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OCR for page 98
New Technology and Office Tradition:
The Not-So-Changing World
of the Secretary
MARY C. MURPHREE
THE NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE SECRETARY
Electronic word and data processing a multibillion dollar
business made possible by the invention and mass production of
the m~crochi~is invading the American office. Few work envi-
ronments are immune to the temptations of the fast, cheap, and
effective automated office equipment now available. Organizations
ranging from Fortune 500 corporations, law and accounting firms,
public agencies, hospitals, and universities to small businesses and
professional partnerships are experimenting with data- and word-
processing equipment on a scale scarcely imaginable 10 or even 5
years ago (U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, 1985~.
The emergence of the modern office a century ago, its techno-
Togical evolution to mid-century, and even its impact on women's
employment have been documented by historians (Baker, 1964;
Davies, 1982; Oeirich, 1968; I,ockwood, 1958~. The current phase
of technological revolution, particularly its effects on American
office workers, calls for further documentation.
This paper examines the impact of office technology on the
secretarial occupation. It analyzes how the current revolution in
98
OCR for page 99
MARY C. MURPHREE
99
office organization intersects with changes in secretarial attitudes
and demographics and with an office culture traditionally based on
gender. It argues that the persistence of patrimonial authority in
secretary-boss relations, combined with new staffing ratios (when
each secretary is assigned to work for more and more bosses),
determine to a far greater extent than technology itself—the
work life of the word-processing secretary.
History teaches us that technological change whether in the
form of the steam engine, electricity, or the automobile never
occurs in a vacuum and that its effects on social organization
cannot be understood as random or idiosyncratic events. Nor are
its costs and benefits shared equally by all members of society.
Rather, much of industrial history depends on the interaction
of technology with prevailing social, demographic, and political
conditions in a particular era. The introduction of word and data
processing into the office of the 1980s, and its impact on the
secretary, is no exception.
Although there is no one way to define the word "secretary,"
particularly in this period of transition or "shakeout," ~ use a
definition that relates both to the social characteristics of the job
(e.g., the authority or superior-subordinate structure) and to the
tasks characteristic of the job (e.g., the division of labor). My fo-
cus will be entirely on what ~ call the "word-processing secretary."
This is a clerical person working on a decentralized m~crocom-
puter or terminal who is formally assigned as support staff to one
or more principals, with whom she is in daily personal contact
and for whom she performs some combination of clerical tasks
(e.g., text and data entry, editing, filing, copying, or stenography)
and administrative or managerial services (e.g., gatekeeping, co-
ordinating, planning, letter drafting). Such a secretary is distinct
from a word-processing operator who works at a video display ter-
minal (VDT) in a large, centralized facility and who is exclusively
charged with word and data production."
7
~ ~ B~ ~
~ Currently, there are no data indicating how many word-processing
secretaries versus word-processing operators there are in the United States,
nor how many workers use particular types of word-processing equipment.
Such distinctions should be made in future data-collection efforts. Companies
with word-processing centers continue to employ large numbers of secretaries
who work in decentralized settings. An increasing number of companies are
mooring to decentralize their clerical operations entirely.
OCR for page 100
100
NEW TECHNOLOGYAND OFFICE TRADITION
The secretarial occupation is the largest and most catholic of
women's occupations, employing some 4 million women. Secre-
taries are widely distributed among industries, professions, and
throughout government, in offices of every size, and in towns
and metropolitan areas across the United States. Recently, the
occupation has experienced tremendous growth, although it has
not ridded itself of its traditional sex-stereotyping. Since 1950,
secretarial-typ~st employment has more than tripled. The compo-
sition of the secretarial labor force has also changed. Since the
1970s, the number of minority women has increased dramatically;
between 1970 and 1980 the number of black women secretaries
increased 148 percent, while the number of secretaries of Spanish
origin increased 131 percent (U.S. Department of Labor, 198
1985~. And, like the female labor force in general, there are more
working mothers, more mothers with preschool children, more sin-
gle heads of households, and more women who plan to be a part
of the paid labor force on a sustained basis.
