SOFTWARE FACTORIES IN SPAIN: ORGANISATION AND DIVISION OF LABOUR A COMPARARATIVE VIEW OF FLUID WORK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETIES 1 ISA FORUM, Barcelona, September 2008
Juan José Castillo
[email protected] www.ucm.es/info/charlesb Summary:
This paper is a theoretical reflection, based on research and discussion of the international literature, about the future and evolution of work and its transformations. It intends to contribute from concrete and empirical grounds to the recurrent debates about the so-called “information society”, taking the collective worker in software production as a base. This worker is repeatedly used as a sample of a golden future for the central societies that will extend, through delocalization, to the “emerging” or developing societies. Where immaterial work will offer a future full of hope. As opposed to this idealized vision, and following our research program the tendencies shown in the development of software factories in Spain are very similar to the ones in the international reality. One of the fundamental concerns of the research work has been to come close to what is really taking place. How new productive organizations in software manufacturing are developing, in order to be able to identify the big trends of tendency, the fate, the present and the future of the workers in the software sector. Workers that turn out to be an emblematic representation of everything that is being actually under discussion about the future of work in the information society. What is shown up in this work is that the tendency to separate conception from execution, with a renewed reiteration of the division of labour among companies, or among working centers from the same company, is a strong sign of current developments. The “noblest” part, the gathering of requirements, the analysis, the direct contact with the final client..., is left aside. On the other hand, in the factories, the trend is to carry out “pure development”. The fundamental core of our argument is linked to the exploration of transferred types of work, of the possibilities for places where these new factories are moved or created, of their role in the promotion or creation of virtuous circles for wealth growth and decent and qualified work. Of possibilities open to the new social territories where they are settled. We try to open reflections and problematic issues inside the sociology of work. Because transferred jobs, qualified but paid with much lower wages, and needing high levels of know-how, knowledge, technique and experience, are ending in distant poles of a “new” international division of labour. Key words: New international division of labour, Software developers, knowledge work, value chains, CMMI, Spain, India, software factories, workflows, fieldwork, software management. 1. Knowledge work in information society: software developers as analyzer. 1
This case-study is a reduced and re-elaborated version of one of the nine case studies carried out inside the National Research Project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, reference SEJ2004-04780/SOCI, December 2004- December 2007: “LIFE AND WORK SCENARIOS IN INFORMATION SOCIETY”, in which the author is also the director. The complete version is published in the book: El trabajo fluido en la sociedad de la información [Fluent work in Information Society]. Buenos Aires & Madrid, Miño & Dávila, 158 pp. Translated from the Spanish by Almudena Bravo.
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Both in sociological research and fixed ideas about the future of contemporary societies, one of the most repeated topics is that we are heading towards an “information society”. This society is repeatedly described as something that is going to come, an emergent tendency, not like a consolidated reality. And, nevertheless, the imaginary of this information society is producing more and more studies, proposals, social research and social production policies, concerning both wider territories in the European Union, and in our country, Spain, together with the social formations configurating and relating to it. On the other hand, in the field of social sciences, from sociology to geography, through economy or psychology, the stress on the predominance of “immaterial work” or, using the original Marxian concept, general intellect, takes up thousands and thousands of pages from reflection and first line research 2 . Promises from most of this research and from these politic proposals, specially at the European Union, take, at least in official declarations, a strategic place. That is the case for the Lisbon Agenda, that proposes to make the European Union "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the World”. Several researchers have criticized this “happy worlds”, taking into account studies and evidence about the true present reality, and about the tendencies predicting the coming prospects. Furthermore, they have suggested that this embellished discourse, to which several sociological gurus have contributed, has been adopted by some trade unions and workers. This meaning that they consider these ideas as another possibility for workers action: “Learning economy discourses may be strategically utilized by trade unions, worker educators and other workplace actors in a revitalization of the sociocultural regulation of work” 3 . This argument is the basis for the spectacular promotion of an “ideal worker”, also deployed in the same sense, both in a critic and discursive way, by Ilona Kovàcs, and by ourselves 4 . Well then in this context a reality fact comes up as a first starting point for this case study “the production sector of immaterial goods”, using the formulation of Arnaldo Bagnasco, sector that obviously includes software production, emblematic of present tendencies both in society and work: “a company –Bagnasco 5 writes- that produces immaterial goods can become much more elastic, being capable of adapting and adhering easily to mobile markets of short term profit, typical of the globalization age”. Together with this idea a strategic question has been articulated and has organized our research and reflection: which is the reality and future of these knowledge workers, here represented by software developers? Are these workers, now identified as a disperse collective placed in locations sometimes separated by hundreds or thousands kilometers, going to suffer – as Christopher May 6 brilliantly exposes- the same effects suffered before by other low-qualified manufacturing workers? This is of course a first formulation that, as we will see below, needs to become more complex, both in theoretical terms and in recent historical evolution. A sample of this needed of complexity is the approach of Harry Scarbrough, who shows in his work how hidden social trends acting in our societies have stimulated, also in intellectual
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See, among many others, Scarbrough, 1999, “Knowledge as work...”; Lindkvist, 2005, “Knowledge communities...”; Sorenson et alii, 2006, “Complexity, networks, and knowledge flows”;Pyöriä, 2003, “KW in distributed environments...”;Seleim and Ashour, 2004, “Intellectual capital in Egyptian software firms”;... 3 Casey, 2004, p. 607, inside the chapter “Possibilities for worker action”. 4 Kovàcs, “Utopías europeas…”. Castillo, 1998 and 2005, “Contra los estragos…” 5 A. Bagnasco, “De la Sociología del Trabajo a la sociedad”, in J.J. Castillo, ed.: El trabajo del futuro, Madrid, Ed. Complutense, 1999, pp. 143 and 142 for previous note. 6 C. May, 2002, p. 408: “Knowledge workers will start to feel the same effects of international trade that economists have long discussed for manufacturing and low skills production workers”.
