chines, published in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1976. According to the author of the technical manual, a “machine of governance” was any “digital device in a centralised governance and control system”. 136 It is important to note that the Soviet Lithuanian engineer determined that a “digital machine of governance” could work only as part of a centralised system of governance and control (valdymo ir kontrol s). 137 As was argued in the previous section, governance of both organisations and entire sectors was translated into cybernetic steering of systems in managerial theory. Similarly, the administrative actions of accounting and calculation had to be translated and entered into “machines of governance”. Cybernetic control was technically embodied in computers and embedded in other technological and social networks. 138 In the Soviet Union, such networks were usually called automated management systems (AMS). As Vidmer noted, AMS was “the most significant practical thrust of the cybernetic school” in Soviet management. 139 Indeed, these systems were sometimes called “cybernetic management systems”. 140 In Soviet texts, automated management systems were defined in both broad and narrow terms. A broad definition was offered in a monograph about AMS published in Lithuanian SSR (1980). It defined an “automated management system” as both material and intellectual machinery, which involved A whole series of economic-mathematical methods, computing technologies, automatics and means of communications of governance, which enables the governing apparatus of an organisation (an enterprise, a ministry, an agency) to more efficiently govern an object. 141
A more narrow definition designated AMS as a computer-based set of programmes for accounting and other data processing to be used for governing purposes. However, as Conyngham noted, the Soviet AMS was formulated as “a man-machine decision-making system, in which some previously human decisions are transferred to the machine and in which all planning and opera-
136
J. Punys, Valdymo mašin teorija ir panaudojimas (Kaunas: KPI, 1976), 3. Punys, 3. 138 Edwards; Agar. 139 Vidmer, 420. 140 My translation of AMS (AVS in Lithuanian, ASU in Russian) is based on the translation as in Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). While Josephson and others used the Russian ASU in their English texts, I will use the English abbreviation AMS. There have been some other translations. For example, an “automated system of administration” was used in Conyngham, “Technology and Decision Making…,” 428. The translations “automated information system,” “automated control system” and “automated governance system” also occurred. In Lithuanian texts they have been abbreviated to AVS (automatin s valdymo sistemos). 141 Antanas epel , Automatizuotos valdymo sistemos ir skai iavimo technika Taryb Lietuvoje (patirtis ir perspektyvos) (Vilnius: Mintis, 1980), 8-9. 137
140