Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
they were active participants in the struggle to develop the discipline of
software engineering.
36
A more nuanced reading of the contemporary industry literature sug-
gests that the key to understanding the managerial response to the soft-
ware crisis has less to do with economic imperatives or dialectical
materialism than with what the sociologist Andrew Abbott has described
as the “jurisdictional struggles” that occur among groups of profession-
als struggling for control over a particular occupational territory. In
The
Systems of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor
,
Abbott provides an “ecological” model for understanding professional
change and development. His model can be summarized briefl y as
follows: 1) professions grow when occupational niches become available
to them, and they change when their particular territory becomes threat-
ened; 2) the critical events in professional development are struggles over
jurisdictions, and key environmental changes involve the creation or
abolition of jurisdictions; and 3) professional struggle occurs at three
levels: the workplace, culture and public opinion, and legal and admin-
istrative rules. These levels are loosely coupled. Most shifts in jurisdiction
start in the workplace, move to public opinion, and may end up in
the legal sphere. Hence, the most consequential struggles are over com-
petence and theory—the core jurisdiction. Increasing abstraction allows
for professional expansion, but overabstraction can dilute the core
jurisdiction.
37
My argument is that just one of these jurisdictional struggles occurred
on commercial computing in the late 1960s. The continued persistence
of a software crisis mentality among industrial and government manag-
ers as well as the seemingly unrelenting quest of these managers to
develop a software development methodology that would fi nally elimi-
nate corporate dependence on the craft knowledge of individual pro-
grammers can best be understood in light of a struggle over workplace
authority that took shape in the early decades of computing. In the 1950s
and 1960s, the electronic digital computer was introduced into the well-
established technical and social systems of the modern business organiza-
tion. As this technology became an increasingly important tool for
corporate control and communication, existing networks of power and
authority were uncomfortably disrupted. The confl icting needs and
agendas of users, manufacturers, managers, and programmers all became
wrapped up in a highly public struggle for control over the occupational
territory opened up by the technology of computing.
