The purpose of the project reported in this book is to describe the workplace of knowledge workers in high‐tech companies in Poland and the USA in 2004‐2008. The project focuses on perceptions of formalities and hierarchies, IT project schedules, issues of trust in the workplace and selected aspects of employee motivation. The analysis is based on long‐term, non‐participant observation and focuses on similarities of knowledge‐intensive workplaces to each other irrespective of country, size or region. In this process the study looks at social issues related to critical management studies in which the major criterion is the quantitative ratio of employed engineers and scientists to the rest of the employees.
Early chapters outline the history of the meaning of work compared with contemporary approaches to work. The knowledge‐intensive organisation is described and a classification attempted, but this book is concerned only with R&D in pharmaceutical and biotechnological research centres and high‐tech companies employing hardware engineers and software developers. The term “knowledge workers” refers only to a study of programmers and the categories into which they fall.
There are thoughtful analyses of social aspects of knowledge‐intensive work, such as ethical issues of outsourcing and time management due to the rapid acceleration of social processes and interactions, and the effect on people's lives, viz. programmers and their need for cooperation. From the customer's viewpoint trust is a major aspect due to the uncertainty inherent in IT projects; technical problems, as well as delays and inconsistencies between a client and a contractor concerning a project's vision, are the aspects that cause real concern. From this communication problems follow as programmers disrespect managerial work and believe it is destructive of their own work.
A whole chapter is devoted to pleasure, motivation and identity in knowledge work, the problem being how to eliminate the boredom factor and other adverse aspects of work. The programmer's work is done for creative satisfaction and is interpreted as pleasure – hence their playful attitude and the freedom they seek. Therefore, it is difficult to assess motivation, as work in progress cannot be closely supervised and evaluated, so it depends on incentives, other stimuli and normative control. The importance of identity is discussed, as the archetypal “geek” is a highly intelligent yet socially impaired person, a rebel in style or behaviour, who sees managerial work as the ultimate boredom.
In this era of ideology the book questions the value and efficacy of managerial work. Managers' ethos and their corporate culture assume that they are the indispensable elements of their organisation, but this view is challenged by new groups of employees and professionals. Thus management is leaning more and more towards influencing the content and perspectives of social reality of different organisational stakeholders, so more research is needed on managing creative work.