The secretary's relationship to technology, on which this paper
focuses, has also changed significantly. The secretary now interacts
with sophisticated, computer-based office systems and electronic
typewriters as well as with the familiar telephone, copy machine,
and dictaphone.2
A wave of publicity heralded the introduction of these gym
tems and may have contributed to raping the expectations of
many secretaries. Employers, eager to sell their support staffs on
the new equipment, have repeated vendor and media clanns and
waxed enthusiastic about the benefits that office automation offers
2 Innovations and improvements in office technologies have essentially
been incremental since the 1870s (see Strom, this volume). Model after
model of typewriters, calculators, dictaphones, telephones, and duplica-
tars have been designed with an end to making them more efficient, less
costly, and more marketable. For example, the original beeswax and paraffin
~Graphaphone. dictating machine, powered by a sewing machine treadle,
was replaced at the turn of the century by a solid wax recording medium
with a shaver making it erasable. This in turn was made obsolete by an
electronic desk model that appeared in 1936, and that, by World War II,
was equipped with a flexible Dictabelt and transistors. Finally, by the 1970s
the dictating and transcribing units had been combined into a single small
unit; small magnetic cassette tapes were available, and remote Hoff premises
telephone transmission was developed. Similarly, improvements in carbon
paper streamlined early duplicating tasks alongside mimeograph machines
and stencils, which went through dozens of design innovations until the entire
duplicating market genre way to the photocopying process.
OCR for page 101
MARY C. MURPHREE
101
secretaries. Employment agencies and secretarial schools eager
to supply their clients with willing and trainable personnel have
urged secretaries and prospective secretaries to acquire the new
skills quickly so that they too can reap the benefits awaiting them
in the electronic office. Many secretaries interpret this enthusiasm
and encouragement to mean that all office work has become "high
tech and expect that they wiD be given a chance to do challenging
work, sharpen their skills, earn better pay, and move up in their
organizations. Preliminary evidence indicates, however, that there
is a serious disjuncture between what secretaries have been led to
expect from the automated office and what many feel they are
actually getting. Particularly at risk in this scenario are minority
and older women.
Understanding the effects of office automation on secretaries
is difficult for several reasons. First, it ~ not clear whether sup-
ply, declining cost, and marketing of new office technologies are
driving the push toward office reorganization or whether factors
such as increasing labor costs, a shortage of skilled and willing
women clericals, and management fears of clerical unionization are
stimulating the demand for office automation (Murphree, 1984b).
Second, as pointed out above, the term "secretary" has no gener-
aBy accepted meaning, but rather ~ a catch-all word for a person
performing a variety of clerical, administrative, and personal tasks
(Watstein, 1985~. The term Office, moreover, Is just as ambigu-
ous and encompasses myriad shapes and forms. There are large
offices and small ones, headquarters and branches, public-sector
sites and private-sector sites. An office can also have different
occupational or industrial cultures: it can be a profession e] office
(e.g., the doctor's office) or a sales office tied to a particular in-
dustry (the brokerage office). The Formation process itself can
also take a multitude of forms. For example, hardware and soft-
ware systems can vary according to how ~multifunctional" they
are (i.e., the number of tasks they are capable of performing).
Systems can also be more or less interactive. They range from
highly integrated, advanced information systems to stand-alone
micro and personal computers. They may also vary in the extent
to which they are "networked to each other or a larger computer
(Spinrad, 1982~. Research also indicates that diffusion of the new
technology is occurring at a fast but by no means uniform pace
(Kelly Services, 1982~.
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102
NE W TECHNOLOG Y AND OFFICE TRADITION
Until very recently, most discussions have focused on the
general "goodness" or "badness" of word processing (Murphree,
1984a). Vendors and their partisans extolled its promise—to lib-
erate secretaries and turn them into high-tech managers—while
critics feared it would reduce secretaries to robots or extensions
of machines, if not eliminate them altogether. These simplistic
ideas are being discarded as a growing corpus of research on office
automation illuminates its complexities. Experts have now begun
to distinguish among different kinds of word-processing arrange-
ments and stress the differential effects these arrangements have
upon clericals (Pomfrett et al., 1984; Feldberg and Glenn, 1983~.
