Localized Globalization: Gender and Capitalist Culture at IBM in the United States and Germany

In the 1930s, IBM implemented Welfare Capitalist measures in its US operations, from air-conditioned workplaces to a new pension fund. The company also hired and promoted women for corporate leadership positions. After reorganizing its international operations in 1949, IBM sought to implement its corporate culture and values abroad, including in the West German subsidiary. While German social laws already surpassed some of IBM’s Welfare Capitalist insurance programs, other programs such as the open door policy only caught on slowly. To the disdain of IBM’s chairman Thomas J Watson, the company had to accept a works council, required by German co-determination law. Likewise, the roles and identities of women within IBM Germany remained tied to German postwar ideas about women and work. While the American parent company worked hard at creating a globalized labor and gender identities, employees in its German subsidiary appropriated these values into their local culture.

Based on records from the IBM Corporate Archive in Somers, NY, and employee magazines held at the volunteer-run museum Haus zur Geschichte der Datenverarbeitung in Sindelfingen, Germany, the paper analyzes IBM’s internationalization efforts. Sociologists like Manuel Castells and others have identified the advent of an informationally mediated society with globally homogenizing ideas about women and work. Deconstructing assumptions about gender, labor and global capitalism, this paper by contrast reveals the persisting variety of capitalist cultures even within the Cold War coalition of the presumably homogenous “West.”