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work, knowledge work, the codification of knowledge and its transformation into merchandise, commodity 7 . As we will see when studying the role of the standardization of proceedings or the introduction of requirements like the ISO regulation or CMMI certifications, this fact has a special relevance for the analysis of the constitution and functioning of the collective worker in software production.
2. Our epistemological profile, our approach. The study of the tendencies in the evolution of fabbrica del software, using the words of the Italian researchers at the earliest stage, has been realized in sociological literature for more than three decades, with a special emphasis in the forms adopted by work organization, the intelligence division applied to production and business reorganization 8 . This research can be enlightening for the background of the study approach, even if it was carried out in contexts that have substantially changed, both in social and technological environment, as in the capacity of production organization. We ourselves at the end of the eighties beginning of the nineties have devoted some attention to the sector, even if we were mainly focused in the use of computerization in different kind of business, sectors and processes. From supermarkets to arquitectural offices, through design and tailoring, among others 9 . However the approach of the present case study is based in the setup and results of the research work carried out in the last years by the TRABIN network 10 . For this reason we necessarily deal with a set of new problems, together with the need to renovate the conceptual and interpretative tools of social sciences of work, to be able to tackle, according to modern times, the “software industry” and its workers today. In order to frame and place these new problems, we have considered convenient to present some of the fundamental features of our approach in this section. 2.1. Studying what really exists, visible and invisible. Our first feature is trying to carry out a field study, theoretically oriented, capable of separating what must be from what it is. Using the already approved terms of ergonomics and anthropotechnology from Alain Wisner, it is about showing not just work and its theoretical or prescribed work organization, but the real activity and organization. This approach is specially suitable for this research about software development, program construction and the so called in the sector life cycle, which includes collecting the “client” requirements, the design, the architecture, the functional analysis, the partial and overall tests, the trial, the application and the maintenance. Because as Danish researchers Hansen, Rose and Tjornehoj have brightly analyzed, in a set of 322 research works about methods for the improvement of the software development processes, in numerous cases prescription predominates over description or reflection 11 . Their conclusion is absolutely enlightening: the vast majority of the articles or pieces of work analyzed say how things should be but not necessarily how things are. In order to stress their argument, the authors even play with the types of print letter in the printed version of the working document, using big size print letters for the word “prescription” contrasting with the word “description”, and reducing to the smallest size print the word “reflection”. 7
Scarbrough, 1999, p. 14. “These trends have encouraged new forms of work organization in which knowledge is increasingly viewed as a joint product of the individual and the organisation rather than the property of individual experts or wider professional groups”. 8 Manacorda, 1976, 1984; Gallino, 1983, “Produzione di software: organizzazzione e qualità del lavoro”; BolognaniandCorti, 1984; Kraft, 1979; Perring, 1983; Gamella, 1985; Perulli, 1988. 9 Castillo, 1989, Informatización, trabajo y empleo en las pequeñas empresas. 10 Castillo, ed., 2005, El trabajo recobrado. 11 Hansen, Rose and Tjornehoj, 2004, “Prescription, description, reflection: the shape of the software process improvement field”. The research field, they say, is dominated by an approach, the capability maturity model (CMM). We will come back on this later on.
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Moreover, studying “real problems of virtual teams” is a basic condition – in our opinion- in order to shed light on the real changes that are taking place in these productive processes and in society. Even if it naturally makes it more complex both the theoretical approach and the tacked issues. Making social actors appear as invisible forms in a hurried approach of the management of production systems, or unexpected forms (for this hurried approach) of resistance or submission at work. Or even creativity 12 . This will of reconstructing “the real work situations”, what it really exists, is a needed epistemological sign in the case of software, as it is extremely frequent not just the generalization, with scarce basis, of the ‘sector’ itself, but also its transfer to global changes of society as a whole. As an example, see the words of two professors, one from Harvard and another from Berlin, in the foreword of the best seller book Secrets of software success 13 : “At the center of the book, however [in relation to other management problems related to the sector: packed software, business solutions and professional services] is a very different approach demanded by this industry to human resource management. Rigid hierarchies of the industrial age, long career paths and so on, don’t work here. It is a genuinely different world”. 2.2. The reconstruction of complete production processes. In order to correctly place the study of current work processes in software development, we have kept on updating, re-elaborating and adapting a work methodology that tries to put each productive process in a wider context, in the same line as the so called by Burawoy, “the extended case method”. Placing in this sense the empirical, handmade, meticulous and detailed studies in an explicative framework which provides them with meaning and depth 14 . Our starting point, of course, will be the one we have already used in several studies, from the early nineties, and that we have captured in a theoretical framework, based in different empiric research 15 . This framework includes the consideration of reasonable and reasoned policy options, of creating environments where virtuous cycles of synergies and public and private resources will give rise to clusters, endogenous local development, that allow a sustainable option of both personal and institutional development, and that will pass on a high road of economic and social development. This starting point connects with the mainstream, the current framework of analysis in our scientific community, that leans on very similar pieces of work to the ones we have developed in our team: like labour division among business (GrimaldiandTorrisi, 2001); strategic government problems in business networks, (Gereffi et alii, 2005; Sturgeon, 2004); evolution of labour division (Cappelli, 2001; Cusumano, 1992; Beirne, RamsayandPanteli, 1998), etc. This literature proves the fact that the ancient central core of the “new international division of labour” (Fröbel et alii, 1980), based on the externalization of unskilled work, becomes today the possibility and, of course, the reality for this sector of software production, of the externalization of qualified work, immaterial work, in tasks that were considered before as just feasible in the central countries 16 . The software production ‘sector’ is, in this sense, a specially appropriated area to analyze the context, the forces behind it, the transformations and the consequences for work, which are changing every day, according to social research, both in the formation of factories and in the link among them.
