Disciplining Innovation? Mobile Information Artefacts in a Telco Innovation Center

This chapter introduces the pattern of bargains with the devil as a means of examining the adoption and use of mobile information artefacts. It argues that, in contrast to other attempts to impose discipline on innovation work practices, the introduction of mobile information artefacts is requested by knowledge workers. Vendor advertising plays a tempting role: proclaiming that the artefact is a consumer good for the knowledge-worker and a productivity tool for the employer. This enlightenment--and deception- -results in knowledge workers persuading their employer by appropriating the productivity discourse of the vendor. There follows a honeymoon phase of play and pleasure for these “techies.” But this is the prelude to destruction, as the knowledge-worker faces demands for their promised productivity. The artefact disciplines their innovation work, even erodes it; thus the situation of the employment relationship within relations of consumption results in the knowledge-worker (and their employer) being exploited by the vendor.

Professional Dimension of IT Specialists' Social Role

This chapter gives the opportunity to describe and analyze how IT specialists construct their professional reality and how they perform their roles. Nowadays companies (or top management) influence its employees in multiple aspects. Thus, professional relations should be investigated in the terms of mutual interactions within the organization, which is the main topic of the chapter. Often, top management tries to conclusively define (consciously or unconsciously) what the organization is. It means that workers of lower levels in such companies are manipulated by their higher-level colleagues. Sometimes this influence, albeit both hierarchical and controlling, leaves some space for the development of more equal bonds. In other organizations, manipulation is not a part of the standard work climate. The relations between the employees are, in such organizations, based on rituals and direct communication. The most important detail of this construction is to take care of every interaction between all organization’s actors. In this chapter, I intend to describe work relations and other aspects of everyday work life of IT professionals. Empirical material is derived from the field research conducted during 2002-2004 in two stages with different intensity of data gathering. The first stage of the research concerned a software company creating customized business software “to meet the requirements of clients.” The second stage was based on interviews with IT professionals from different organizations including software companies, international corporations, and also IT departments within companies operating in different business branches. Complete analysis of gathered material is presented in a doctoral thesis (Postula, 2007). Therefore, in case of some discontinuity of considerations in this chapter I would refer to the full text.

High-Tech Workers, Management Strategy, and Globalization

Based on qualitative interviews with Seattle area high-tech workers, this chapter explores their positioning within and reaction to globalization processes. Looking especially as cost-cutting labor strategies of contingent employment, importation of foreign workers, and the outsourcing of professional high-tech work, it is argued that these are essentially restrictive employment strategies that benefit employers at the expense of employees. While some of the interviewees more or less approved of these practices as logical from the corporate perspective, and were confident that their jobs were too complex to be at risk, most are questioning these processes and some were actively trying to organize in an effort to halt or at least slow down such trends. How and why high-tech workers accommodate or resist management policies and practices they disagree with is analyzed with attention to the impact of ideology.

"Boundary-Spanning" Practices and Paradoxes Related to Trust Among People and Machines in a High-Tech Oil and Gas Environment

This chapter follows subsea engineering coordinators (SEC) at Statoil, a major Norwegian oil company, and their collaboration with subsea engineering/operational support personnel and external vendors. This is a high-tech business that tends to be described by formal procedures and a strict division of labor, or in other words, strict hierarchy and market coordination mechanisms. Still, engineers in this setting perform substantial informal boundary work to be able to do their work efficiently. Their self-definition and devotion is realized through boundary-spanning interaction with various material resources and through extensive management of trust. The consequence of this knowledge intensive operational practice is that the engineers have to live continuously with paradoxes. In the light of the situation of these engineers, we address some of the dynamics of collaboration and control that such professionals must cope with in today’s high-tech environments.

