An Institutional Analysis Of The Formation Of Jobs In Software Work In .

List of FiguresFigure 2-1: The ‘static picture’ of changes in computer systems development(Friedman and Cornfield, 1989)Figure 3-1: The role of skills in the relationships between various social groups whohave an interest in taking over a task area2732Figure 3-2: Relationships in the theoretical model.43Figure 5-1: IBM programmer ad, 195272Figure 5-2: IBM advertisement for Business Analysts, 195677Figure 5-3: Honeywell’s ad for ‘Computer method analysts’, 1959.79Figure 5-4: IBM’s programmer ad, 195681Figure 5-5: General Electric’s ad for programmers. 195984Figure 5-6: Sperry Univac ad for new computer, New Yorker, 2 Oct. 197890Figure 5-7: Rand’s programmer ad, 1954.92Figure 5-8: SDC’s programming ad, 195794Figure 6-1: Univac’s ad. 1955109Figure 6-2: IBM’s Service Bureau Corporation’s ad, 1957.112Figure 6-3: RCA’s ad for programmers, analysts and sales representative. 1959124Figure 6-4: IBM’s ad for attracting programmer trainees, 1959126Figure 6-5: IBM’s ad for ‘Applied Science Representatives’, 1954128Figure 6-6: IBM’s ad for programmers, 1954.129Figure 6-7: CDC advertisement for programmer trainees, 1968.131Figure 6-8: IBM’s ad for college graduates, 1961133Figure 6-9: Two sample ads from EDP schools, 1967135Figure 6-10: IBM’s programmer ad in Ebony magazine, 1968138Figure 6-11: IBM’s programmer ad in Ebony magazine, 1968145Figure 8-1: Microsoft University ad, 1988212Figure 8-2: Employment in U.S. IT industries, 1990, 200322911

1 Introduction"To be ‘redundant’ means to be supernumerary, unneeded, of no use - whatever theneeds and uses are that set the standard of usefulness and indispensability. Theothers do not need you; they can do as well, and better, without you. There is noself-evident reason for your being around and no obvious justification for your claimto the right to stay around. To be declared redundant means to have been disposedof because of being disposable [ ]." (Bauman, 2004, emphasis in the original)1.1. BackgroundIn the morning of March 12th, 2008, Bill Gates appeared before the US Congress’Committee on Science and Technology to tell them about “the shortfall of scientists andengineers with expertise to develop the next generation of breakthroughs”:“MR. ROHRABACHER: There are a lot of other people in the society rather thanjust the top people.MR. GATES: That's right.MR. ROHRABACHER: It's the B and C students that fight for our country andkept it free so that people like yourself would have the opportunity that you've had.Those people, whether or not they get displaced by the top people from anothercountry is not our goal. Our goal isn't to replace the job of the B student with Astudents from India.MR. GATES: That's right. And -MR. ROHRABACHER: And the B students deserve to have good jobs and highpaying jobs.MR. GATES: That's right. And what I've said here is that when we bring in theseworld-class engineers, we create jobs around them.MR. ROHRABACHER: Okay.MR. GATES: And if we don't -- so the B and C students are the ones who get thosejobs around these top engineers. And if these top engineers are forced to work, sayin India, we will hire the B and C students from India to work around them.MR. ROHRABACHER: Okay. But, according to “BusinessWeek”, there arealmost 150,000 programmers [who] have lost their job in this country since the year2000. Now my reading of all of this is that there are plenty of people out there tohire, but people want to have the top-quality people from India and China and12

