The Company We Keep: Occupational Community in the High-Tech Network Society

Acknowledgments

T his book is based on five years of in-depth ethnographic research, during the period of the Internet stock bubble and shortly after its collapse, at a small software development firm in the labor market region surrounding Washington, DC. When conducting an extended ethnographic study of an organizational culture, one is constantly struck by the manner in which chance circumstances, seemingly random occurrences, and the evolution of interpersonal relationships alter the course of the research and the type of information that is obtained from fieldsite encounters. Yet the success of the overall research project, the ability to make sense of multiple “strange” situations and convey that understanding to an audience of readers, ultimately depends on the assistance of a supportive network of other individuals willing to contribute their time, attention, and insights to what, ideally, is a mutual drive toward greater understanding of what it means to work in contemporary society. For help in framing the topic, I wish to thank Dr. Colleen Cotter, a sociolinguist who shared with me her research expertise, knowledge, acute sense of the role of language in organizational life, unfailing good humor, and insights about the significance of events and spoken and written exchanges at my fieldsite. I also appreciated the assistance and collegiality of Mindy McWilliams, a staff person with the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship, who helped me analyze the meaning of electronic mail messages at the company. I am also grateful to the Georgetown University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, including the Communication, Culture and Technology (CCT) Acknowledgments viii / Acknowledgments Program and the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, for providing research support. The research could not have been completed without the guidance, encouragement, and comprehension of theoretical frameworks of Dr. Lucy Suchman and Dr. John Hughes of the Lancaster University Department of Sociology. They provided fine-grained and extremely insightful readings of writings completed for my doctoral dissertation. I am very grateful to them for sharing their knowledge and sociological wisdom with me. The expert comments of the internal and external examiners at my viva voce examination , Dr. Dan Shapiro and Dr. Nina Wakeford, respectively, provided the direction needed to transform my initial interpretations of fieldwork data into a cohesive sociological work. I would like to thank the founders, managers, and employees of IntenSivity Unlimited by name, but I cannot do so because I promised them anonymity. So I will thank them anonymously, especially the founders, the UI guy, the Marketing VP, the software engineer, the SysAdmin, the UNIX maven, the Java wizard, the hardware junkie, the communications professional , and the jazz enthusiast. This interpretation of their organizational culture was co-constructed with them, and the time I spent strategically wandering around their offices was one of the most rewarding periods of my professional life. I hope this book does justice to their work and conveys the respect I have for them and their contribution to building the infrastructure of the network society that surrounds us. Many of the ideas elaborated here were formulated in presentations and meetings with my colleagues in the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). I am grateful for the encouragement I received from Dorine Andrews, David Silver, Jeremy Hunsinger, and Christine Hine, among others . The final manuscript of this book benefited immensely from the extensive comments of several anonymous academic readers, who helped to refine my thinking about precisely how the computer technologists at IntenSivity constituted a community. I would like to thank two journals for granting permission to include in this volume material from the following articles: “Internet Technologists as an Occupational Community: Ethnographic Evidence,” Information, Communication & Society 5, no. 1 (2002); and “The Persistence of Workplace Ideology and Identity across Communicative Contexts,” Journal of Applied Linguistics 3, no. 1 (2006), which I co-authored with Colleen Cotter. My editor at Temple University Press, Mick Gusinde-Duffy, believed in the value of this writing project from the outset and stuck with it through multiple rounds of readers’ comments and successive drafts. I appreciate the confidence he has shown in my work. Editorial assistance from Lynne Frost and Jane Barry improved the text. Acknowledgments / ix I am grateful to my stepson, Joseph Santoro-Sharkey, whose work at IntenSivity one summer provided the contacts needed to enter the research site, and who continued to share his thoughts about the evolution of IntenSivity over the years. Finally, I extend a huge thanks to my wife, Karen, who accepted my late-night writing and researching and occasional...