Alienation and Work: ICT Professionals

This chapter surveys the effectiveness of Marx’s theory of alienation by examining the experiences of ICT professionals within the workplace. This chapter studies whether Marx’s theory helps in creating the conditions to enable ICT professionals to articulate their working lives as they see them, within the general trends of the sector, and to theorise their experiences. The author first describes the participants of his setting, before going on to consider the meaning of professionalism for them. Next, the chapter examines previous and existing research into ICT professionals, defining the key characteristics that shape the ICT industry. It then takes this overarching environment and applies it to the ICT professionals who took part in his own research presenting a distillation of their verbatim views about their own work and experiences touching on practices such as work process engineering, ‘benching’, ‘body shopping’ and how management of their labour functions. The author concludes that the power structures within which ICT professionals work shapes the products they produce, further emphasising that technology and its development are primarily advancing the interests of capital contributing to professionals’ expressions and experiences of alienation.

Trajectories and Strategies in Global Software Outsourcing Relationships

Global software outsourcing (GSO) is the outsourcing of software development to sub-contractors outside the client organisation’s home country. India remains the unquestioned leader, registering average annual growth of more than 40% over the last decade and developing some US$3.6bn-worth of software for foreign clients in 1999/2000 (Heeks, 2000). Advice for potential GSO clients counsels starting small, starting at home, and starting with programmers (McFarlan, 1996). Many client organisations have followed this advice, putting a toe into the GSO waters through small-scale body shopping: for example, having Indian sub-contractor staff come over to the client site to complete a minor, non-critical piece of coding/conversion work.