elsewhere, and they're willing to let these 150,000 American computer programmersjust go unemployed.MR. GATES: Actually, “BusinessWeek” doesn't do surveys. I think you'rereferring to a quote in “BusinessWeek” from an Urban Institute study -MR. ROHRABACHER: That's what I said, according to “BusinessWeek”, yeah.MR. GATES: Well, they quote -- it's not according to “Business Week”.MR. ROHRABACHER: Okay.MR. GATES: There was a study that a group at Urban Institute did that was deeplyflawed in terms of how it defined what an engineer is. When we say that these jobsare going begging, we're in business every day.MR. ROHRABACHER: Mm-hmm.MR. GATES: We're not kidding about it. These jobs are going begging, and theresult is that in a competitive economy -MR. ROHRABACHER: You'd have to raise wages.MR. GATES: No, no -MR. ROHRABACHER: -- if the job is going begging, you raise wages, now in -MR. GATES: No.MR. ROHRABACHER: Okay.MR. GATES: It's not an issue of raising wages. These jobs are very, very, veryhigh-paying jobs.MR. ROHRABACHER: Okay -MR. GATES: And we are hiring as many of these people as we can.MR. ROHRABACHER: Let me give you one example -CHAIRMAN GORDON: Mr. Rohrabacher, if you don't mind, we'll finish this onthe second round.MR. ROHRABACHER: You know, I am one of the guys that helped Kosovobecome independent, and I'm on the Foreign Relations -- hearing there. Maybe atthe reception tonight, which you're going to be at, maybe we can continue thisdiscussion.CHAIRMAN GORDON: I’m sure [Mr. Gates] will be excited to know you’ll dothat.(Laughter)” (Microsoft, 2008) 11Microsoft (2008) ‘Bill Gates: Testimony before the Committee on Science and Technology, U.S.House of Representatives’, ogy-u-s-house-of-representatives/ published 12 Mar 2008,accessed 30 Jun 2011.13

As Mr. Gates would admit, contrary to the popular images of ‘computer geeks’ and a historyfull of genius inventors and entrepreneurs, “there are a lot of other people” involved in theso-called information technology (IT) revolution. Unlike “the top people”, however, weknow very little about the jobs and working lives of those who carried out much of theactual work; i.e. those who have designed, developed, operated and maintained informationand communication technologies across the new “information society” (Blok and Downey,2003; Webster, 2006;). This brief exchange, by far the most heated part of the day, isillustrative of their situation in the society: they are everywhere but nowhere to be seen.They work with information, but there is very little information about them. One cannot besure about what happened to those “150,000 programmers”; unlike Bill Gates, they are onlyrepresented in abstract and debatable figures.At the heart of the matter, as Gate’s skillful twist on the issue shows, is how to define whatan engineer (or any other IT job) is. Recent research suggests that it is by no means clearwhat constitutes an IT job and who the IT workers are (Kaarst-Brown and Guzman, 2005).This is perhaps most evident in the huge differences that exist between various estimates ofthe number of IT workers: between just under 2 million to over 5 million in the year 2000(see National Research Council (NRC), 2001: Appendix B). Nor it has been possible toclassify IT jobs within any stable system of occupational classification. According to theU.S. NRC Committee on Workforce Needs in Information Technology:‘Definitions of data categories (e.g. the definitions for items such as “computerscientist” or “systems analyst”) which are necessarily relatively stable over time, donot necessarily reflect the IT job titles of today because new types of jobs emergequickly in the IT sector. In particular, data categories are too coarse and do notreflect important distinctions between IT jobs.’ (NRC, 2001: xvi)Even certain terms like ‘programmer’ or ‘systems analyst’, which have been continuouslyused for the past 60 years, now refer to very different jobs with a diverse range of roles andresponsibilities, requiring different sets of skills and forming part of different career paths(NWCET, 2003).Closely related is how one should differentiate between the so-called “world-classengineers” around whom jobs are supposedly created and the normal (‘B or C class’)programmers. This is not simply a matter of job evaluation and wage differentials. It ratherconcerns, more fundamentally, how the constitution of skills, their formation in individuals14

