Professional Dimension of IT Specialists' Social Role

Abstract

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.