Publisher

Structuring the Information Age examines the history of information technology in the United States by shifting focus away from the producers of that technology and toward a kind of end user that has heretofore received little attention—large-scale corporations, which easily rank among the leading information-technology (it) consumers.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History - Timothy Alborn

Structuring the Information Age will interest two types of readers: those who are concerned with the development, adoption, and impact of technology and those who are concerned with the growth, strategies, and economic influence of business organizations.

Journal of Business and Technical Communication - Daphne A. Jameson

Yates has contributed another original study to the history of information technology.

Technology and Culture - Kenneth Lipartito

Structuring the Information Age makes educating reading and is an important contribution to our understanding of the connection between past and present in the transformation of socio-economic systems.

Administrative Science Quarterly - Asaf Darr

Brilliant volume . . . Yate's study of the adaptation of information-processing resources in insurance has greatly widened the horizons of our understanding of the dynamics of technological development in a business setting.

Business History Review

This timely and important work is the first scholarly history devoted to the use of information technology within a single American industry.

EH.Net - Thomas Haigh

This valuable addition to the historiography of the computer looks at new technologies from a user’s viewpoint. Here the user is the life insurance business, which is an appropriate choice because it has always been an information-intense business.

IEEE History Center Newsletter

Structuring the Information Age will interest two types of readers: those who are concerned with the development, adoption, and impact of technology and those who are concerned with the growth, strategies, and economic influence of business organizations.

— Daphne A. Jameson

Journal of Business and Technical Communication

This timely and important work is the first scholarly history devoted to the use of information technology within a single American industry.

— Thomas Haigh

EH.Net

Structuring the Information Age examines the history of information technology in the United States by shifting focus away from the producers of that technology and toward a kind of end user that has heretofore received little attention—large-scale corporations, which easily rank among the leading information-technology (it) consumers.

— Timothy Alborn

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

A welcome addition to a growing body of literature on the history of the use of computers by businesses, and a good model for other scholars to use.

— James W. Cortada

American Historical Review

Yates has contributed another original study to the history of information technology.

— Kenneth Lipartito

Technology and Culture

Structuring the Information Age makes educating reading and is an important contribution to our understanding of the connection between past and present in the transformation of socio-economic systems.

— Asaf Darr

Administrative Science Quarterly

A welcome addition to a growing body of literature on the history of the use of computers by businesses, and a good model for other scholars to use.

American Historical Review - James W. Cortada