Social Relations and Knowledge Management Theory and Practice

This chapter proposes a new hypothesis to the refusal to cooperate from qualified professionals and supports it with five arguments drawn from the fields of sociology of work and professions. The management of knowledge (KM) is based, among other things, on a system for pooling knowledge to which employees must contribute. Nevertheless, the experts of KM persistently note the relative failure of knowledgepooling practices, particularly among the highly qualified professionals. Some experts have little to say about this issue and the scarce explanations they provide are highly unsatisfactory sociologically speaking and inspired by a folk psychology discourse. Sociology of work and professions, particularly, provide the grounds for alternative and more solid analysis of the phenomenon.

Old and New Timings in a High-Tech Firm

We use a lens of organizational time and timings in a recent historical study of high-tech engineers in one leading U.S. firm, Techco. Our aim is to arrive at a nuanced account of whether such engineers emerge as being either highly privileged knowledge workers or as being “caught in the middle” between management and labor with no shelter from the harshest dynamics of capitalism. At the time being studied, senior management had introduced a range of measures, the effect of which was to disrupt existing organizational timings and so to threaten both the work and the self-identity of engineers. However, we argue that such disruption does not originate solely from management action. Instead the speed of technological change itself threatens to swamp the engineers, the very architects of such progress at the same time as new notions of organizational space render them more visible to senior management gaze.

The Information Society

The discourse on the information society is characterised by a democratic ideal of “general access.” In this chapter, we follow the transformation of such an ideal as the discourse of the information society is translated by the Swedish parliament and implemented in a high-tech region north of Stockholm. We will see that as the discourse is being implemented, it incorporates ethnic categorical boundaries that structure the region and segregates the community where it is being implemented. The main argument of the chapter is that categorical inequalities are embedded in the economic rationality/business logic that structures the discourse on the information society, resulting in socioeconomic, geographic, and technological segregation.

Trustworthiness as an Impression

This chapter discusses current developments in the theory of trust and distrust drawing upon a field study between solution providers and their clients in the IT industry in Poland. It addresses the question of how the suppliers (trust-takers) establish the image of being trustworthy, and how their trustworthiness is in turn examined by their potential customers, when cooperation takes place in the context of the openly expressed lack of trust (or distrust). Trust in the chapter is seen as a tranquilizer that suspends the feeling of vulnerability and enables action regardless of uncertainty involved in the situation. Cooperation is understood in dramaturgic terms--the supplier is to produce an impression that will make them appear trustworthy as perceived by the customer.

Language Norms and Debate in Triple Helix Organizations

Commercialization activities combining the discoveries of one occupational group, such as scientists, with the commercial skills of managers involve interactions across occupational cultures. This chapter considers how dissent can be interpreted as a sign of dysfunction or cause for concern. The context of the study is temporary Australian hybrid industry-research organizations composed of academic, government, and industry personnel. Semi-structured interviews of twenty scientists, engineers, and managers focused on their experiences and perceptions of occupational culture, including styles of debate. Distinctive patterns of argumentation were identified as typical of commercial and research occupations. Extended argumentation contributed to knowledge creation, and played a role in maintaining a hierarchy among research institutions. Members of research and commercial occupational subcultures working in Australian CRCs reported frustration and reduced effectiveness of argumentation due to different norms for dissent. Initial expectations of similarity, built upon identification of occupational hierarchies, heighten the impact of these differences.

Employee Turnover in the Business Process Outsourcing Industry in India

In this chapter, we explore the problem of high turnover in the high-tech BPO sector in India, where relatively well-educated employees are performing a variety of primarily low skill, low cost jobs. We highlight the various approaches employers are taking to solve the turnover problem. As we will argue, some of these strategies are fairly traditional, focusing on various instrumental incentives to promote employee retention, while some others are new and rather radical, particularly the articulation of an organizational and work culture tailor-made for the particular demographic profile of BPO employees: young, upper middle class, well-educated graduates. Based on anecdotal evidence and interviews with industry personnel, we sense some ambiguity regarding the effectiveness of these strategies. We argue that this ambiguity is a function of (a) the recent and rapid growth of the industry and the fact that firms are experimenting with a whole variety of retention strategies, and (b) the inability of firms to develop an integrated organizational culture that permits a focus on both longer term organizational performance, as well as retention.