At the crudest level a contrast is drawn between word processing
that is centralized in pools, on the one hand, and that which is
decentralized to satellite stations, on the other (Johnson et al,
1985; lacono and Kling, 1984; Murphree, 1984a; Werneke, 1984;
Menzies, 1981~. In the former, an organization's word-processing
functions are all located in a single work site or word-processing
center. In clecentralized word processing, satellite units are dis-
tributed throughout the organization. Inherent in this distinction
is a focus on the difference between word-processing "operators,"
who perform VDT work at the centers under the supervision of a
manager, and the word-processing secretaries who concern us here,
i.e., secretaries working at satellite VDT terminals in face-to-face
relations with principals or bosses to whom they are assigned.
Some research examines the sequential phases of the inte-
gration process (Giuliano, 1982; Gery, 1982) and the effect of
office automation on different occupational groups (Kanter, 1983;
Bjorn-Andersen, 1983~. Westin et al. (1985), for example, focus on
customer service representatives, data-entry clerks, and clerical-
secretarial employees. Bikson and Gutek (1983) analyze the vari-
ety of activities and complexities of the tasks performed by dif-
ferent white-colIar work groups (including secretaries) who share
an information-handling function. Johnson et al. (1985) refine
the centralized-decentralized theme by discussing different forms
of integration of information processing into organizations and
their consequences for organizations. The ergonomic arrangement
of different settings has also received attention in the literature.
Finally, researchers have attempted to evaluate the success and
problems encountered in the use of different staffing arrangements
with word-processing equipment (Pomfrett et al., 19843.3
This paper develops a focus omitted by other analysts, namely,
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MARY C. MURPHREE
103
the strong gender-based authority relations and patrimonial orga-
nization through which word-processing secretaries are linked to
their superiors, and by which, traditionally, the nature of their
tasks, prestige, wage levels, opportunities for mobility, and, hence,
job satisfaction have been determined. 4
The discussion that follows is divided into four sections. Wher-
ever possible, the analysis discusses the experience of minority
women, who make up a growing proportion of word-processing
users, and of older women secretaries, whose work patterns are
subject to the greatest disruption. The first section examines the
patrimonial form of social organization that has traditionally char-
acterized secretarial work. The second section discusses the new
breed of secretary produced by a changing labor force supply and
by women's changing expectations concerning their rewards and
rights on the job. The third section explores how technology affects
secretarial expectations and experiences in the new office particu-
larly through changes in "staffing ratios" (e.g., private secretaries
versus shared secretaries versus team or minipoo} secretaries). The
fourth section argues that patrimony not only persists in the new
once, but when combined with new staffing ratios also accounts
in important ways for the lack of challenge, responsibility, and
opportunity to move up in the job that many secretaries are ex-
periencing. The section ends with a discussion of other variables
such as size of office and organization, resources and wealth of the
3 Pomfrett et al. (1984) offer a useful typology of the possible permuta-
tions of principal/secretary social organization, as well as a report on the
satisfaction and dissatisfaction of the different groups and individuals. They
also identify equality of supervisions as an important variable for operator
(read secretarial) satisfaction, especially where pool scenarios are concerned.
The study does not deal with gender questions nor with the patrimonial
aspects of word-processing secretarial jobs.
4 My analysis draws heavily on case studies and survey data reported
by vendors and by researchers in academia, unions, private research-firms,
and women's advocate organizations. It also uses interviews and case studies
conducted by the author with secretaries in a variety of industries, including
law firms, government agencies, universities, and broadcasting. Systematic
research, however, on secretarial subtypes (by socioeconomic status, industry,
size of firm) does not exist and should become a research priority for policy
makers concerned with understanding the changes taking place.
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104
NE W TECHNOL O G Y A ND OFFI CE TRA DI TI ON
firm, and industry or service in which the firm engages, which may
influence changes and rewards in the secretarial occupation. The
final section brings together my conclusions.
