The economic decline of the 1970s sparked a new quest for efficiency in the West German automotive industry. Automation appeared as one path towards rationalization. I will review how robotization and computers were implemented on the shop floor and in product engineering. My paper further examines the tensions and conflicts between management and workers because of these changes and how they affected attitudes towards digital rationalization.
I will show that both robots and computers initiated a shift from a rigid assembly line system to flexible production methods. My paper argues that the robotization of the shop floor appeared to be a key to economic success around 1980. Moreover, computer technology altered product development. I trace the factors that contributed to these changes and challenge the perception that workers and employees opposed rationalization measures. Rather, it will reveal when workers and employees actively participated and became agents of rationalization depending on race, class, and gender–which includes not only skilled male workers and employees but also unskilled (female) workers and migrant workers brought to West Germany as well as office workers.
Reviewing these ambivalences of digital rationalization measures, my presentation contributes to our general understanding of how digital technologies altered the working world and to what degree their implementation is linked to the technological design of robots and computer technology as well as to gender, social background, and education of workers and employees as well to managerial goals.

In an age of technocracy and planning euphoria, computer specialists were emblematic characters. In West Germany, for newspaper columnists like Karl Bednarik in 1965, they formed a new elite that transformed everyday working worlds and heralded the end of the classical management. With their cold rationality, these experts – according to Bednarik – were to take the place of managers as emotional, improvising spontaneous and intuitive decision-makers. In fact, systems engineers, programmers, and IT consultants played a decisive role in rearranging the corporate social order and its human resources, altering communications, regulating work processes and questioning in-house rankings.
The paper will analyze how these new experts in Germany challenged established corporate hierarchies, managerial routines and orders as well as established procedures and work-flows, and thus established themselves as new powerful “generalists” in administrative techniques between the 1960s and the 1990s. In particular, I will show how digital computers were implemented in business contexts as decision-making tools and shaped organizational processes, recruiting and education programs, as well as manager trainings. Investigating social practice as well as public discourses, with a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization and biases woven into the technological systems, I will hence explore the changing role and image of computer experts as a new power group. The paper is based on a variety of printed, edited and archival sources. With that, it aims to enrich a social and cultural history perspective on the working worlds in the digital age.

At the beginning of the 1980s, secretaries in West Germany found themselves in a paradoxical crisis: The introduction of computers in everyday office life and the associated rationalization efforts led to fears for the future of individual jobs and the profession as a whole. At the same time, companies complained about huge difficulties to fill their vacancies.
The advent of computers and the technological transformation of working environments fuelled fears of rationalization and the loss of jobs across industries and societies. With secretary being a classically female occupation, those affected by office rationalization (as well as rationalization fears) were primarily women. The secretarial profession was particularly tainted with numerous sexist role attributions: Female office workers were expected to mother and admire their bosses, to ensure a nice working atmosphere and to look good. The legitimacy of these stereotypes and sexist expectations were vocally questioned by the women’s movement. Against this backdrop, female secretaries in Germany held congresses and organised in professional associations to navigate the diverse processes of change in their profession – a profession that should not vanish, despite all fears.
Based on secretaries’ magazines and documentations of secretaries’ and labour organisations’ congresses, this paper investigates the computerization of the working world and its intersecting challenges as a gendered phenomenon. It touches questions about power and illustrates the interplay between technology, knowledge and women’s emancipation in a digitalizing world.

In 1987, the renowned economist Hans Albach declared that the Berlin-based Schering AG was one of the most successful enterprises in West Germany. Its profitable economic performance, Albach noted, was based on a previously established and well-managed “open, worldwide information system” – an information network system, in which scientific information not only circulated but also became an integral part of the production process. The economic relevance of information increased significantly during the1970s, when the post-war boom ended in Western Europe and global competition intensified. The West German chemical and pharmaceutical industry reacted and reorganized their strategic focus that made knowledge an even more important asset of their economic performance.
Based on these observations, my paper will analyze how and why companies tried to establish and control global information network systems, in which scientific knowledge circulated and was transformed into economic performance, eventually leading to a complete reorganization of the companies. I argue that digital technologies played a pivotal role in transforming multidivisional chemical and pharmaceutical companies into research-based life sciences companies between the 1980s and 1990s: The computer not only altered production processes but also transformed organizational structures and communication processes. In this regard my research also aims to shed light on the question how digitalization affected the working worlds since the 1970s.
My research is based on archival sources from the corporate archives of Bayer, Hoechst, and Schering. In addition, I analyze documents of labor unions as well as selected contemporary economic and sociological studies.