Revisiting Technical Workers : Professional and Organizational Identities in the Software Industry

Introduction There is a growing body of work which examines the nature of contemporary or 'new' professions and their relationship with knowledge work (e.g. Scarborough, 1999). For the most part, however, this work assumes homogeneity within occupational groups. Perceiving employees in this way not only ignores the complexity of many occupational groups, but also fails to acknowledge insights from the examination of traditional work. Despite many writers recognising that knowledge work is a rather loose categorisation (e.g. Alvesson, 2001), there have been few frameworks employed to disentangle its meaning and the divergent experiences of knowledge workers. In this paper we take a group of knowledge workers-software professionals-and analyse their identity with their organization and profession. We aim to assess the extent to which software workers, divided based on skill level and entry qualifications are also divided in their perceptions of professional and organizational identity. Instead of seeing them as a uniform employment category, we follow Perrolle (1986) and assume that there is a division of labour in software work. We view this division as being analogous to established distinctions found between the elite design engineering role and the test engineers, draughter and technical authors in the Research and Development worksites of traditional electronics and aerospace Hence, we identify a divergent group of workers that can be distinguished by a number of interrelated variables including labour market position, education, skill level and work role. This parallels Meiksins and Smith's (1996) account of traditional engineering work. In software, at the one extreme, we have a group that possess the skills and characteristics usually associated with knowledge workers, with high-levels of educational attainment, interesting design projects, significant autonomy and high labour market value. In contrast, we have what may be described as low skilled employees who have fewer conventional qualifications, and who generally work with older programming languages or in support or testing roles. The experience of these groups of software workers is explored in this paper from the perspective of the employee's own identification with the software profession and the organizations by which they are employed. Little work has been undertaken on the nature of professional identification for new occupations with most research tending to focus on traditional professions (Wallace, 1985). Although writers 3 concerned with new professions and knowledge work, have tended to propose the organization as the core agent for identity formation (e., more recent work has highlighted the limited …