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Hughes et alii, 2001: “Some ‘real’ problems of ‘virtual’ organization”. Concrete research, in this case, shows that main issues of management remain “as usual”, and they don’t disappear with the ‘virtual teams’ nor with the ‘virtual organization’ (p.53). 13 Detlev J. Hoch et alii, 1999, 2000, p. VIII. Professors are F. Warren McFarlan and Hermann Krallmann. 14 Michael Burawoy, 1998. 15 A set of them can be looked up in the paper included in Castillo, 1994, “¿De qué postfordismo me hablas?”, pp. 365-391; and in Castillo, 1998, “La cualificación del trabajo y los distritos industriales: propuestas para una política del trabajo”, pp. 177-199). 16 May, 2000; Vigneswara Ilavarasan and Kumar Sharma, 2003; Arora, and others, 2001; Parthasarathy, 2004; Barret, 2001; Riain, 2000, 2004; Mir, 2000; Nicholson and Sahay, 2001.
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For this reason our approach, based on the reconstruction of the complete production processes, is specially enlightening. This point of view throws light upon the issues neglected in other perspectives. A similar approach is realized by Miriam Glucskmann (2004), with the aim of placing the call centers, inside what she calls “total social organization of labour” (p.798), equivalent to our complete production process, elaborating an analytical framework, according to which the insertion itself of these centers in a specific sector is called into question (this could also be done for the centers for software development, or the ‘software factories’). Rather on the contrary, what Glucksman proposes is an approach that does not consider the call center as an isolated unit, but intends to integrate it inside the work and production to which it belongs in an externalized, detached or subcontracted way. Her meticulous and suggestive discussion avoids the use of terms like ‘supply chain’, to keep the terms ‘overall processes’ of ‘provision and consumption’”, which allows her elaborating a series of “call configurations”, serving to distinguish different types of call centers, even if she doesn’t accept to consider them like this. In her conclusion she places herself in our methodological position, even if she recognizes the difficulties it implies: “…that call centres form a part, rather than
a whole, of an organizational ensemble, accomplishing one stage in a complex series of interconnected activities”. 17 . 3. The organization and division of labour in software production: the focal point of our study. 3.1. Software: a particular commodity… Michael Cusumano in a splendid book oriented to “directors, programmers and businessmen, or those wishing to be… 18 , starts by stressing that the production of software is not like other businesses, like the manufacture of many other goods and services. Because once the product is created the cost is the same for one copy as for a million. Because it is a kind of business in which the sales profit can reach the 99 per cent. Because it is a business that can easily change from manufacturing products to providing services. Let’s bring at this point some useful distinctions service-product, applied to the design or our research, in order to throw light on collective workers of software production, on their work conditions, on their possibilities, on their future. Software developers can be of standar products, of unique and personalized products for one company, of distant and online services… The variability and difference in complexity, under the same label, is overwhelming. There is no software product but multiple and varied products. All you have to do is to take a look at the web pages of many companies consulted to understand that, on the other hand, products designed for a restricted market, apparently ‘packed’ standard products, intended for a restricted professional collective, for a type of computer assisted design, for a specific personnel management …, will lead to very different complexities and problems when it comes to constitute a collective of workers, of analysts, of programmers, of software managers… of possible software factories. This is the so called by the well-known consolidated author Cusumano “the most fundamental technical activity of software companies: software development” 19 . Many researchers have called the attention to this richness of productive figures and of work experiences and expectations, even to the repercussions on private life and time organization. With a special emphasis, precisely in software workers whose posts move “from the routine to the cutting edge” 20 . 3.2. …in a new international division of labour. On the other hand, the international labour division, the fragmentation of the processes for software creation and development, is not just a methodological need but a starting point for a 17
Glucksman, 2004, “Call configurations…”, p. 801. The business of software, 2004, p. xiii, 1 and 2. 19 Cusumano, already mentioned book, chapter 4. 20 Hyman, Scholarios and Baldry, 2005, p. 708. This is not just about prototypes of knowledge workers. It focuses on work relations, home, life and how work conditions shape workers lives. 18
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wider reflection on the role of activities and services delocalization in the present world economic configuration. In order to study the meaning and the tendencies of work organization itself, its types and characteristics, our starting point will be the most recent research proposals. In this research, the main question from the point of view of the recipient countries of qualified work, specially in software production, in Prasad (1998) words is: qualified works, with career perspectives, with possible impact on local development, lost in the center for workers, are they acquired in the periphery? To tackle this question, from the point of view of the countries from which these works ‘emigrate’, several research programs have tried to find out (for example, for the NorthAmerican economy and society) which are the effects of the offshoring of many services, the loss of employment this can involve. One of the most developed programs in this field is the one carried out by the MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 21 . In order to put in place adequate policies, the program wonders what happens with the electronic emigration of knowledge work, including, of course, programming, comparing wages in origin and destination, e.g., United States and India, in relation to minimum wage in both. And, as Hellander (2004) has pointed in his reference work piece, the classic option between make or buy, meaning the determination whether to produce a component part internally or to buy it from an outside supplier, is doubled in the software sector with a third option: connect 22 . In the same way, the approach related to labour division among companies, businesses, clusters, stresses the local development perspectives and the upgrading. An emblematic wellknown piece of work is Local enterprises in the global economy. Issues for governance and upgrading, edited by Hubert Schmitz in 2004. On the grounds of wide empirical research and presenting research programes with a high significance, it introduces a systematization of different organization