PATRIMONY IN TRADITIONAL SECRETARIAL WORK
~aditionaDy the secretarial role has been understood as a
support role with the subordinate performing a variety of admin-
istrative, clerical, and personal tasks for a superior. For the last
century, women have been secretaries while men have been princi-
pals. The classic description of this role was provided by Rosabeth
M. Kiter (1977) in her pioneering work, Men and Women of the
Corporation. Focusing on the secretarial role in the structure of
a large organization called INDISCO, Kanter analyzed the pat-
rimonia] nature of the role relationship between secretaries and
their principab. Using Weber's definition of patrimony as a guide,
and the "Iord-vamal" mode} as metaphor, she identified three am
pects of the traditional boss-secretary relationship: (1) principled
arbitrariness (secretaries have no job description but rather are
subject to the arbitrary power of a boss who, within limits of
fair practice set by Principled or tradition, can make whatever
job request of a secretary he chooses); (2) fealty (an emphasis on
loyalty and The personal in boss-secretary relations, such that
symbolic, emotional, and nonutilitarian rewards become substi-
tutes for economic ones); (3) status contingency (the fact that
secretaries derive their status from the rank and power of their
bosses). Each impacts in varying degrees on secretarial tasks and
on the secretary's access to better pay and mobility.
TRADITIONAL SECRETARIAL TASKS
Secretarial tasks are generally defined by a principal or boss
who has a great deal of latitude and personal authority In de-
termining what a secretary does. Typically, a secretary and boss
carve out a personal set of procedures and understandings con-
cerning what tasks the secretary will perform. The organization
provides only the merest skeleton for the structure of the secre-
tary's job. One boss may delegate challenging and creative work to
a secretary. His successor may delegate nothing. The secretary's
work is also characterized by a constant flow of orders with no
routinized schedule. Typically she must respond "to momentary
OCR for page 105
MARY C. MURPHREE
105
demands and immediate requests generated on the spot" (Kanter,
1977:79~. Traditionally the secretary acts as a kind of "office wife,"
performing an array of personal and socioemotional services for
her boss. These may include listening to his troubles, performing
office housekeeping duties, running personal errands outside the
office, or even granting sexual favors (Kanter, 1977:79~813.
The secretary must also act as a buffer between the boss and
the outside world. This includes acting as a Gatekeeper (screen-
ing calb and visitors), as well as assisting the boss In presenting a
certain front to the organization or world. As ~ wrote about legal
secretaries in my 1977 case study (Murphree 1984a: 1423:
Essentially skilled ageneralists,n legal secretaries have tradi-
tionally performed a multitude of both simple clerical and house
keeping functions and complex administrative and lawyering tasks.
Beyond taking shorthand and transcribing items for her boss's sig-
nature and beyond acting as his gatekeeper . . . legal secretaries
typically might type corporate minutes, draft standard wills or
petitions following boiler-plate forms, or check legal citations and
references for her attorney. She might also monitor the court cal-
endar or docket, handle the firm's bills and charges, and work with
an outside accountant on firm taxes. All this has been in addition
to filing, ordering supplies, handling the mail, typing endless copy
from draft, collating multiple final copies, and, of course, making
coffee....
In keeping with the office-wife role expected of her, the Wall
Street legal secretary further has traditionally performed certain
supportive and nurturant tasks as well. Covering for an attorney's
mistakes, lying about his whereabouts when it is helpful, listening
supportively (and in confidence) to his career or family problems,
. . . are all important tasks associated with her sex-stereotyped
role as handmaiden and confidante.
REWARDS AND CAREER MOBILITY
Secretaries in jobs defined by patrunonial relations are subject
to a special set of standards and; rewards that, unlike most other
occupations in the office, is highly particularmtic. By and large
secretaries are rewarded for loyalty and devotion to their bosses.
In the INDISCO study, for example, Kanter found that secretarial
ratings were determined by two main traits or attitudes. One was
initiative and enthusiasm, and the other was the secretary's ability
to "anticipate and take care of personal needs." They were not
necessarily rated for professional skills. Even when the company
attempted to standardize the evaluation process, managers often
OCR for page 106
106
NEW TECHNOLOGYAND OFFICE TRADITION
rated secretaries in terms of the quality of their relationships rather
than in terms of skills that benefit the organization generally
(Kanter, 1977~.
