2 Individuals ’ Skills as Information Processing

The basic argument of this chapter is that when we say a person is “skilled,” “ semiskilled,” or “professional,” we are describing what sort of an information-processing system he or she is. If organizations have to deal with uncertainties, then someplace in the organization there have to be people who bring information to bear on those uncertainties. The flow of unpredictable events to a worker’s or professional’s area of responsibility sets problems for that worker or professional. The capacity to use the news about what uncertainty has come in, to decide what to do and then to do it or arrange to have it done in a fast and effective way, is what a skill consists of. Thus, to describe a skill is to specify what sort of information-processing mechanism a given worker is. We will argue that the best way to describe the individual as an information-processing structure is by the routines he or she can use, and then by the principles he or she uses to decide which routine to invoke as chance brings in now this, now that task to be accomplished. If we then develop a theory of the conditions under which more complex information processing by individual workers is required, then we will have a theory of the skill distribution of different sorts of organizations, and of different parts of organizations. To develop such a theory we first develop the notion of routines, of routinization as part of what skill is, and the relation of the number of routines in the repertoire of a worker and the complexity of that worker as an information-processing system. WC also discuss the routinization of the relations among workers’ routines in “fordist” production. Fordist production allows the use of semiskilled workers in the production of complex products. The theory of routinization and skill will then give us a theory of the conditions under which complex production requires complex in-