(training) and the allocation of responsibilities and rewards that go with them are decided. 2Jobs emerge when an activity is acknowledged as a form of work that can be assigned toindividuals and is worthy of remuneration. Occupations arise when these localacknowledgements become more widespread and new institutional arrangements emerge tostructure their work and shape their relationships with employers, etc. (Nelsen and Barley,1997). Often at the center of various forms of institutional support is the provision oftraining and protection of individuals’ skills (licensure in the case of professions, retrainingrights in union contracts). But in the absence of stabilized IT jobs, one can hardly expect tofind occupationally defined skills and skill levels. This raises the question why are IT jobscontinuously changing and differentiating. How is IT work related to the wider institutions,especially those concerned with formation, recognition and utilization of skills’ in workers.Is there something special about IT work, or are other jobs and the way working life isorganized undergoing a more fundamental change? And is there a link between the two?The conversation above also shows that the supply of IT workers is a cause of concern forpolicy makers. IT workers play an increasingly vital role in the economy (Freeman andSoete, 1994) and governments have recognized the need for devising policies that helpbuilding an IT workforce (e.g. The Twenty-First Century Workforce Commission Act inU.S.). Much of these efforts have been driven by a perceived shortage of IT workers as wellas a belief in the potential of IT for job creation and economic growth. Governments want toknow what skills to invest in, and how best to train and retain IT workers. Lack ofunderstanding of how and why IT jobs change has made their plans for training IT workersproblematic (NRC, 2001).1.2. Statement of the problemIn this study, my primary question is why IT jobs are not institutionalized in the way manyother occupations have been? The first answer that springs to mind is “because of constanttechnological change”. But it seems too simplistic to assume that technological change is theprimary cause of differentiation and fragmentation of IT jobs. There are other occupationsthat have been subject to technological change but show no indication of significant change(see Gallie, 1991). Moreover, it is people in IT jobs who often bring about technologicalchange in IT. The question then, would be why (and how) people do this to their jobs. At thevery least, a satisfactory explanation must unpack this relationship and place it within itssocial context. More fundamentally, one could argue that taking technology as the primarycause reduces jobs to their material aspects whereas jobs are social constructions that change2By skill I mean the capacity to accomplish a task (cf. Freidosn, 2001: 25). It may be gained throughexperience or education and usually has productive value (see Green, 2013: Ch. 2).15

meaning and significance as a result of changes in the social environment (see Barley,1988). Therefore one must look for alternative and more complicated explanations beyond asimple technological one.The unstabilized status of IT jobs is interesting for other reasons as well. Historical andsociological studies of professions have shown that when a group of workers have skills thatare highly valued (or in high demand), they create a monopoly of skill and raise barriers tothe entry of ‘others’ (e.g. Larson, 1977; Perkin, 1989). Given the persistent shortage of ITworkers, which started very early in the history of the field, one could hypothesize that theycould, in principle, create such a monopoly and control the emerging labor market in orderto establish their positions and privileges in the society and across organizations. But thisnever happened: IT workers seemed powerless (if not care-free) in exerting any influenceover their labor market or even changes in their jobs. Instead, IT became an enabler for everexpanding businesses that, in the process of globalization, crossed all borders in search ofcheap labor or valuable skills. As Mr. Gates pointed out “in a competitive economy”, “ifthese top engineers are forced to work, say in India, we [in the industry] will hire the B andC students from India to work around them.”To be sure, professionalization of IT work has been high on the agenda of IT workers andacademicians for a long time (e.g. Orden 1967; Denning, 2001, Ensmenger, 2001a). Theyhave produced an extensive knowledge-base, established professional bodies and developedelaborate higher education programs. Some groups have also made extensive efforts toestablish a scientific ‘objective’ basis for the profession under such banners as ‘ComputerScience’, ‘Software Engineering’ or even the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). Others,not being content with a purely technical education, have emphasized the social and ethicalaspects of IT workers’ role (e.g. Myers, Hall and Pitt, 1996; Walsham, 1996; Dahlbom &Mathiassen, 1997; Kling, 2003). Yet all these efforts seem to have had little effect on therapidly changing world of IT work: professional bodies suffer from very low membershiprates while educational programs witness widening of the gap between theory and practice(Abbott, 2005; Iivari, Hirschheim and Klein, 2008).The academic Information Systems (IS) departments and programs are probably the epitomeof the effects of the continuously changing mix of jobs and skills. On the one hand, ISscholars have asked themselves (over and over) whether or not IS is a discipline and has acore, and if so, what is it? (See, among others, Banville and Landry, 1989; Paul, 2002; Kingand Lyytinen, 2006; Somers, 2010). The answers to these questions have often been(implicitly or explicitly) related to what IS scholars should teach (e.g. Markus, 1999; King16