A number of recent studies have begun to analyze the skilled
but often "invisible" labor that secretaries perform. Too often
these skills go unrecognized and undercompensated. Secretaries,
for example, perform many highly skilled tasks that require expert
social and cognitive judgments and use sophisticated mediating
and negotiating techniques that involve great diplomacy (Mur-
phree, 1984; Suchman and Wynn, 1984~. As "gatekeepers" they
must know when to disturb their managers for telephone calls as
well as how to put off the unwanted call diplomatically. In addition
to knowing who's who in the manager's world, they must know
how to read urgency in the tones of their bosses and their bosses'
superiors; how to follow complicated and often poorly explained
instructions; and how to negotiate and shepherd projects through
the various departments and support services of the organization.
These skills, according to Machung (1983), while handsomely re-
warded at the executive or managerial level, are undervalued when
performed by women labeled as secretaries.
This perception of inequity is increasingly a source of grievance
to secretaries. The Consensus Statement of Professional Secre-
taries International (a nonunion organization) insists that "discre-
tionary judgment, not clerical skills, is the key component of the
secretary's productivity." Further it maintains that "tAipprecia-
tion does not replace compensation. This message is similar to
that of "Raises Not Roses promulgated by District 9 to 5 of the
Service Employees International Union.
Secretaries are paid less and have less control and less in-
dependent recognition than they might have otherwise. Instead
they receive such nonutilitarian rewards as praise, appreciation,
prestige, love, or flattery.
Symbolic rewards are also frequent substitutes for promotion.
Typically women in secretarial jobs derive their formal rank and
pay from the formal rank of their bosses rather than from the skills
they utilize or the tasks they perform. A common career path for
a secretary traditionally has been to begin as a pool secretary,
advance to working for a lower-level manager or divisional officer,
and end up as a secretary to a vice president or a president (Kanter,
1977~.
OCR for page 107
MARY C. MURPHREE
107
In my study of legal secretaries ~ found two main types of
career mobility: vertical and horizontal. Vertical mobility was
most commonly achieved by the spool to partner" route. It also
meant moving from the typing pool to working for any attorney,
or moving from a junior law partner to a stop partner," or from
an associate to a partner. Sometimes it involved moving from
a pair of attorneys to a single attorney. Secretaries sometunes
moved horizontally within an organization as well. At law Firm
X, where ~ conducted a case study, this simply meant the secretary
changed to an attorney with the same rank as her present boss.
For exa~nple, through the office grapevine a secretary might learn
of a good position opening in the office of an attorney with a
reputation for being particularly nice and request permission from
the personnel department to transfer laterally to that attorney.
Partners' secretaries, however, were usually not permitted to move
laterally. Any move they made had to be to a higher-level attorney
or out of the firm altogether. Only rarely, however, did any legal
secretary move to another service department of the firm, i.e., to
the paralegal department, to proofreading, or to the library.
Whatever industry or profession they are tied to, secretaries
have generally not moved with any ease into managerial and pro-
fessional jobs. Moreover, the ladders that do exist are exceedingly
short and confining. Research indicates that moving up typically
means an easier work load but not necessarily a more challenging
one. In many instances the sharpest work, with the most demands
and greatest variety of technical requirements, is performed at the
lowest secretarial level (Kanter, 1977~. Secretaries at the upper
levels of INDISCO, for example, had more responsibility in the
sense that they took on a few administrative duties (and often
their mistakes had greater consequences), but they did not neces-
sarily have the heaviest work loads. This was also true at Firm X,
where legal secretaries to junior partners or senior associates had
less status and pay but heavier work loads than senior partners'
secretaries. Their attorneys not the senior partners- typically
generated the most paperwork In the firm (Murphree, 1981~.
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108
NEW TECHNOLOGYAND OFFICE TRADITION
CHANGES IN THE SUPPLY OF WOMEN TO
SECRETARIAL JOBS: RISING EXPECTATIONS
AND DECLINING SATISFACTION
For many years women secretaries have shaped their expec-
tations to the patrimonial structure surrounding them. In recent
years, however, the workplace expectations of more and more
women have soared, creating a striking dissonance between expec-
tations and actual experience- a dissonance exacerbated by new
office technology.