possibilities for local business systems, including software ones, in a typology that covers from networks to hierarchy, on the basis of the possibilities for autonomous development or the dependency in labour division. In a similar way to what we identified as head companies and hand companies 23 . These research schemes to which we return and revitalize allow researchers, as we’ll see in detail below with the example of Bangalore in India, to resort to a set of interpretations of great complexity, like the institutional and governmental role in the promotion of the development of these local virtuous conglomerations. The role of trustfulness and negotiation. The role reserved for the workers themselves, for formation and University. And, furthermore, they allow comparisons with strategic character that can connect the most successful models of development, either in Silicon Valley, Ireland, Brazil or Mexico 24 . And, of course, Spain. The answer to some of the questions, of the important questions, of these approaches, frame and give sense to the interpretation that starting from the production processes, reconstructs the form in which they shape and condition the life of the persons and the possible expectations and relations in societies at local, regional or national level. Do the so called by a researcher adherents regions exist, rich in knowledge, in tasks, in experience, in trustfulness, in infrastructures, in networks, in potentialities? Can they be created by planned political
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Sturgeon and Levy, 2005: “Measuring the offshoring of service work and its impact on the United States...”; GereffiandSturgeon, 2004: “Globalization, employment, and economic development...”. 22 Hellander, 2004, p. 24. This book, that we consider an excellent example of a research work, as we already mentioned above, was presented as doctoral thesis in Finland and goes through an epistemological real impressive path: firstly it elaborates a theoretical model about value creation; then it applies this model to the realization of an empirical exhaustive study; and, finally, it rectifies and enriches the model with the research results. Something quite similar to the grounded theory. In fact, it uses the terminology from this approach. 23 See texts in quote 16. 24 See the relevant piece of work by Rasmus Lema, 2005, about the role of collective efficiency in software production in Bangalore and the assessment of Humphrey and Schmitz, “Chain governance and upgrading: taking stock”, included in Schmitz, 2004, pp. 349-381. Dayansindhu, 2001, utilizes wider concepts like embeddedness, to approach the software industry in context.
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intervention, joining local resources, private initiatives, social demands, will of creating decent work for the majority? And can all this be done (and how) taking as a referent, precisely, the software sector and computer-related services? Coming back to Prasad’s question, already mentioned at the beginning of this section, do good works that can be delocalized from the central countries maintain and stabilize in the ‘periphery’? 25 To which extent can they be promoted, in the framework of a nation and its diverse social territorial formations, Spain in our case, the resources for local development through the implantation of software factories in different locations? 26 This is the framework of analytical possibilities opened by the study of complete production processes, inside the international division of labour, in both territorial and social perspectives, for the approach of the study of the “software industry” 27 . 3.3. India as a field of reflection and research problems. The development of software industry in India, and other technologically advanced services, has been subject of analysis and systematic study, to the point that we could classify the evolution of research works and their fundamental concerns as a splendid mirror of the evolution of the industry and the industry of software itself, and even of the advances of the accelerated international dispersion of the production based in knowledge 28 . Thus the thesis of the exportation of unqualified tasks, also in the development of programs, as in the manufacture of electronic components, could be upheld without much debate at the beginning of the nineties 29 , indicating a high level of consensus, at least in the interpretation…. These arguments, that followed the classic book by Fröbel et allí, 1980, were doubled with a complementary argument: the exportation of workers, these ones qualified, to the production center, whether it was in the United Kingdom or in the United States: bodyshopping. This “new international division of labour”, was “characterized by a fragmentation of manufacturing processes what were globally dispersed”, looking for or “motivated by the need of cheap labour”, unskilled or semi-skilled. The aim was to dispose of vast human resources at a very low price 30 . But the question already mentioned in the previous section, formulated by Monica Prasad (1998), whether the opportunities lost by the workers of the center when work emigrates are acquired by the workers in the periphery, who receive these works, displays a set of analysis ending in the center of the division of labour. In the nineties some local policies took place resulting in a great establishment of multinational companies at local level, together with the creation of a ‘local environment’ that turned Bangalore, and the so-called ‘Silicon Plateau’, into an adherent region, wanted by their comparative advantages. Between 1990 and 1994, a thousand subdivisions of multinational companies in India applied for and obtained ISO certification. For Prasad this certification, whether it served or not 25
A special regard, from Latin America, deserve the cases of different countries, specially Mexico and Argentina (Ruiz Durán, Piore, Schrank, 2005; Carrera, 2005; Foro de Software y Servicios Informáticos, 2004; López, 2003; Novick and Miravalles, 2002; Chudnowsky, López and Melitsko, 2001; CEPAL, 2003). 26 Cases of this kind have been taken, after strategic sampling, as fieldwork case studies, that are the central part of this research and that have been gathered in this work in a significant proportion. 27 We cannot extend here in the references, but we need to stress the importance of O’Riain work (specially 2004), for Ireland, because, precisely starting from the software industry he has reconstructed a general analysis of economic and social development for this country. See also Hellander, 2004, for Finland; Isaksen, 2004, for Norway. And Cumbers and McKinnon, 2004. 28 Through all this work we have and we will mention diverse studies that, even if their center is the software industry in India, have in many occasions a much wider scope, studying very specific problems, like work-life relation, the forms of information management, trustfulness as a fundamental criteria in the use of documental sources, etc. For this reason it is recommended to look up the references included in the bibliography. 29 The best example is undoubtedly Salim Lakha, 1994, “The new international division of labour and the Indian computer software industry”. 30 Lakha, 1994, pp. 383, 394.
