Projects

IT SKILLS, VALUES, AND CONSCIOUSNESS: A DATA BASED PROFILE OF IT PROFESSIONALS

Summary

In 2005 almost one in thirty British workers will be information or communications technology manager, a software engineer, a systems analyst, a programmer, or some other specialist concerned with accumulating, analysing, or managing digitised information. That makes close to one million information technology professionals (ITPs) - more than doctors and nurses combined, and almost more than primary school and secondary school teachers combined. We know that, economically speaking, culturally speaking, in terms of focal images and patterns of human interaction alike, the modern world simply would not exist without ITPs. It is therefore anomalous that we know so little about ITPs compared to other key occupations. We intend our 24 months' of intensive secondary analysis to put an end to that.

The existing lack of knowledge is paradoxical, and in some ways emblematic of these digital times. We don't lack information (data, more correctly speaking). There's masses of data. But it's been buried deep in a veritable Aladdin's Cave of so far unexploited large-scale survey findings about employees collected in the UK over the last 20 years. The Bath project, then, will combine something like a steady and well targeted archaeological dig with a series of carefully planned and highly disciplined acts of plunder, to bring into circulation the hoard of data in the archive to profile the ITP occupations in terms of a quantified dialogue with theories put forward by sociologists, applied psychologists, students of organization, and feminists. Academic jousting aside, specific dissemination channels will involve user communities concerned with training ITPs, and offcial bodies concerned with building IT skills.

Let's be more explicit. The Quarterly Labour Force Survey provides base information about the IT professions like the bald facts cited above. >From QLFS, we can plot, with great accuracy thanks to massive random samples and frequent repetition, the underlying growth, rewards, and sex composition of the IT professions. We can compare these occupations with many others in such terms. Interesting, useful - yes. But such description or comparison says nothing about ITPs as organisational actors and a social force. Neither can even answer such key questions as how well personal skill levels match the skills demanded in their jobs. This important survey is silent on how ITPs interact with other organisation members; it overlooks their work values and job attitudes - career aims, preferred rewards, job satisfaction, and organisational commitment. It is cannot tell us about ITP job movements from year to year, or about wider social, economic and political outlooks.

To do so is not its job. To examine such things, we shall be burrowing elsewhere, in the five or six landmark studies of British employees undertaken since 1985. The samples are smaller, true, but still run to several thousands of employees each, and the data about individual characteristics, on social relations, and for defining work orientations, are rich and enable contributions to a half-dozen different debates in the social sciences of work. In each survey we can single out the ITPs thanks to full occupational data and even establish trends in terms of their organisational position, their attitudes, and their interactions with other employee groups. For examining some trends and processes in more detail over time, we can access several across-time surveys. We could even provide an answer of sorts to such questions as: 'What sort of childhood did ITPs have?'. (In fact, that's not one we've prioritised.) However, the most valuable of these longitudinal studies, the British Household Panel survey, will allow us to follow career moves by individuals over time, examine their patterns of partnership and household formation, and provide a rich seam of data about health and morbidity. All in the context of comparison with other occupations.

A key feature of an e-Society will be the central importance, economically and in terms of potential social influence, of ITPs. Theories of post-industrialism and post-modernism provide numerous predictions about their role in this new world, but derived hypotheses about socio-cultural impacts remain to be tested - especially those referring to social values, worldviews, and the 'consciousness' imputed to the information elites. Our tests of such theories, together with our growing stock of empirical findings, constitute the core contribution of the Bath project to the e-Society Programme as a whole.

Publications

Banovcova, L & Rose, M (2006), 'Why so chuffed at the chalk face and so choked in IT? Deconstructing the effect of occupation on overall job satisfaction among teaching and computer professionals', Bath e-Society Working Paper 3, Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath.

Rose, M. & Banovcova, L. (to be submitted by August 2006). ‘Work orientations as a fuzzy concept: The case of IT professions’, target journal: New Technology, Work & Employment. ***

Rose, M. (to be submitted by October 2006). ‘A digital gentry? IT Professionals as an Organizational élite’ Target Journal: British Journal of Industrial Relations/British Journal of Sociology. ***

Rose, M. (to be submitted by November 2006). ‘Data professionalism as a limitation in organizational tournaments: Researching data professionals’, target journal: International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society ***

Rose, M. & Banovcova, L. (to be submitted by January 2007). ‘The Silicon Ceiling: Women’s IT Careers are still Truncated’, Target Journal: Gender, Work & Organization.

Rose, M. & Banovcova, L. (to be submitted by March 2007) ‘Cosmopolitans or locals? IT skill as a condition of organisational attachment’, target journal: Organization Studies

Rose, M. & Banovcova, L. (to be submitted by May 2007) target journal: ‘Upwardly immobile: Career blockage in IT’, target journal: Industrial Relations Journal or Journal of Management Studies

*** These three items are due to be posted on the Internet during February 2007

In response to a call to e-Society projects from the Programme Director, an offer has been made to write a short article for Encyclopedia of Public Information Technology on 4 topics covered in the project.