As the size of American corporations grew old ways of keeping track of employees became impractical. Increasingly, owners and managers didn't know their employees. Increasingly, workers ctended to be immigrants from very foreign cultures, people who didn't necessarily share the assumptions of the Native Protestant middle class. New technologies arose that made it possible to track these employees, to keep objective records of their work patterns. One of the key technologies was the development of synchronized clock systems. In the ad to the left, from 1908, management (in the rooms at the bottom) can make sure the entire building runs according to a central schedule. The system will work no matter who or what is in the rooms--the ad shows them as identical, blank spaces, ready to be filled with whatever management needs. Any group of employees entering this building would assume the pattern of discipline and regularity sent out from the master clock below. This 1911 ad, for the company that later became IBM. demonstrates how new time keeping technology made it possible to sort out productive from unproductive workers, to reveal differences that were concealed from ordinary sight. In a culture where no one can change their place--where a peasant stays always a peasant and a noble always a noble, a farmer follows his father and a daughter her mother--no one needs to spend much time making sense out of anyone's identity. People are what they appear to be, because they can't be anything else. A gross overstatement, but with a kernel of truth. In cultures which don't emphasize the posibility of becoming someone else, identity is not much of a problem. But once you've opened up the possibility that people can change their station in life, their "rank," their identity, how do you give how do you give order to change?