ABSTRACT
The histories of the development of information technology in banks and other fi nancial intermediaries in Western Europe and North America illustrate several general features of the wider role of this technology in business. Typewriters, adding machines, and other stand-alone offi ce machines diffused in businesses in the industrialized world beginning in the early twentieth century. They allowed new and less-trained people to perform various tasks, contributing to the routinization of jobs and the building of taller hierarchies. The batch-processing technologies-punched-card machines and early computers-accelerated this process. Since the 1960s, computers have been contributing signifi cantly in shaping theories of the fi rm and actual products, production processes, organizations, and work (Aylen 2009; Boyns 2008). This volume is the fi rst attempt to outline this development of a single industry across the Western World.
