James W. Cortada
Information and the Modern Corporation
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011, 159 pp.
For academic readers, and especially those in information studies, Information and the Modern Corporation will be at once strange and familiar. James Cortada places information management at the root of corporations’ priorities, contextualizing his argument within a framework of wisdom, knowledge, information and data that is very conventional within knowledge management and information science. Other topics central to information studies are scattered through the book as well, such as virtual teams, open source software, tacit knowledge and infrastructure development. While the book seems intended primarily to give business executives a perspective on information, it also holds some value for academics interested in information studies.
MIT Press’ Essential Knowledge Series, of which Information and the Modern is a part, is designed to “deliver concise, expert overviews.” Other books in the series focus on topics largely related to technology or philosophy, with entries on crowdsourcing, memes and the internet of things, as well as free will, the mind-body problem and even waves (the kind that occur in bodies of water). As short introductions to the main ideas around topics of contemporary interest, books in the series are likely to be read by either non-academics or students seeking an overview before exploring a literature in depth. Information and the Modern Corporation, then, seems most likely to be read by executives looking for a quick introduction to an information-centered perspective on the corporation.
Cortada is an excellently qualified—if somewhat idiosyncratic—author to write an introduction to the use of information in the corporation, as he has a PhD in European history but subsequently worked as a manager for IBM for many years and is currently a research scientist at the Charles Babbage Institute (which focuses on the history of information technology). He has written over fifty books, which are primarily aimed at three audiences: historians of Spain, historians of computing, and business and management scholars and executives. Information and the Modern Corporation sits at the intersection of the latter two.
Following introductory chapters that provide an overview of knowledge management, Cortada organizes Information and the Modern Corporation around several topical chapters, considering the role of information in supply chains, product development and marketing, infrastructure, and enterprise organization. Especially in the first two of these topical chapters, the general argument is that more information leads to smarter systems: supply chains that share information and better predict demand and customer relations management (CRM) software that integrates with data from external sources. While Cortada is careful throughout to note that these are optimal cases and that there is often a lack of trained workers to support such systems, his overall outlook is that information management makes corporations smarter, faster and more flexible.
Likely as a result of the conventions and word limits of its genre, Information and the Modern Corporation leaves the proof of many of its claims to rest on Cortada’s experience and reputation. Consequently, its depiction of the “modern corporation” is highly abstract, avoiding historical context and providing few details about specific implementations, both surprising given Cortada’s background in history. Instead, the corporation that Cortada describes is an ideal amalgam; it illustrates the importance of information while sitting outside many of the historical circumstances that shaped its development. For example, while Cortada tells readers that marketing has “evolved into a formal discipline of its own,” there is no discussion of how or why this has happened. Similarly, Cortada argues that, in the 1970s, the university lagged behind governments and corporations in “mak[ing] the flow of digitized data around the enterprise … increasingly effective and ubiquitous.” While these claims are provocative, Cortada provides little indication of how to validate or pursue them.
Largely due to the lack of detail and historical context, scholars might treat the book less as a generic overview and more as an opportunity to understand how corporations see themselves. Indeed, one of its primary values may be in presenting topics of interest to information studies from a new perspective that often fails to align perfectly with the field’s tenets. For example, Cortada’s claims about the high visibility of information technology (relative to information) will come off as strange to those familiar with the information studies literature on infrastructure. Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, Steven Jackson and David Ribes, for example, have to varying extents made their careers by drawing attention to those unseen aspects of systems that underlie information, invisibly transporting and shaping it. Similarly, Cortada’s brushing aside of issues such as monitoring of employees’ technology use (which he argues they will accept in exchange for “more and better-managed information”) and the black boxing of algorithms used to set and compare prices will seem strange to scholars concerned with the political and ethical implications of these topics. While his academic writing elsewhere makes clear that Cortada is remarkably well read on information topics (his 2012 article, “Shaping Information History as an Intellectual Discipline,” for example, is overwhelmingly thorough in its references), Information and the Modern Corporation is, by necessity, short on this kind of rigor. Delving deeply into the areas noted above would be out of genre and unwarranted, but it still seems that there should be some treatment of the controversial status of topics such as surveillance.
The short book ends with predictions for the future: that routine and dangerous work will increasingly be performed by machines; that machines will additionally control decisions and resource allocation; and that, as a result, the future role of human workers is uncertain. Five years after the book’s publication, these concerns remain relevant, especially in relation to automation and artificial intelligence. Still, Cortada’s two-page discussion of a future in which “everyone will be a ‘knowledge worker,’” feels dated, even considering the book’s 2011 publication date. After all, Peter Drucker’s 1959 The Landmarks of Tomorrow and Fritz Machlup’s 1962 The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States made much the same point half a century ago, and Cortada’s book does little to provide solutions or a framework for understanding new labor trends.
These warnings aside, Information and the Modern Corporation does present a quick overview of how information is viewed within corporations, a context to which many academic researchers may lack access. This perspective has value in providing new concepts and potential inspiration. The claim that modern enterprises are best thought of as an ecosystem of partners, firms, and supply chains, for example, provides a typology that could potentially structure empirical research. Similarly, Cortada’s generalizations, which often come off as lacking evidence, might serve as provocations for future work. This is especially true when the book points to questions that remain unanswered. Researchers in a variety of fields, for example, might productively pursue a question that Cortada poses about the rate of change of information practices within organizations. While he lays out several “rules of the road” such as that data are being produced more rapidly and that wisdom and knowledge change relatively slow, these are rough suggestions that merit fuller consideration in a different kind of publication.