In the late 1970s, Daniel Yankelovich (1979) focused atten-
tion on the growing "psychology of entitlements" characterizing
American workers, female as well as male. Workers increasingly
demand rights and rewards at work that they did not consider
due them in the past. Women, while generally satisfied with less
than men (Gutek and Bikson, 1985), are nonetheless an important
part of this movement. According to Rosabeth Kanter, since the
1960s women in the nonprofessional rank and file have lobbied
with a new legitimacy for an extension of their basic civil rights
into the workplace and have demanded equity, discretion, and
greater employee control (Kanter, 1977~.5 Many are questioning
their subordinate place in organizational hierarchies as nurturant
"office wives, servants, and sex objects. At the same time they
are seeking recognition for their Invisible labor" and their role as
important players on the office team.
Accompanying this drive for entitlements has been an observ-
able decline in the overall satisfaction of working women, especially
secretaries. As early as 1977 women were reporting a gap between
what they expected from their jobs and what they felt they were
getting. The Quality of Employment Survey, for example, re-
ported a decline of some 25 points In the mean job satisfaction
5 There is a wide range as to what different workers mean by their
Frights. At the most radical level, the rights issue focuses on access to real
power for subordinates, namely, access to the resources of the organization,
or what a union organizer in Terkel's American Drcanw: Lost and Found
(1981) called Profits and say-so. Worker rights may also involve "freedom
from hierarchy" (Blauner, 1966; Presthus, 1978) and the opening up of an
organization's opportunity system to any qualified workers (Kanter, 1977~.
In most instances, however, the rights discussed involve such specifics as the
right to pay equity or privacy, the right to participate in decisions involving
departmental production, or the right to more control by the worker over his
or her immediate work tasks and environment.
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MARY C. MURPHREE
125
Many employers (and some secretaries) believe that the on-
thejob training on new equipment is a sufficient substitute for ad-
ditional pay (Women's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, 1985~.
Most secretaries, however, want to see their new computer skills
reflected in their paychecks and argue their case through orga-
nizations such as Professional Secretaries International and The
Working Women's Education Fund.
In a recent poll of 1,250 secretaries, almost 90 percent believed
their computer skills should earn them higher pay. However, the
same survey reports that 58.1 percent fee} that their computer
skills had not earned them a higher salary (Fusselman, 1986~.
Thirty-five percent of the secretaries interviewed in the Panasonic
Study, In fact, cited "insufficient pays as a source of their great-
est job stress. In the Kelly survey only 30 percent of the word-
processing secretaries interviewed reported receiving pay increases
as a result of their word-processing skills. The Educational Fund
for Individual Rights also found "a strong minority" perhaps 25-
35 percent of the women VDT users it studied expressing concern
about fairness of the pay they were receiving. These attitudes were
particularly strong among clericals, including secretaries, under 30
years of age. (This is also the group, according to the Kelly study,
most likely to receive a pay increase as a result of developing new
word-processing skills (Kelly Services, 1982~.)
It is essential that research be undertaken that tracks the types
of skills used in different word-processing jobs and how currently
these skills relate to wages. Secretaries in private, shared, and
team jobs perform very different constellations of tasks and hence
are likely to use a different collection of skills. Individuals working
in the same kind of word-processing job may vary greatly among
one another in expertise. Two secretaries can have very different
abilities in exploiting a sophisticated word-processing program
like Wordstar(~) or XywriteW. They may differ in the number of
commands they know, knowledge of when a command should be
used, understanding of the computer's operating system, ability
to save space on files, and ability to program the machine to take
shortcuts or customize it to their needs. Developing a fair and
equitable formula for evaluating word-processing and secretarial
skills is an essential job still to be done.
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NE W TECHNOLOG Y AND OFFICE TRADITION
OTHER VARIABLES AFFECTING CHANGE
Altered staffing ratios and the authority structure are only
some of the organizational variables affecting change in the sec-
retary's job. Other important variables include the size of the
office, the kind of industry or profession (legal secretary, medical
secretary, bank secretary, etc.), and the resources and wealth of
the office or work group.
