258 RÜDIGER HACHTMANN
and Product Testing), for example, visited Japan in the 1980s in order
to study the Toyotist production regime on site. Yet this visit does not
seem to have left any visible marks on the GDR industry.^43 Likewise, the
SED regime was very much the loser when it came to “the pursuit of the
chip”—the attempt to catch up to the level of digitalization in the West.
Competition on Unequal Footing: The Digitalization
of Industrial Production in East and WestThe increasingly widespread introduction of digital information and com-
munications technology (ICT) from the 1970s onward led to the disap-
pearance of certain occupational groups, such as typesetters, who had
been part of a proud working-class aristocracy before they were made
redundant by phototypesetting machines. Although the elimination of
certain occupational groups as a result of technological progress had
been part of industrial history since the very beginning, the digital revo-
lution fundamentally redefi ned the workplace for all employees. Its most
important components were not only the ever-growing storage, informa-
tion, and computing capacities of individual computers, but also the de-
velopment of networks, initially channeled through external centers and
then later provided via servers.
As early as the late 1970s, all major companies in West Germany with
more than fi ve hundred employees had their own mainframes.^44 During
this decade, networked ICT also made its way into actual manufacturing
processes. Production workers, whose work used to be relatively auton-
omous in individual production or within the framework of small-scale
series production, found themselves increasingly dependent on external
actors and factors. Microelectronic programs progressively came to con-
trol the workfl ows of lathe operators, for example; these programs, how-
ever, were largely managed externally, by a new, superior occupational
group, namely the programmers. The qualifi cations and experience of
lathe operators lost value as a result.^45
Likewise, the job descriptions of those who were responsible for the
digitalization of production continued to change. From the 1990s, the
creative development activities, which had been tasks done by engineers
in the automotive industry and its suppliers well into the 1970s, were
pushed aside and replaced by communication and coordination tasks; ac-
cordingly, the engineers themselves were more strongly integrated into
the “command chains” within the factories, changing their job profi les
as a result. Business and management skills became the top priority over
time, while, at the same time, engineers were assigned to an increasing
number of steps within workfl ows. To the dismay of the engineers at