A superb study. Yates provides a well-constructed and convincing study of the application of computer systems to business functioning, the people who brought about the change, and the specific gains in insurance from that application. An excellent contribution to the literature on business history and the history of technology. -- Arthur Norberg, University of Minnesota JoAnne Yates writes with impressive clarity about the incredibly complex origins of the information age. By focusing on the life insurance industry and by stressing both continuity and change, she provides a key to understanding the crucial relationship between technology vendors and users. -- Thomas P. Hughes, author of Human-Built World
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Life Insurance in the Tabulator Era
1. Insurance at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
2. First Impressions of Tabulating, 1890–1910
3. The Push toward Printing, 1910–1924
4. Insurance Associations and the Flowering of the Tabulator
Era
Part II: Life Insurance Enters the Computer Era
5. Early Engagement between Insurance and Computing
6. Insurance Adoption and Use of Early Computers
7. Incremental Migration during the 1960s and 1970s
8. Case Studies in Insurance Computing: New England Mutual Life and
Aetna Life
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
JoAnne Yates, Deputy Dean and Distinguished Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is the author of Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management, also published by Johns Hopkins.
Structuring the Information Age makes educating reading and is an important contribution to our understanding of the connection between past and present in the transformation of socio-economic systems. -- Asaf Darr Administrative Science Quarterly Brilliant volume... Yate's study of the adaptation of information-processing resources in insurance has greatly widened the horizons of our understanding of the dynamics of technological development in a business setting. Business History Review Yates has contributed another original study to the history of information technology. -- Kenneth Lipartito Technology and Culture A welcome addition to a growing body of literature on the history of the use of computers by businesses, and a good model for other scholars to use. -- James W. Cortada American Historical Review Structuring the Information Age examines the history of information technology in the United States by shifting focus away from the producers of that technology and toward a kind of end user that has heretofore received little attention-large-scale corporations, which easily rank among the leading information-technology (it) consumers. -- Timothy Alborn Journal of Interdisciplinary History This timely and important work is the first scholarly history devoted to the use of information technology within a single American industry. -- Thomas Haigh EH.Net This valuable addition to the historiography of the computer looks at new technologies from a user's viewpoint. Here the user is the life insurance business, which is an appropriate choice because it has always been an information-intense business. IEEE History Center Newsletter Structuring the Information Age will interest two types of readers: those who are concerned with the development, adoption, and impact of technology and those who are concerned with the growth, strategies, and economic influence of business organizations. -- Daphne A. Jameson Journal of Business and Technical Communication
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