2025 Theses Doctoral

Control Data: American Power and the Global Assembly Line, 1957-1992

Coon, Ella

This dissertation provides a history of Control Data Corporation from the company’s founding in 1957 to its dissolution thirty-five years later with the end of the Cold War. The project argues that the company’s management, responding to changing US industrial policy in the mid-1960s, pioneered a defining feature of US political economy in the post-Cold War era—global assembly—as a form of Cold War governance. Control Data’s global assembly line exploded the Fordist self-contained, vertically-integrated factory and strategically placed the constituent phases of manufacturing—research and development (R&D), marketing, assembly, and subassembly—around the world. Geographically segregating “high”-value production from “low”-value assembly work allowed management to optimize the price of basic manufacturing and internalize research costs. Reorganizing business also reordered the structure of American political and social power at home and abroad.

In making these points, the dissertation takes the reader from the establishment of the company in 1957 through initial attempts to build manufacturing capacity before globalizing production. The analysis, from there, follows corporate leadership as they constructed the company’s global assembly line in the mid-1960s and 70s—tracing their journey through rural assembly works in the Upper Midwest, right-to-work-states, War on Poverty-era “poverty plants,” expanding industrial parks in East Asia, and even behind the Iron Curtain. The dissertation thereafter analyzes a failed attempt to export this business model to computer services in the 1980s. The narrative highlights how, at each step along the way, Control Data management targeted female workers, and, in doing so, transformed the social base of manufacturing at home and abroad in a way that challenges standard narratives of “deindustrialization” and “post-Fordism.” The analysis closes with a discussion of how global assembly lines of the 1960s and 70s persisted past Control Data’s own dissolution at the end of the Cold War and gave way to the “global value chains” of the 1990s-2010s.

The project draws on a wide source base and uses a range of qualitative and quantitative methods to tell this history. These materials include a plethora of corporate archival papers as well as government documents ranging from local business licenses to white papers, diplomatic cables, field reports, trade and labor statistics, and beyond. In addition to this written record, the dissertation brings the voices of not only Control Data executives but also middle managers and line workers into the company’s history, through both discovery and invitation.