Search

This article examines corporate labor and gender relations in transatlantic perspective. It argues that the gendered communication of IBM’s Thomas Watson Sr. shaped labor relations in his company’s West German subsidiary. In the United States, Watson acted as a business progressive, expanding internationally, opening professional careers to young women, and implementing welfare capitalist measures. When IBM took tighter control of its foreign operations after World War II, Watson sought to implement welfare capitalist measures in the subsidiaries abroad. His wife Jeanette by his side, he presented himself as the caring “pater familias.” German IBM employees embraced Watson’s conservative rhetoric of the IBM family but continued to join national unions and formed a works council, thwarting the major welfare capitalist goal of averting labor organization. Against such local labor practices, gendered communication undergirded a loyal workforce even in critical situations, an overlooked factor contributing to the company’s success.

This article provides a close study of information processing at Allianz, a West German insurance company, in the two decades following World War II. It contributes an international perspective to the history of information by analyzing corporate information technology decisions outside the United States and by tracing exchanges about information technology between insurance managers in the United States and Germany. The article argues that Allianz managers, claiming that electronic information processing would reduce office operating costs, meticulously sought to document these savings to legitimate their computer acquisition in an otherwise adverse economic and political climate.

US computer manufacturers-including IBM and Remington Rand-expanded into Europe after World War II. The companies overcame resistances and adjusted to different market conditions; how they did this, and why IBM succeeded more than others, is examined here. This article argues that IBM adeptly managed-or engineered-relationships with foreign governments and stakeholders through a European-wide manufacturing system and European research laboratories.

This essay advocates for international histories of computing that either compare computing in two or more countries or that investigate interactions between countries. While the first are suited to identify causal factors, the latter augment social and cultural histories.