ABSTRACT
In predominantly private sector work activities, such as food provision, the making of mining machinery, and new housing construction, computerization tended to be ancillary, introduced primarily into or restricted to separable tasks such as accounting. More extensive computerization, associated with greater degrees of social transformation, was manifest in national state activities. The patterns of computerization in services were also more divergent, like those in state-mediated activity and unlike those in subsistence-related work or manufacturing. National state strike policies centralized control over the police, reinforcing a general bent toward centralizing. Computers have a prominent place in Conservative images of contemporary society, but they also have a prominent role in the national state's technology of repression. Early in the period of new information technology, there was much about which British computopians could be optimistic. Privatization tended to absorb much of available British capital, thereby limiting money available to the private sector for investment in such things as computing.
