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1. Automation and computerization

Automation and computerization are related but separatephenomena. Automation means the mechanizationand usually the

speeding upof production, not only in manufacturing but also inservice. Computerization is an advanced form of automation.Fantasies and anxieties about automation predate the nation'sfounding. The golem of Jewish legend, for example, is a powerfulautomaton. But Americans' historic receptivity to technologicalinnovation and their need for machines to compensate for scarcity oflabor have made the United States a center for automation.

American automation began in the early New England textile millsand other communities of the 1820s and 1830s, where workerslabored amid rows of complex, noisy, and dangerous machines, andin the pioneering Midwestern slaughterhouses of the 1840s and

1850s, where workers butchered, divided into parts, and packedhogs in disassembly lines. In both enterprises employees stood inplace while the work came to them and repeated their respectiveassigned tasks day after day. By contrast, in the much smaller early

American craft and machine shops, employees had moved aboutmore freely from task to task as the work itself remained stationary.

Automation severely limited workers' physical movement andoccupational diversity alike.

Nevertheless, automation does not inevitably result in deskilling, orthe steady loss of skills, both technical and intellectual, to machines.In the iron and steel industry, new machines may have diluted skills,

but in textiles and other industries, the number of semiskilled workersactually increased, as employers required a labor force with theknowledge and dexterity to operate complex machinery. Merephysical strength mattered ever less. Hence the irrelevance toindustries not dependent on sheer manual labor of Frederick Taylorssystem of scientific management (Taylorism)the elimination ofallegedly extraneous works motions and the acceleration of others.

Although scientific management, as conce ived by Taylor, and

automation were thus two quite different concepts, Taylorismprovided ideological justification for subsequent automation inindustry. For Taylor, workers as well as machines lacked intelligenceand performed most efficiently when controlled completely by

engineers and managers.

Automation usually means the substitution of machines for workers,causing technological unemployment. The term became popularduring the economic depression and mass unemployment of the1930s, when for the first time the American public singled outPresident Herbert Hoover and other engineers for being asresponsible as greedy industrialists for the efficient large-scalemanufacturing machines hitherto lauded as engines of prosperityand job creation. Although America has never experienced anythingcomparable to England's eighteenth-century Luddites, or machinebreakers, both white-collar citizens and industrial workers of the

1930s did finally associate automated machinery and job losses.

Automation need not, however, always mean fewer workers. AtHenry Ford's pioneering Michigan automobile assembly lines atHighland Park (1910s) and River Rouge (1920s), low-cost massproduction and increased efficiency created thousands of new jobs.In fact, the process of mass production characterized much of the

American industrial landscape. Yet these two huge Ford plants cameto epitomize automation in popular culture, technological history, andscholarly discourse under the rubric Fordism. They were also themodels for the classic critique of automation in Charlie Chaplin's1936 movie Modern Times.

Recovery from the Great Depression through World War II militaryproduction, followed by postwar prosperity, lessened concern aboutautomation until the mid1950s, when another wave of technologicalinnovation arose. Now the threat that computers might replace white-collar workers, even intellectual workers like librarians, generatedgrowing unease. The 1957 movie Desk Set, starring Spencer Tracyas an efficiency expert computerizing a corporate researchdepartment headed by Katharine Hepburn, popularized postwar


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anxiety about technological unemployment.

Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut's novel Player Piano (1952) envisioned theUnited States as a prosperous welfare state dependent on one huge

computer for all major decisions. In Vonnegut's technologicaldystopia, only a few engineers and managers hold meaningful jobswhile most citizens resent their menial daily tasks despite thedomestic comforts provided by technological progress. Significantly,the term computer, hitherto applied to men and women skilled innumerical calculations, was now applied to the mechanical devicesthat replaced them. (Years later, automatic programming codeswould replace human computer programmers.) Congressionalhearings on automation in 1955, which revealed that substantialnumbers of blue- and white-collar workers alike were being displacedby machines, made automation a public issue.

Not until the radical critiques of American technology of the 1960sand 1970s, however, did earlier piecemeal condemnations ofautomation and computerization become parts of a broaderindictment of the overall quality of work. Harvey Swados'spathbreaking 1957 essay in The Nation, The Myth of the HappyWorker, vigorously argued that assembly-line workers' high pay andgood benefits hardly compensated for their daily grind and loss ofautonomy.

