The occupational culture of IS/IT personnel within organizations

As organizations' reliance on information technology (IT) continues to grow, the information technology personnel who support end users play an increasingly important role in the proper functioning of those organizations. In the present study, we interviewed information technology personnel (N=32) as well as other employees (N=89) to examine their intra-group and inter-group communications and assess the existence and importance of the occupational culture of IT personnel within organizations. We applied Trice's Occupational Subculture theoretical framework (1993) to examine the characteristics of the occupational culture of IT personnel and its relationships with other type of personnel within organizations. The results of our study suggest that IT personnel have established a distinct occupational culture within organizations, characterized, for example, by the use of technical jargon, primary value of technical knowledge, extreme and unusual demands on people in the profession related to the constant change of IT, feelings of superiority and a general lack of formal rules. Conflicts between IT occupational subcultures and other extant subcultures arise from cultural differences

[1]  Diane B. Walz,et al.  Revisiting the perennial question: are IS people different? , 1998, DATB.

[2]  Fred Niederman,et al.  A view from the SIGCPR conference: what have we learned in this decade? , 2002, CPRS.

[3]  Rob Kling,et al.  The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at , 2000 .

[4]  Gerald R. Adams,et al.  Book Review: Primary Prevention Practices.Martin Bloom. (1996). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. , 1998, Journal of Primary Prevention.

[5]  J. M. Beyer,et al.  Studying Organizational Cultures Through Rites and Ceremonials , 1984 .

[6]  J. Maxwell.  Understanding and Validity in Qualitative Research , 1992 .

[7]  Linda S. Marion,et al.  Information technology professionals as collaborative change agents : A case study from behavioral health care , 2005 .

[8]  J. Dutton,et al.  The Cultures of Work Organizations. , 1992 .

[9]  Rob Kling,et al.  Learning About Information Technologies and Social Change: The Contribution of Social Informatics , 2000, Inf. Soc..

[10]  Charmaine Barreto,et al.  The motivators and effects of formalized knowledge-sharing between employees through knowledge management initiatives: A multi-case study approach , 2002 .

[11]  B. Burrows.  Culture and organisations. Software of the mind , 1992 .

[12]  Carol D. Hansen.  Occupational Cultures: Whose Frame Are We Using? , 1995 .

[13]  J. Schofield.  Increasing the generalizability of qualitative research. , 1993 .

[14]  Elizabeth M. Weiss,et al.  Electronic monitoring in their own words: an exploratory study of employees' experiences with new types of surveillance , 2000 .

[15]  Barry Bozeman.  Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method , 2003 .

[16]  Harrison M. Trice,et al.  Occupational subcultures in the workplace , 1993 .

[17]  Jack J. Baroudi,et al.  The Information Systems Profession: Myth or Reality? , 1988 .

[18]  B. Mark.  Organizational culture. , 1996, Annual review of nursing research.

[19]  Constance Campbell,et al.  A Longitudinal Study of One Organizations Culture: Do Values Endure? , 2004 .

[20]  E. R. Hammer.  Research in Organizational Behavior , 1984 .

[21]  Dorothy E. Leidner,et al.  Review: A Review of Culture in Information Systems Research: Toward a Theory of Information Technology Culture Conflict , 2006, MIS Q..

[22]  Ritu Agarwal,et al.  Retention and the career motives of IT professionals , 2000, SIGCPR '00.

[23]  C. R. Franz,et al.  ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT, USER INVOLVEMENT, AND THE USEFULNESS OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS* , 1986 .

[24]  Rosío Alvarez,et al.  Confessions of an information worker: a critical analysis of information requirements discourse , 2002, Inf. Organ..

[25]  Fritz H. Grupe.  Information systems professionals and conflict of interest , 2003, Inf. Manag. Comput. Secur..

[26]  Dee G. Appley.  Beyond Culture , 1977 .

[27]  Kevin Crowston,et al.  Coordination and Collective Mind in Software Requirements Development , 1998, IBM Syst. J..

[28]  Derek Cameron,et al.  Chefs and Occupational Culture in a Hotel Chain: A Grid-Group Analysis , 2001 .

[29]  Steven Hornik,et al.  Communication skills of IS providers: an expectation gap analysis from three stakeholder perspectives , 2003 .

[30]  Magid Igbaria,et al.  Career Orientations of MIS Employees: An Empirical Analysis , 1991, MIS Q..

[31]  Jennifer A. Chatman,et al.  Culture as social control: Corporations, cults, and commitment. , 1996 .

[32]  J. Townsend,et al.  Adaptation and intracultural variation , 2000, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[33]  Matthew B. Miles,et al.  Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook , 1994 .

[34]  Rob Kling,et al.  Reconceptualizing Users as Social Actors in Information Systems Research , 2003, MIS Q..

[35]  J. Stanton,et al.  Information Technology, Privacy, and Power within Organizations: a view from Boundary Theory and Social Exchange perspectives. , 2002 .

[36]  김종식.  동아시아 문화와 경영, Geert Hofstede, Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values (Beverly Hills, CA:Sage Publications, 1980) ; and Cultures and Organizations : Software of the Mind (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1997) , 1999 .

[37]  P. Shalit.  The Silent Language , 1964 .

[38]  Zoran Sušanj,et al.  Organizational climate and culture , 2005 .

[39]  Lois W. Sayrs.  Interviews : an introduction to qualitative research interviewing , 1996 .

[40]  Alan Williams,et al.  Enterprise Cultures in the Global Economy , 1994 .

[41]  E. Schein.  The Corporate Culture Survival Guide , 1999 .

[42]  Michael L. Tushman,et al.  A Political Approach to Organizations: A Review and Rationale , 1977 .

[43]  Indira R. Guzman,et al.  Who is "the IT workforce"?: challenges facing policy makers, educators, management, and research , 2005, SIGMIS CPR '05.

[44]  Jeffrey M. Stanton,et al.  Information technology and privacy: a boundary management perspective , 2003 .

[45]  Sid L. Huff,et al.  How CIOs obtain peer commitment to strategic IS proposals: barriers and facilitators , 2001, J. Strateg. Inf. Syst..

[46]  François Guillemette,et al.  Handbook of Interview Research. Context and Method , 2003 .

[47]  M. Miles,et al.  The Qualitative Researcher's Companion , 2002 .

[48]  Martha E. Myers.  Motivation and performance in the information systems field: a survey of related studies , 1991, SIGCPR '91.

[49]  Rob Kling,et al.  The control of information systems developments after implementation , 1984, CACM.