Electronic data processing, or EDP, rose to prominence in 1950s American business as a way to automate simple and regular tasks that involved large amounts of data. It was fast (comparatively), accurate, and transformative. And, like any new technology making its entrance into office life, it was met with profoundly mixed feelings.

Ida Russakoff Hoos, a renowned sociologist and a critic of systems analysis, noted in her 1960 HBR article (aptly titled “When the Computer Takes Over the Office”) that EDP’s sudden presence in the workplace provoked polar reactions that were “often wishful and sometimes biased.” On one hand, “the machine is seen as the master of men unless firm government control or a workers’ revolt intervenes” (it was the ’50s, after all); on the other, those who believed “that the innovations are simply a phase of technological progress which begin with the invention of the wheel.”

Marxism aside, I don’t need to call your attention to the parallels we’re experiencing today. Robots have already started taking over our jobs — unless you’re a programmer, in which case you can work for a $1,000 an hour on a boat. Everything is going to be ok, unless everything is going to be terrible.

But behind the fear, excitement, and macroeconomics of it all are the people and places that are deeply affected by new and different technology, day in and day out. That is where Hoos focused her research and her observations are remarkably prescient.

Hoos studied 19 San Francisco Bay Area-based organizations across industry types and sizes for two years, beginning in 1957. All had recently introduced EDP into their daily work. She focused on “the changing structure of organizations, shifting lines of authority and communications, effects on decision-making processes, and a variety of other administrative and industrial related questions.” Ultimately, she aimed to “promote a better understanding of the real effects of automation on the office.”

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What’s most evident in her findings is that large-scale strategic changes not only changed the nature of work; they also changed how people felt about their work, and how they interacted with colleagues and customers. And it didn’t exactly bring out the best in people, for good reason.

Broadly, EDM seemed to reverse the trend of a decentralized company and office. Prior, growth was associated with “a certain amount of dispersion of function and authority.” Now that data could be processed quickly, records could be kept centrally, reducing the need for branch-level paperwork. As a result, workers were often transferred, downgraded, or ultimately dismissed.

This consolidation of power disrupted the higher reaches of the org chart. “EDP executives display a strong tendency toward empire building,” writes Hoos, undercutting other departments and making independent decisions. Older vice presidents, not wanting to seem like “old fogies” or “opposed to progress,” rarely voiced dissent. But it hardly mattered: “‘Vice presidents in charge of’ find their official functions atrophied; there is little for them to be in charge of.”

Middle management wasn’t free from trouble, either. Jobs that had been used as a training ground to groom the next generation of leaders were transformed by the introduction of EDP. Eager professionals found themselves checking data for errors before it was processed, rather than taking initiative or proving shrewd judgment. “Such work is neither challenging nor rewarding, nor does it have the prestige which must compensate ambitious young men in their upward climb.” As a result, top talent left rather than risk stalling their careers.

Lower down on the rungs, the choice often seemed to be being replaced by a computer or being a servant to it. At one company with over 3,000 clerical workers, the introduction of EDP to replace two accounting functions left 286 people out of a job, with 982 others affected in some day-to-day way.

Hoos estimates that, generally speaking, for every five office jobs eliminated by EDP, one was created. She notes that key-punch operation — one of the main areas of job growth — is “universally regarded as a dead-end occupation, with no promotional opportunities.” Most key-punch operators she interviewed found their prior clerical work more interesting because they were up and about, interacting with colleagues and customers. Now, they complained that they were “chained to the machine.”

These are some of the specifics. When you step back, what’s most striking is that people at all stages of their careers noted that their raison d’etre disappeared with the introduction of the computer. When you train for one job your entire career, and then that job is suddenly taken by a machine, the small number of marketable skills you have almost become moot, Hoot observed. Older non-supervisory employees were particularly vulnerable. “In almost every case I have investigated, few marketable skills have been acquired by workers during the years on the job,” she laments. “Much of the knowledge is related directly to one company’s practices, and has little value in another business. Thus, many workers in the middle years find that their experience has no asset.” Supervisors were also hit hard because they were losing people — and the tasks those people did — to actually manage.

The anxiety and fear reached into other functions, too. Unaddressed, coping mechanisms became organizational liabilities. At one company, employees running tabulation machines (one of the functions frequently replaced by EDP) were suspected of “obstructionist tactics” like failing to meet deadlines, letting errors through, and outright refusing to do certain tasks with the mantra of “they can’t be done that way.” At another company, rumors flew among employees and department heads became defensive; as a result, everything became far less efficient. One supervisor reported lying to other district managers who asked about how the introduction of EDP might affect their own departments: “he ‘doesn’t dare tell them the truth’ for fear of possible repercussions.”

And yet Hoos reports that, amidst all this discontent, elite EDP managers didn’t acknowledge their company’s acrimonious atmosphere. One “asserted in all sincerity that they [employees] all ‘just love’ the changes. Moreover, he maintained, they are ‘thrilled with the challenge of automation.'”

“The failure to recognize the worker’s point of view typifies most EDP executives in firms I have studied,” remarks Hoos. “Their replies to questions about personnel problems generally reveal great ambivalence. Usually, they try to uphold the untenable and self-contradictory proposition that EDP affects systems, but not jobs.”

In many cases, these contradictions manifested themselves in reality with a “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” mentality that, well, hurt them. At one company, for example, employees whose tasks were replaced by EDP were transferred to lower-rung positions but received the same higher salary, stoking jealousy among those already in the lower-rung roles who were paid far less for the same work.

In other words, companies didn’t take into consideration how humans would relate to one another in a workplace where they also had to relate to machines. And the idea that management would talk openly with those whose jobs were vulnerable was treated “like asking condemned prisoners to sign their own death warrants!”

What can we learn from this today? There’s plenty of talk in the media about robots competing for our jobs, but it’s important that the human realities of technological advancement are discussed within organizations as well.

There are places where executives and managers can start, even if the research is in relatively early stages. How, for example, might employee behavior change when people work alongside machines? Do the types of tasks being replaced matter? Can you convince skeptical employees that a new technology being introduced is something to embrace instead of fear? And is there a future where humans and computers can work more effectively together?

After all, Ida Hoos is clear that she’s not out to indict the computer: “there need not be any machine breaking, such as took place in the seventeenth century, when the workers hurled their sabots into the machines to destroy them (giving rise to the term ‘sabotage’).” But she stresses that we need a more balanced view of technology introduction in order to apply “thought and action to important problems faced by management, labor, and the public at large.” Study, study, study this, she seems to be saying. Understand it not just in the macroeconomic, abstract, or short-term; know what it means to the individual who is excited, anxious, and fearful. We are still decidedly all of these things.