Office Size
Office size has always had an impact on secretarial work. Sec-
retaries working in small offices have always been spared the costs
of extreme specialization. Most have great variety in their jobs as
"dills" of all trades. Their work includes typing, housekeeping, re-
search, inventory control, and accounting. Caste distinctions tend
to be played down, with work relations warmer and more family-
like and rules and regulations kept to a minimum (Murphree, 1981;
Litwak and Figueira, 1968~.
Secretaries in small offices nevertheless generally forgo the
perks of larger establishments. Large firms often tend to have
good back-up services (e.g., duplicating departments, mail and
messenger services, canteens in which to make coffee and wash the
pot) and higher salary scales. Just as important, large organiza-
tions tend to be financially sounder. As one secretary In a very
large law firm pointed out to me: "They've got cash at the end of
the month; their check is good!" Large organizations also afford
a certain panache or status by association that reflects on any
employee in her life outside the office, however modest her status
at work. ("I can read about our clients in the New York Times.")
Computerization is making dramatic inroads in small offices
(U.S. Congress, Office of Technological Assessment, 1985~. The
impact of automation in small offices alters few of these differ-
ences. Its impact, however, is not well defined.~° There are indi-
cations that secretaries In small offices may be In a better position
to be delegated higher-level computer tasks, such as setting up
a computerized billing system or some other administrative or
managerial software packages. For example, many small law firms
.
10 Unfortunately, we have little systematic research on small-office au-
tomation and its effect on secretaries. Such research is essential since small
business generates the bulk of new clerical jobs in the United States today,
and more and more secretaries are likely to find jobs there.
OCR for page 127
MARY C. MURPHREE
127
cannot afford customized packages, and the task of adapting a
retail software package falls to the legal secretary with initiative.
Moreover, while salaries of word-processing secretaries in small
offices are likely to remain lower than those of secretaries in large
organizations, the opportunity in small firms to broaden one's
skills may put the small-office secretary in a better position to
advance into higher-paying jobs, depending on the industry in
which she works.
Industrial Variation
Secretarial jobs, before and after the introduction of the com-
puter, have tended to vary in significant ways by industry and
profession. Want ads routinely promote secretarial jobs by adver-
tising different industrial or professional cultures. Secretarial jobs
in broadcasting are considered glamour jobs; law and publishing
are portrayed as intellectual and dignified; medicine is for the
secretary who wants to help people.
It is, in fact, true that the service or product put out by
a company will have ah effect on the secretary's tasks. Medical
secretaries, brokerage secretaries, and academic secretaries, for
example, tend to have more client contact than do large-firm legal
secretaries.
Research, however, indicates that secretaries who work in the
professions, while generally better paid (academia is the excep-
tion), have the shortest career ladders and least opportunity for
mobility into management. In an earlier piece (Murphree, 1981),
distinguished between professional or caste bureaucracies and class
bureaucracies. In the former (e.g., law and accounting firms), mo-
bility is based on credentials, and hence beyond the reach of the
secretary. In the latter (e.g., brokerage houses and some man-
ufacturing firms), initiative, savvy, and salesmanship are highly
valued, and secretaries have a better chance for advancement. Sec-
retaries in the caste-like Wall Street law firms are, by definition,
barred from moving into any professional jobs, except for two or
three supervisory jobs in personnel or as "leadersn or coordinators
of a clerical team.
Public versus private sector is another variable that may affect
the nature of change in secretarial work in the automated office.
Public sector secretaries are more likely to be protected by unions
than are secretaries in the private sector. Increasingly, contract
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NEW TECHNOLOGYAND OFFICE TRADITION
bargaining includes discussions of the impact of technology on
office workers. Negotiating points can include job security, wage
increases for word- and data-processing skills learned, ergonomic
improvements, and job design standards.
Resources and Wealth of Office
The quality of secretarial jobs has always varied according to
the resources and wealth of the organization. This is no less true
in the automated office. Wealthier firms are the most likely to
spend extra dollars for upgrading the ergonomics of the office, i.e.,
improving lighting and air quality, purchasing the proper chairs
and desks, and keeping the equipment In top-notch condition.