White-collar workers less threatened by technologicalunemployment, particularly those in presumably lifetime corporatepositions, often thought themselves immune to the ills endured by

production workers. Studs Terkel's Working (1972) and theDepartment of Health, Education, and Welfare's Work in America(1973) amply demonstrated otherwise. In the 1980s and 1990s

America's largest corporations discharged large numbers ofmanagerial and white-collar employees. Technological innovationnow seemed to threaten even more educated employees, thoughblue-collar workers lost still more jobs owing to automation. Half asmany factory positions existed in 1996 as in 1966.

By the 1990s, the computerization of America had become a fact oflife. In the 1940s and 1950s, computer pioneers like John Mauchlyand John Von Neumann never anticipated more than a few giantcomputers that would be operated by skilled programmers employed

by the largest national and international institutions to solve the mostcomplex quantitative problems. By the 1980s, computers hadbecome available to ordinary Americans and embedded in their livesin countless ways.

At the end of the twentieth century, many Americans anticipated anever more automated and computerized high-tech utopia. But othercitizens, aware of actual and potential technological andenvironmental disasters, retreated from the nation's historicallyuncritical embrace of technological progress and saw automationand computerization as, at best, profoundly mixed blessings. Forthem, chess champion Gary Kasparov's 1997 loss to International

Business Machine's (IBM's) Deep Blue computer symbolized thehuman implications of technological triumphs.

2. Productions and Manufacturing

Production is the process of converting inputs into outputs throughvarious operations. All the operations which demands consumptionof resources together known as manufacturing. Both the terms areused interchangeably yet both are different axioms.The difference isin the raw material. In production, the raw material is not procuredfrom outside, the company owns it and after processing and make

the final product. But in Manufacturing, the company procures theraw material from outside, and then makes the final product.manufacturing is a process of converting raw material in to finishedproduct by using various processes,machines and energy.it is anarrow term.production is a process of converting inputs in tooutputs.it is a broder term.every type of manufacturing can beproduction, but every production is not a manufacturing.exa- makingof a turbine by various processes is manufacturingassemble thevarious parts to make an engine is production not


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manufacturing.Manufacturing isn't just when producing the product, itincludes other stages such as design, sales, management andmarketing

3. MIS and GIS

Management Information Systems (MIS) is the study of people,technology, organizations and the relationships among them. MISprofessionals help firms realize maximum benefit from investment inpersonnel, equipment, and business processes. MIS is a people-oriented field with an emphasis on service through technology. If youhave an interest in technology and have the desire to use technologyto improve peoples lives, a degree in MIS may be for you.Businesses use information systems at all levels of operation tocollect, process and store data. Management aggregates anddisseminates this data in the form of information needed to carry out

the daily operations of business. Everyone who works in business,from someone who pays the bills to the person who makesemployment decisions, uses information systems. A car dealershipcould use a computer database to keep track of which products sellbest. A retail store might use a computer-based information systemto sell products over the Internet. In fact, many (if not most)businesses concentrate on the alignment of MIS with business goalsto achieve competitive advantage over other businesses.MIS professionals create information systems for data management(i.e., storing, searching and analyzing data). In addition, theymanage various information systems to meet the needs ofmanagers, staff and customers. By working collaboratively with

various members of their work group, as well as with their customersand clients, MIS professionals are able to play a key role in areassuch as information security, integration and exchange. As an MISmajor, you will learn to design, implement and use businessinformation systems in innovative ways to increase the effectivenessand efficiency of your company.

A geographic information system, or GIS, is a computerized datamanagement system used to capture, store, manage, retrieve,analyze, and display spatial information. Data captured and used in a

GIS commonly are represented on paper or other hard-copy maps. AGIS differs from other graphics systems in several respects. First,data are georeferenced to the coordinates of a particular projectionsystem. This allows precise placement of features on the earths

surface and maintains the spatial relationships between mappedfeatures. As a result, commonly referenced data can be overlaid todetermine relationships between data elements. For example, soilsand wetlands for an area can be overlaid and compared to determinethe correspondence between hydric soils and wetlands. Similarly,land use data for multiple time periods can be overlaid to determinethe nature of changes that may have occurred since the originalmapping. This overlay function is the basis of change detectionstudies across landscapes.

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