A National Authority but . . . : UCSD Work Expert Toils in Anonymity at Home

Pick up almost any national newspaper or magazine article over the past decade discussing changing industrial technology and role of labor and the chances are good that an analysis by UC San Diego professor Harley Shaiken will be included.

Since 1980, Shaiken has appeared in almost 100 articles on numerous aspects of work, industrial restructuring, and technology that apply to the question of America’s future competitiveness in the world economy.

Yet as respected as Shaiken is internationally for his expertise on these issues, he is known hardly at all outside a few specialized business circles in San Diego and Southern California, despite the implications that his work has for the developing international business community on both sides of the border.

Little Local Exposure

Shaiken is among many UCSD professors who work on the La Jolla campus in relative anonymity and with little local exposure at the same time their views are sought after elsewhere. Only recently have campus officials begun sustained efforts to link UCSD more closely to the San Diego community. In Shaiken’s case, the lack of publicity results in part from his holding down a heavy teaching and research load as a member of the Department of Communication, itself a little-understood part of a campus better-known for its medicine and science prowess.

“There really is an unfortunate image of UCSD as separate from San Diego,” Shaiken said the other day during an interview about his role at the university. “To really do well (as a professor) requires contact and focus with the local as well as national scene.

“But for various factors, it’s often easier for professors here who have come from the East Coast to remain plugged in there.”

Recruited From MIT

Shaiken himself is completing his second year at UCSD, having been recruited from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught in an interdisciplinary program on science, technology and society that looked at the social implications of science. While at MIT, Shaiken completed his first book, a look at the effects of automation and computers on workers.

“It was hardly an easy move to leave MIT,” he said, “but here, even with the school’s science reputation, I think there is a much broader range of issues and how they interact with technology . . . at MIT, as a non-scientist, you always felt a little cut off from the mainstream. At UCSD, there is a more open and stimulating environment (vis-a-vis) science and social issues.”

But Shaiken said that often it is easier for professors to orient their work toward East Coast academic centers because traditionally much research has been done there and because San Diego is still often viewed as “a place of the 1950s and 1960s and it does take time to nurture a social science/liberal arts background in San Diego.”

Alien to Easterners

He said that on frequent trips to the East Coast, colleagues speak about UCSD and San Diego as akin to working in a power plant on the Volga River in a Soviet nonentity.

“In general, I guess there is a broad tendency here not to so readily focus on the immediate area even though unquestionably some of the most important economic and social developments in the country are taking place here, right under our nose.

“In many ways, we are a university on the border and that raises all kinds of central questions that a lot of people are becoming aware of . . . we now have the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and the graduate school of International Relations and Pacific Studies.”

Shaiken has begun to develop key contacts in the area, especially with companies that are locating on the Mexican side of the border to take advantage of cheap labor at the same time new technology allows them to link up with other operations worldwide.

Area of Expertise

His position in the communications department falls into a generally defined area of study called “communications as a social force.”

“Many things that I do include a strong look at global production, at technology, at transfer of skills, which are all a proper part of communications,” Shaiken said. “In other areas of research I don’t relate directly to communications. But at bottom, the department’s broad coverage allows me to continue my cross-discipline type of work.”

Shaiken described the department as still poorly understood even among some people at UCSD, because the label “communication” calls to mind journalism rather than a more global picture of information and technology that is central to the UCSD program.

Unlike many academics, Shaiken enjoys both undergraduate teaching and his public persona as a frequent commentator in publications ranging from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times. He has not as yet, however, been asked by UCSD Extension to lecture or participate in community relations programs for the San Diego area.

‘More Relevant’

“Being used (in the media) in that way makes my research more relevant and accurate because it is tested against a public perception, and it allows me to reach a wider audience without having my work lose its scholarly value,” he said.

For example, Shaiken last week commented in the Los Angeles Times about the ramifications of the closure by General Motors of a Michigan auto plant producing a poorly selling model despite the willingness of employes there to labor under flexible work rules. The closure may undercut efforts by American manufacturers to persuade workers to accept new production approaches wanted by the companies in order to compete better with Japanese and Korean corporations, he said.

Shaiken uses contemporary examples as well in the four courses he teaches during the academic year at UCSD. His courses are popular, although he tries to limit them to 40 students each, and despite the fact that the material often involves reading monographs in technical language and tackling economic details that students have not previously encountered or perhaps not even have thought about.

Computer-Worker Link

One course looks at how computers have affected workers, and is based on his first book. “Even so, I think about fresh material all the time in order to make the course--and my own presentation--exciting,” Shaiken said. “For example, I used to stress technological unemployment as the result of computers but now in looking at the changing character of the work force, I think I put more emphasis on (technological) underemployment.

“The students do pick up on these things, and they understand that a lot of the material is on the cutting edge of the national debate that goes on in the country today. Every week, I try to bring in press clippings-- not my own--to relate the class to broader national and international themes.”

In a second course on how telecommunications and other automation allow companies to locate and produce around the world, Shaiken took his students to Tijuana for a day to look at plants set up there by American and Asian corporations.