ABSTRACT
Disagreements on other matters notwithstanding, there are one point about computerization that most commentators find almost self-evident: computing is transforming our lives, it is agreed, through a tour de force of superior efficiency. If computing works as most people intuitively expect, gains in productivity should be readily manifest. Investment in computing ought to bring higher returns to any company than allocation of equivalent resources for human labor or other uses. In addition to its expected effects on employment—and concomitant with such effects—computing is widely expected to enhance the efficiency of organizations. Many important innovations in organizations, they insist, cannot reasonably be accounted for by anything so simple as cost-benefit calculation. Cost-effectiveness judgments on this innovation must certainly have been problematic from the standpoint of those who made the decision to adopt. The implication is that agents' efforts at improving quality through computers undermined their productivity.