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for the standardizing of quality, it did serve as a sign or guarantee in order to sell to remote customers, like the European Community market. Her argument, central and very nuanced, is that these norms, imposed by market and by the globalization of production and consumption, carried as a consequence a deskilling of work processes that were taking place in India. They led to an “invisible deskilling”, that –she states after quoting the interviewed businessmencould be not their final objective, but were among their non wanted, but well received, consequences. ISO quality regulation and CMMI model, today essential norm to be able to be software provider, both to companies and institutions, or even to the so called system integrators, has contributed –she says- to a taylorization of programming work and to a loss of control over individual work. The internationalization of production, she states, makes it necessary for the customer a standardization that makes it irrelevant the world place where it is made, which “leads to the creation of international standards and norms, and mandatory adherence to these standards reintroduces a workplace dynamic of deskilling” 31 . With these documentation and good programming techniques, work places get released from concrete workers, making less work needed, in qualitative terms, and, therefore, it produces more unemployment. Prasad bases her opinion on the studies that took place in industry and later on in other productive areas with the introduction of TQM, Total Quality Management, or of ISO norms, as unavoidable requirement for subcontracting companies to be able to be supplier of big car companies, for example. And, as research has widely proved, quality norms have ended, in fact, to be used more as a way of control than as a wanted way of documentation and traceability of products or services in relation to the quality offered to the client 32 . Well then a few years later, in 2003, this interpretation is already called into question, identifying the type of products and the advance or surmounting of the lowest situation in the “value chain”, or, in our own terms, placing these Indian companies themselves farther away from hand companies and closer to head companies. Carrying out more complex projects, which include the gathering of requirements, the design, the architecture, etc. This means, in the classical cascade- scheme that represents software production process, where the more above is the more independent, the more qualified as a productive group: “in the last years there is enough evidence to assure than Indian companies are maturing and growing in their capability to execute wider and more complex projects; as they are executing the parts with most added value in these projects (like the gathering of requirements and high level design)” 33 . This is the central argument of the discussion between Ilavarasan and Sharma (2003), about the question “Is software work routinized?” In order to get an answer to this question they revise one by one several questions that can be applied to any study about software production, to find out to which extent it is fragmented or unskilled: a) “Software workers are clearly divided into conception and execution workers, such as designers, coders or testers”. b) “Execution workers do not participate in the conception of the project”. c) “Workers involved in one module do not have information of the rest of the modules in the same project”. d) “Formation requirements are different for the different categories of workers”. e) “Career opportunities are limited for execution workers”. f) “Certification procedures foster directive control” 34 . To each of these questions the authors find a negative answer through empirical studies. And in their conclusion they emphasize the discovery of a chamaeleonic division of labour; a 31
Prasad, 1998, p. 431. A similar conclusion is reached by Beirne et alii, 1998, “Developments in computing work: control and contradiction in the software labour process”, p. 149. 32 Most influent and orienting piece work of this analysis is the one of Segrestin, 1997. 33 Arora et alii, 2001, p.1286and1268-9; Hellander, 2004. 34 IlavarasanandSharma, 2003, “Developments in computing work: control and contradiction in the software labour process”, p. 2.