and Lyytinen, 2004). On the other hand, cyclic fluctuations in the enrolment figures of ISprograms have sparked discussions about the credibility of IS programs and relevance of itsteachings to practitioners ‘real’ concerns and needs (e.g. Trauth and Hafner, 2000; Glass,2007; Looney and Akbulut, 2007; Panko, 2008; Bullen et al., 2009, Riemenschneider et al.,2009; Davidson, 2011; Firth et al., 2011; Looney et al., 2014). But despite all their efforts tobe academically respectable and practically relevant, IS departments seem to be losingground in both areas. 3All these issues point to the necessity of understanding why IT jobs have been continuouslychanging and fragmenting. It must be noted that, as indicated above, IT jobs havenevertheless been shaped by the institutional context within which they emerged andevolved. It is my contention that the specific context of emergence of IT work in the USplayed a significant role in setting the trajectory of IT jobs. More precisely, I argue that, inthe absence of governmental intervention aimed at stabilizing the labor market, decisionsmade and policies adopted by IT corporations involved in the dynamics of product market(s)have led to destabilization of IT workers and effectively prevented the formation of a solidoccupational collectivity. In the absence of lineages (organizational and occupational careersand connections that bond workers together), jobs became transitory in an essential sense:their practices, their role and responsibilities, all became subject to rapid and seeminglyuncontrollable change with deteriorating effects for their claims to authority and legitimacy.How did this happen? It was surely not an automatic outcome of changes in thetechnological component of jobs. As I seek to demonstrate in this research, for a period oftime, despite rapid technological change, jobs and careers seemed to be stabilizing, largelythanks to favorable corporate HR policies that sought to retain valuable skills in individuals.However, with the decline of IBM and transformation of competition in the IT market, thesituation changed: Not only new skills came to be valued but also the new dominantcompanies felt no responsibility towards training individuals or keeping skilled individuals.The new norms of employment relationship that emerged in the wider economy allowedcorporations to feel free from any obligation to provide employment security (or eventraining) and therefore, skills became the responsibility and liability of individuals.Throughout both periods, the effectiveness of corporate decisions (in setting the terms ofemployment and dealing with workers) was largely due to government policies that lentsupport to corporations rather than workers.3A study of recent college graduates after the financial crisis had found that 14.7 percent of IS majorswere unemployed. The average unemployment rate of the group of graduates studied was 7.9%. SeeKirkwood, L (2013) ‘Art majors jump ahead of tech grads in landing jobs’, USA Today, 30 Jul, 2013.17

Moreover, IT workers became the harbingers of the new forms of work and IT jobs wereconsidered a ‘model’ for future white-collar jobs (e.g. Kanter, 1995). In the new world ofwork, corporations can (are allowed and powerful enough) to set the standards of ’skillrequirement’ without having any commitment to provide those skills or to retain and retrainskilled employees. In the new employment relationship, the onus is on the (isolated)individual to show his/her continued worth. Thus, according to Castells (2001: 93), the new‘informational society’ demands ‘self-programmable labor’, that is, “anyone with thecapacity to develop skills as required by a changing market” and will pay well for those‘talents’ (see also Castells, 2010: xxiii). But, whether this reflects arbitrarily set skill‘requirements’ or fluctuations in the market, the new political economy of skills has madeeven the best jobs transitory. Once those skills are expired, lives spent learning the “wrong”skills are considered a form of ‘human waste’ that must be discarded. Unless they engage in‘life-long learning’, those deemed redundant by “the market” will find themselves n

The London School of Economics and Political Science . An Institutional Analysis of the Formation of Jobs in Software Work in the United States, 1945-2001. Roohollah Honarvar . A thesis submitted to the Department of Management of the London School of Economics for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, London, April 2015 . 1