Ó Riain, Seán
(2010)
The Missing Customer
and the Ever-Present
Market: Software
Developers and the
Service Economy.
Work and Occupations, 37 (3).
pp. 320-348.
ISSN 0730-8884
Abstract
Although some software engineers and developers work directly with the
final users of their product to generate customized software, many do not.
However, drawing on an ethnographic study of software developers in a
U.S. firm in Ireland, this article argues that both software developers who
work closely with customers and those who do not can be thought of as
“service workers.” The article extends the analysis of the “service triangle”
of workers, managers, and customers to software workers who interact
with customers in the software development and support process. It then
uses the case of software workers who do not interact with customers to
rethink our definition of what counts as service work. For these workers,
the customer also looms large in the workplace—but only as an abstract
entity to which they should respond and be attentive, mobilized through
organizational mechanisms that transmit and simulate market pressures
rather than through concrete interactions with customers themselves. The
irony is that an organization of production that mobilizes the customer as the
driving force of the production process ultimately, and largely unintentionally,
marginalizes the customer as irrational and incompetent—an outsider in the
service economy, with little input into the technologies they end up using.
| Item Type: |
Article
|
| Keywords: |
software; service work; markets; professional work; knowledge economy; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Sociology |
| Item ID: |
5725 |
| Identification Number: |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888410373331 |
| Depositing User: |
Prof. Sean O Riain
|
| Date Deposited: |
23 Jan 2015 12:00 |
| Journal or Publication Title: |
Work and Occupations |
| Publisher: |
Sage Publications |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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