Lecture slides:
Video podcasts:
Week XI: Work and Information Technology

Guest Lecturer: Brian Hilligoss

Major Topics:
  • Cyberspaces or cybercells?
  • Decentering intellectual labor and the problem of info and knowledge outsourcing
  • Returns on labor in industrial and information work
  • Work at a distance and the problems of control and trust, collaboration, and authenticity
  • The subcontracting economy: six-figure temporary employees
  • Obsolete job hierarchies, perilous "flat" structures
  • The problem of job qualifications and job titles
Assigned Readings:
  • This is a bit long, but Christopher May, in The Information Society: A Skeptical View (Cambridge, UK, Polity: 2002), 49-80, argues that work in the information economy might be even worse than it was in the industrial age.
  • Another major issue centers on the question of IT outsourcing overseas; Robert Cringley (of PBS) defines the contours of the outsourcing issue; others worry about the national security implications of letting "foreigners" have access to mission-critical code.
  • Here's an in-depth review of Richard Florida's book, The Rise of the Creative Class, on how IT is reshaping social geography.
  • Collaborative work over a distance is one of the new ways work is now done; here's a piece about SI's own Stephanie Teasley and her work in developing a "collaboratory;" and here's an article by Teasley herself.
  • Intra-firm collaboration is often easier than one might think, and it goes a long way to reduce the "stovepiping" of an organization's knowledge; group decision support systems (GDSS) are one variety of useful tools—maybe, but do they accurately map real-world social relations and cognitive processes?
Recommended Readings:
  • Still the best analysis of work in IT is Simon Head's The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) [amazon link] [Mirlyn link].
  • In case you hadn't guessed this, it turns out, according to Lisa Bowman, that "E-mail patterns map corporate structure"
  • For knowledge workers, problem-framing and negotiation are a key part of getting the job done; this piece is very good: Pentland, B.T. (1997) “Bleeding Edge Epistemology: Practical Problem Solving in Software Support Hot Lines,” in Barley, S.R. & Orr, J.E., Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in U.S. Settings (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1997).
  • The best set of readings about work in IT and about collaboratories is available in the Association for Computing Machinery's Web Portal (UM authentication required, then in the uppermost search box, click the button for "The ACM Digital Library " and in the pane, enter "CSCW").
  • As we've discussed, jokes are often a identity-building currency within subgroups, especially among professionals; here's a link that covers both technical support and reference-librarian tales.
  • For a bit of futurology, here's a piece from Metropolis magazine on "Reimagining Work."
  • Finally, lest you think that IT-assisted and -based work if free from incoherent and dangerous social and political forces, here's the tale of Wen Ho Lee, a hapless researcher at Los Alamos, a top US nuclear weapons lab.