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work in teams, even in virtual teams; workers enjoy symmetrical information; the same level of formation is given to all; there are no career boundaries; and control is distributed. With such an idyllic panorama, they finish by affirming that neither software work is “routinized”, nor it seems to be able to be, nor it will be in the future. Something that obviously much other research perceives with a certain level of nuance or even calls radically into question 35 . At the same time most recent research bets on again for the ascertainment of a development that gives up, in Bangalore, software services based in their low place in the value chain, stating that “these developments can well mark [the apparition] of a nascent networked technological district”(Parthasarathy and Aoyama, 2006) 36 . 3.4. Standards as mechanisms for work organization. The introduction and use of organizational standards, such as ISO, SPICE norms, or the well known and promoted by SEI, Software Engineering Institute, CMM (Capability Maturity Model), or the subsequent CMMI, has been studied, in literature about software work organization as a privileged instrument to know the tendencies of software development to what has been called software factories 37 . An exemplar of this approach is the one of Paul Adler, in a meticulous and complex case study carried out in a big North American company, taking as study field four different programs, two of them placed on level 5 of CMM model, and other two on level 3. Adler has interpreted his detailed fieldwork with a set of theoretical problems that he has summarized in different forms and ways, trying on one side to account for the influence that the introduction of these standards have had in the possible work simplification, or, more precisely, on its ‘routinization’, or taylorization, as he expressly says 38 . In the first formulation, Adler takes the introduction of the CMM model as an analyzer, with the aim of setting as central research question, “how does process discipline change software work –the nature of that work, its organization, and above all, the experience of it” 39 . A question that -as it has already been shown- is also in the center of our concerns. The conclusions Adler gets are nuanced, and his effort to show the aspects of change and loss of autonomy by developers, based on solid documentation, and, above all in a complex set of transcribed interviews and presented to the reader, express, on the other side, contrary tendencies that imply an improvement which does not agree with the simplified version of labour taylorization, and of decollectivation of software production work 40 . Faced to the contradictory tendencies and experiences that appear in his study, Adler proposes to resort to the theory in order to interpret and give sense to the tendencies behind. And for this he will fall back on different paradigms that he finally interprets according to what he calls himself a renovation of the theories of labour process. Coming back to Marx, and to a 35
A more complex and more explicative thesis at international level in Mir et alii, 2000, “The codes of migration. Contours of the global software market”, about polarization of qualifications on and through nation-states. See also the already mentioned article in Arora et alii, 2001, “The Indian software services industry”. 36 These authors explain that their fieldwork research justifies this assertion for the case of India, but it is doubtful that it can be generalized to other contexts, given the particular and specific case of Bangalore. 37 A fundamental reference is Watts Humphrey, 2002, “Three process perspectives: organizations, teams, and people”. In sociological literature the pioneer analysis is the one of Segrestin, 1997, “L’entreprise à l’épreuve des normes de marché. Les paradoxes des nouveaux standards de gestion dans l’industrie”. 38 We must say here that we have been able to consult this study and the author’s reflections, its emphasis in articulations, with an unusual detail and minuteness in sociological research in different formulations, both in published texts and in unpublished documents, whose references are included in the bibliography. 39 Adler, 2002, p. 24. 40 Obviously, emphasis change, and if in 2002, p.76, the conclusions start with a reference, and an express quote to the taylorist “mental revolution”, later in the same text there are a long set of arguments that modify this vision. To end up giving a partial and contradictory vision of the results of the introduction of CMM.
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vision that has been left in the shadow by a second generation of this important school. This vision is called ‘paleo marxist’. And he summarizes it by saying that two contradictory tendencies must be contemplated, the ones that make the software case appear like a sometimes confusing objet. The first tendency, in his vision, lays in the fact that productive forces tend to make the more complex work and qualification requirements. Also in software, with the modernization that the introduction of the CMM model implies and the changes that it brings. This has consequences for the developers, widening their work object, among other features, that he includes in what he calls ‘socialization of production’. So in this sense tasks will improve, enlarge, and will not be not just “write code”, but they will also cover the complete production life circle [what we have certainly not found in our fieldwork], among other aspects. Yet a second tendency can even completely ruin these beneficial transformations. And these contradictions are placed in the process of capital valorization: more profit, more market, more competition. Relations of production, to sum up. Thus in this case study, the companies that adopted CMM, first, they improve costs, quality and delivery deadlines for projects. But, second, the contra-tendencies are the narrow and short term margins of profit and the concurrence among plants 41 . For our research we took into consideration some arguments that challenge the analysis of the information gathered on the field. This point of view forces the inclusion in both sides of the tendencies of work organization, and can be based in the concept of ‘socialization’, enumerating a set of index: 1) The extension of the work object. It would consist in not drastically separate between ‘executers’ and ‘designers’. Furthermore, as several abstracts reveal and emphasize in his elaborations, one of Adler’s important argument is the assertion that the work object has substantially changed with the ‘modernization’ of processes. 2) The extension of the collective worker, specially funded on the creation of teams, the need for work in groups, the consultation to pairs, etc. 3) The deepening in the interdependence in the collaboration. 4) The socialization of the tools used at work. 5) The socialization of the development of rules and tools. And 6) The socialization of formation and qualification processes 42 . In our research, both from the experts and technicians viewpoint as from business associations, Public Administration and, obviously, from companies, the suitability of the production to the already mentioned models, both ISO and CMM (Capability Maturity Model) or SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination), has become today an essential starting point. A constraint. A model whose application seems unavoidable 43 . Taking standards as analyzers of the reality of work in software development allows open perspectives and discover aspects in real life of work difficulty perceptible with old archetypes and already 41
You can find a good summary in Adler, 2004, pp. 253-254 and 255-256, respectively. And a detailed description in Adler, 2005. 42 A rich and detailed vision of this argument and of the contradictions found in reality, in Adler, 2005, p. 421: “In sum, the CMM deepened rather than resolved the contradiction between use value and exchange value”, and its development in pp. 422-426, “Bureaucracy: simultaneously mock, enabling, and coercive”. 43 With this assertion we just pretend now to pay attention to the similarity of the arguments deployed not just in the remote precedent of taylorism or fordism, but also in the recent and comparable one of the lean production. See them all in our work “Nuevos modelos productivos…”, included in Castillo, 1998, A la búsqueda del trabajo perdido, pp. 2-84. CMMI, Capability Maturity Model Integration has a quite different display from original CMM. In Spain, public support to the improvement of software quality (“Mejora de la calidad del software”), from the State Secretary for Telecommunications and Information Society (Secretaria de Estado de Telecomunicaciones y para la Sociedad de la Información), privileges the implantation of CMMI and SPICE, over other ISO norms. See the regulation in: “Resolución de 5 de abril de 2006, BOE, n. 85, 10 de abril de 2006, p. 13910”.
