Productivity machines: Transatlantic transfers of computing technology and culture in the Cold War

The 20th century saw the slow but steady rise of the United States as a principal international player. This study explores how the transfer of computer technology contributed to the rise of the United States as a political and economic power. To do so, it charts the cultural meaning of computers as they traveled across the Atlantic during the two decades following World War II. American government officers for the Marshall Plan and the executives of progressive corporations, including the two leading US computer manufacturers IBM and Remington Rand, formed a public-private partnership to transfer American business methods and machines to Europe. They intended American computers to increase the productivity of European economies by carrying the American values of free enterprise, cooperative industrial relations and integrated markets. While the Marshall Plan officers pursued a consensus-driven approach to technical aid, the two computer companies unilaterally integrated their European operations. Yet, they were united in their intent to instill productivity-mindedness in (Western) Europeans. But Europeans did not perceive of computers as productivity machines that promised higher standards of living; instead, they saw computers as automation technologies that threatened technological unemployment and socio-economic decline. Closer studies of the German insurance and banking industries show that Germans appropriated computers to the gender and labor relations in each industry. The largest insurance company in Germany, Allianz, rapidly adopted computer technology and a group of new college-educated managers appropriated control over the computer to position themselves among Allianz\u27s executive workforce. Also, they unsuccessfully sought for a technical solution to curb the growing ranks of female routine employees for data entry. The German banking industry, by contrast, delayed the introduction of computers to the late 1960s. In the meantime, German banks relied on part-time female employees for manual data entry and developed their own standard for automatic character recognition, thus devising a sociotechnical solution to the data entry problem. While computers were intended as means of Americanization that carried productivity to Europe, they were appropriated to existing corporate and political cultures in Germany