CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2009
| Author | Lewin, Clare Svetla |
|---|---|
| Title | Rise and Fall of the Ideology of Professionalism: An Ethnographic Study of a group of American Information Professionals |
| Summary | The paper examines a group of 12 Information Professionals from a large Insurance company in Southern California caught in the wave of corporate downsizing and processes of outsourcing during the era of Globalization. This particular group of programmers, system analysts and project leaders were able to “survive” outsourcing, kept their jobs, but the interviews found that they are as depressed, unhappy and angry as another group of information professionals interviewed by Richard Sennett who were laid off from the IBM American Office as a result of their jobs being “outsourced” to India. In order to find the reason for the anxieties and social anomie, the author of the paper goes back to reconstruct the lifeworld of the group under study as it was in the year 2000, based on some old interviews. The data from these interviews is analyzed from theoretical perspective derived from the work of authors such as Zizek and Althusser and also Berger, Habermas and Bourdieu. The paper argues that in the earlier stages information professionals were allowed by management to assume some of the status of the old class of independent professionals patterned mainly from the field of law and medicine. The analysis of these interviews shows that they knew that this is a “borrowed” status but they acted like they did not know – they understood how things really are but they continue operating on the premise of an illusion “they are doing it as they did not know” and what is the most important they used this illusion to structure their reality. With the globalization processes and a new labor pool of highly qualified and much cheaper information professionals from India, the skills and knowledge of American programmers were not as valuable assets to corporation as it was, their status undergoes a revision downward, a machine surveillance and method of control used for the other service workers are introduced also for them.. However, the old beliefs die slowly and it is a cause for anomie, conflicts and severe disturbance of social integration. |
| Supervisor | Kowalski, Alexandra and Rigi, Jacob |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2009/lewin_clare.pdf |
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