The literature on professional work has recently seen a resurgent interest in the relationship between managers and organizational professional workers (e.g. Hodgson et al, 2015; Noordegraaf, 2015; Spence and Carter, 2014) and in the impact of new technology on professional work (e.g. Russell et al, 2016; Susskind and Susskind, 2015). Central to these two discussions is how autonomy in decision-making has shifted away from expert professionals and how management have assertively sought to encode bodies of technical knowledge, e.g. for capture in knowledge databases. There has however only been implicit recognition that the new technology used in performing professional work is typically selected and imposed by managers, rather than chosen by professionals themselves. As such, the primary aim of the research presented in this paper is to address a gap in the literature: how the management imposition of ICTs into the organisational professional setting has implications for our understanding of the changing nature of professional work. Specifically, via a study of IT service professionals, we consider how specific management-imposed ICTs might assert agency (Winner, [1980]1999) on the labour process of organizational professionals thus undermining their professional status.
We asked two research questions. Firstly we asked: to what extent do management-imposed ICTs place restrictions upon individual autonomy to determine workload, and schedule and perform work? Secondly, we asked: to what extent are specific ICTs employed to capture from professionals their individual expertise for corporate reuse, thus reducing the scope for the performance of work using professional expertise?
The study was undertaken across five different organisations in the UK. Firstly, 20 IT service professionals were closely observed processing incidents reported by system users. The notes taken were converted into data records representing the micro-level activity within the labour process. These records were analysed to identify the functionalities of the management-imposed ICTs used in the labour process. Secondly, 24 IT service professionals were interviewed to generate over 14 hours of fully-transcribed interview data. Thirdly, broader ethnographic data from observations across a total of 34 days were recorded in a journal. The interview transcriptions and journal notes were manually analysed through a process of reading, reflecting, open coding and modelling to identify how these professionals used and related to the management-imposed ICTs.
We identified ten different technological functionalities provided by the management-imposed ICTs. Six of these, including workflow management and ‘dataveillance’ functionalities, had a prescribing and/or intensifying effect on the labour process; four – various database technologies – served a managerial desire to shift expertise from the individual to the corporate, thus threatening professional status associated with expertise. Thus, our findings are that, in this context, ICTs operate in combination to prescribe and intensify the professional’s labour process and to wrest professional expertise from individual professionals via mechanisms of codification and capture.
The article adds to the knowledge in the aforementioned streams of enquiry, offering a novel theoretical perspective on the impact of ICTs on organizational professional work. Additionally, following Olakivi and Niska’s (2016) recent theory concerning the overlapping of managerial and professional discourses, the article highlights the central role played by ICTs as artefactual contributors to such overlapping discourses that situate organizational professional work within contexts of assertive management.
References:
Hodgson, D., Paton, S., and Muzio, D. (2015) ‘Something Old, Something New?: Competing Logics and the Hybrid Nature of New Corporate Professions’. British Journal of Management, 26( 4), p. 745–759.
Noordegraaf, M (2015) Hybrid professionalism and beyond: (New) Forms of public professionalism in changing organizational and societal contexts Journal of Professions and Organization, 2 (2): 187-206
Olakivi, A and Niska, M (2016) Rethinking managerialism in professional work: from competing logics to overlapping discourses. Journal of Professions and Organisation. DOI: 10.1093/jpo/jow007.
Russell, B., Trusson, C., and De, S. (2016) ‘The Ambiguities of ‘Managed Professionalism’: Working In and With IT’, in A. Wilkinson, D. Hislop, and C. Coupland (eds) Perspectives on Contemporary Professional Work: Challenges and Experiences. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 165-186.
Spence, C., and Carter, C. (2014) ‘An exploration of the professional habitus in the Big 4 accounting firms’. Work, Employment and Society, 28: 946-962.
Susskind, R., and Susskind, D. (2015) The Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform the Work of Human Experts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Winner, L ([1980]1999) Do artefacts have politics? In: McKenzie, D and Wajcman, J (eds) The Shaping of Technology (2nd Edition), Buckingham: Open University Press.