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used concepts of social sciences. And of course one of them being the multiple forms of work and workers resistance to control methods. Let’s just now set an example with a revealing and brilliant study carried out by Nicholson and Sahay, and published in 2001, with a research approach very close to ours, both for the strategy used and for the emphasis in the construction of a theoretical model according to the researched reality itself, the discussion with social agents (interlocutors) and the published research results 44 . The study works on two companies of the same ownership, one in England and the other in India. The externalization to India brings the formation and application of strict ISO norms that obtain a collective of very disciplined Indian programmers. When the ‘mother’ company wants to do the same in its central headquarters and faced to the resistances of the qualified workers inside towards what they feel as a ‘degradation’ of their posts, it will be the Indian workers, ‘imported’ to England, those who will serve as a tool to break the resistance of British workers. This is the most interesting feature in this context (the article is an example for much others). Using the Indians from ‘Eron’, already disciplined, let’s say, in software factory. Already accustomed to ISO norms, to place themselves in the ‘life cycle’ of the product they get assigned from the organization. Demanding written text of everything they do and documenting every step they make. The company, ‘Gowing’, tries to change in this way the attitudes; either “renovate” its own developers; or either, as a last resort, making them leave the company. These programmers, that came from three different companies, from very different cultures to the one the company wants to become ‘dominant’, can be exemplified in the “creatives” from RDC, that stand out from their colleagues, according to the company director, even in their clothing, and do not hesitate to show their arrogance. Gowing imported the “Eron Quality Methodology”, with a long path of changes, which the researchers followed in detail, even participating in the meetings and debates. The end of the process is a “mechanization and labour division [that] was repelled by a contra-organization of RDC programmers” 45 . The authors, through the exploration of the complex transfer of norms and standards do not hesitate to affirm, connecting with the best tradition on labour process research, that the discipline adopted led to a “fordist production and assembly-line approach” 46 . 3.5. Team work: real and virtual collectives. One of the main features on the analysis of labour organization in software production is the constitution of teams or work groups that, from the middle seventies, formed part of the scheme of ‘new methods of work organization’. On the other hand, the knowledge work, the information management, the immaterial character of the raw material used in this process, compels to considerate these new forms of organization, in high technology contexts, that allow the circulation, the sharing of an intervention on a program, in something not conditioned anymore to any physical, geographic, national or other boundary. The specialized literature has largely produced pieces on the so-called ‘virtual teams’, communities of practice, or collectivities of practice, that can be placed at thousands of kilometers of physical distance, and even more distanced in culture or organizational styles. If this form of work organization had a big impact in the seventies, we should not forget that it is necessary a contextualization that explains the reasons, the aims, the actors that intervened in that great organizational mutation which could be reflected in the slogan, and 44
Brian Nicholson and Sundeep Sahay, 2001, “Some political and cultural issues in the globalization of software development...”. 45 Nicholson and Sahay, same art., p. 38. 46 Nicholson and Sahay, same art., p. 39: “In an organization like Gowing where the main ‘product’ is software, the Eron methodology helped to disassociate the Gowing management from the RDC methods of development (described by Jones as ‘design on the back of a cigarette packet’) and towards the fordist production or assembly-line approach”.