They are also the most likely to preserve the private secretarial
role. Secretaries give status to a boss, and this ~ important
in many offices. It is not clear~espite vendor cIanns- that a
terminal on the boss's desk can replace the prestige of having a
secretary. More likely, those who can afford to maximize their
status wiD have both a terminal and a secretary. -Most law firms,
for example, have maintained private or shared secretaries as long
as the bottom line has permitted.
Poor firms or economically shaky firms (or poor departments),
on the other hand, are the most likely to attempt to cut costs by
not replacing secretaries who leave. They may also be more likely
to implement secretarial sharing or minipoole In their office when
word processing is brought in. They are also the least likely to
give extra pay to secretaries who work for a large number of bosses
and who have very heavy work loads.
CONCLUSION
In this paper I have stressed the importance of examining the
social context in which office automation is occurring in order to
determine its effects on secretaries. ~ have also pointed out the im-
portance of examining the differential effects automation can have
on various "at risks groups of women office workers, particularly
black and Hispanic women, who come into offices with different
work histories and backgrounds but who have more than many
managers are prepared to acknowledge the same expectations
and needs for growth and advancement as their coworkers.
Key factors in my analysis have included gender relations at
work, especially the persistence of a strong patrimonial tradition
OCR for page 129
MARY C. MURPHREE
129
in boss-secretary relations, and variation ~ staffing ratio (private,
shared, and pool secretaries), which are found in the contempo-
rary office. These can- either mitigate or exacerbate traditional
social relations between bosses and word-processing secret Aries in
important ways.
My focus, which considers office automation from the perspec-
tive of the word-processing secretary, suggests hypotheses about
where it is likely to succeed and to fail. Crucial to its success or
failure are the rising expectations working women bring to their
jobs and the limited extent to which these expectations are be-
ing met. It appears that too often word-processing secretaries are
led to expect more from the new technology than it can realisti-
cally deliver, given the strong traditions that continue to shape
office organization. The trend toward secretarial sharing and cer-
tain pool-like arrangements, along with a lack of training, make
it impossible for many secretaries to learn and perform the more
challenging high-tech tasks technology in principle permits. The
persistence of patrimony in certain word-processing settings con-
tinues to require secretaries to negotiate their job tasks just as
they always have.
Mobility and access to real career ladders continue to be a
problem. In the new, an in the traditional, office, favoritism and
manipulation of a boss is more likely to produce a move upward to
a professional position than any reorganization of career ladders
that is technology-driven or management-inspired. Moreover, sec-
retaries shuttled from private secretarial status into slots as shared
secretaries or into strict m~nipool~ lose access to even the short-
ladder career routes (e.g., pool to executive) that were formerly
available.
Wages and salary increases for skins acquired may prove to
be the biggest problem of all. Word-processing secretaries may
have to work ~smarter" and ~harder" and learn new skills just to
maintain their jobs and current pay. This is a source of frustration
for many women who look for incentives to Get on the word-
processing bandwagons and contribute to office productivity.
The dearth of data on the subject should not be minimized.
The occupation of secretary has reached a critical juncture in office
history. Yet, analysis of it and its incumbents currently must be
based on exploratory case study material and crude preliminary
survey data. Laclking more reliable data, ~ am restricted in this
paper to presenting a series of hypotheses.
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130
NEW TECHNOLOGYAND OFFICE TRADITION
My inquiry suggests a troubling relationship between women's
experiences in the new office and their expectations, at least in
the typical case in which office automation is experienced as an
invasion of VDT terminals in a piecemeal and unsystematic fash--
ion. Many traditional tasks and rules remain. But there is also
a troubling trend toward eliminating some secretarial functions.
The trend of word processing by professionals, in which authors
or bosses handle everything from the generation of ideas to the
generation of finished texts, may be growing.
What then becomes of the secretary? What are the conse-
quences of these changes for secretarial job design, wages, working
conditions, and mobility? What jobs, if any, can minority women
move into? What happens to older secretaries? What jobs for
women once workers will continue to exist?
It is imperative to get answers to these kinds of questions.
Careful, systematic research on those pace-setting high-tech envi-
ronments that have moved beyond poop or secretarial sharing to
a basic redivision of labor may furnish clues to what the nation's
largest women's occupation can expect.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
office tradition