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respective institutions, of “improvement of working conditions”. The capacity for workingclass opposition in working places, the call into question of the so called “scientific” labour organization, taylorism and fordism, was the main engine of those changes. And the ‘semiautonomous production groups’ its most consolidated form. Teamwork came back to the arena of work organization, in a massive way, in the nineties and in a notably different context. This time, by business initiative, mostly without negotiations, and at the top of what was then called, again, the one best way at that time: the lean production. Even so, today, and for the constitution of an analysis template for the new production organizations, in our case, in software, it becomes essential to revise and update the framework of analysis and the realities of work teams, the small collectives of workers, which can have on them more tasks, more organizational capacities, more initiative, more chances to break labour division. And verifying their existence and functioning conditions in the reality of our present software factories. Because under a same denomination, great organizational novelties or pure forms of adaptation to the business fashion can be found. This meaning that real problems can be hidden under presumed virtual realities 47 . In reality, and in literature, of software factories, virtual teams are a challenge, a possibility, not without difficulties, as we have learned from the persons we have interviewed in our research. In a review to the related literature, Martins and others (2004) define as virtual teams those in which “members use technology to interact with one another across geographic, organizational, and other boundaries, and are becoming common place in organizations” 48 . With a more sociological and less technological scope, Pyöriä (2003, p.167): defines virtual teams by 1) the use of information technologies; 2) the independent design of important parts of its work; and 3) a high professional training 49 . The anti-taylorist feature, non individualizing, non routinizable, will also be always present, even if we can find some aspects of work intensification, of transfer of control and discipline to the inside interior of the group, and therefore to the programmers themselves 50 . For our study, in any case, it may be very important to clearly establish the type of knowledge work that is software production, and the most archetypical characteristics of the workers inside this collective 51 . In this sense, for example, a better way to get closer to the true reality of work, far from ideal formulations just useful for reflections out of time and real world, is the distinction made by Lindkvist (2005) between “knowledge communities and knowledge collectivities”. The difference is remarkable, even if
47
See Pruijt, 2003, “Teams between neo-taylorism and anti-taylorism”; Hamde, 2002, “Teamwork: fashion or institution?”. Martins, et alii, 2004, “Virtual teams...”;Hughes, et alii, 2001, “Some real problems of virtual organization”. 48 Martins et alii, 2004, p. 805. See also p. 807. Their parti pris leads them to despise the comparison with face to face teams “given that these last ones are disappearing…”And in p. 823, “with rare exceptions all organizational teams are virtual to some extent”. 49 Pyöriä, 2003, p. 167. Can be completed with Kraan’s contribution, 2006, looking for a definition of team which allows a “high performance and low stress” work, as a group that, obviously using information technologies to overcome geographical boundaries, etc., becomes a “group of people who cooperate to attain a common goal”(p.4). 50 The argument is coherently developed by Pruijt, 2003, p. 89, among other places. Hamde, 2002, on his side, has reflected, with an excellent use of Simmel’s work, on how a form of work organization that imposes itself as an, unavoidable, fashion ends up being an institution when it is taking as the only way to make things, without possible discussion. 51 Sorenson et alii, 2006, “Complexity, networks and knowledge flow”, distinguish the possibilities for networks and transfers according to the complexity of the related knowledge. In the “industries based in moderately complex knowledge”, among which they seem to include software, it can be necessary social proximity. “Social proximity here refers to the distance between two parties in a social network”, and they set as example those networks whose integrants never saw themselves face to face, as opposed to those who have a direct relation. See Leamer and Storper, 2001; Scott and Storper, 2003; Sherer, 2005; Sturgeon, 2004; Forsman and Solitander, 2003; Coe and Bunnell, 2003.
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it just seems a small aspect: a collectivity is something less steady, more circumstantial, more contingent…, something much more similar to the realities we have found in our work 52 .
4. Software factories in Spain. 1. Introduction. General data: A sector or a part of different production processes of goods and services? Applying our own interpretative approach 53 , and in discussion with the literature in the field, we must begin by an obvious feature that forces us to construct our ‘material’ object of study at the same time that we define it. More precisely: the manufacture, application and maintenance of software is subjected to an accelerated externalization, which was before a function developed inside the big companies and, therefore, the data we obtain from the different most credible statistics (i.e., the 2003 Survey on Services Sector, Encuesta del Sector Servicios, of INE, National Statistics Institute, 2005) could be considered as a minimum: there are yet many computer services non externalized, or carried out by staff in the companies themselves, and that, therefore, will appear in the respective sectors 54 . In the 2003 Survey on Services Sector (Encuesta del Sector Servicios), the category number 72 inside CNAE93rev 55 gathers a series of data of high significance that we have examined in a first approach, which has provided us with approximate and illustrative general data regarding occupation, distribution by categories, sex, size of companies, etc. For example, over 180,102 persons employed in “Computer Services”, 47.8 %, that is to say 86,400, are software technicians. And among them women are just a 27.46 %. Over the 23,265 registered companies, 14,817, that is to say the 63.7% have “less than 2 workers”. In a reference study (AETIC, 2005), and in public debates carried out with the occasion of the diffusion event of the results of the “Industrial Observatory for Electronics, Information Technologies and Telecommunications” (Observatorio Industrial de Electrónica, Tecnologías de la Información y Telecomunicaciones), in December 2006, one of the debates was, precisely, a detailed analysis and a proposal for new statistical classification. In this sense it was expressed in the meeting conclusions and in the press release published at the occasion: “the recent evolution of the sector’s activities makes it difficult its inclusion in the current National Classification of Economic Activities, for which it becomes necessary to widen the classificatory framework of the sector, in order to facilitate its evaluation and follow-up”56 . This forces us to introduce a reflection on the process of creation of the ‘sector’ itself. There is no evidence, even in a summarized way, of the fundamental lines of this transformation in a really significant case, both for the economic importance and for the relevance, in the 52
Lindkvist, 2005, “Knowledge communities and knowledge collectivities: a typology of knowledge work”, p. 1205. 53 See above the section “The reconstruction of complete production processes.”. 54 From the interviewed privileged informants of the sector, we can conclude that, in the definition of the sector itself and its business representation, sector’s definition is currently a key question. The Spanish Ministry for Industry (Ministerio de Industria) has opened a set of round tables for sectorial reflexion, ‘Observatories’, one of which is devoted to the Electronics, Information Technologies and Telecommunications (Observatorio Industrial de Electrónica, Tecnologías de la Información y Telecomunicaciones) and presented its first results in a working day meeting that took place on 1st December, 2006 (http://www.mityc.es/Observatorios/Observatorios/SectorElectronica/). 55 National Classification of Economic Activities (Clasificación Nacional de Actividades Económicas) 1993, revised. 56 We must point out that even these works underestimate, in our opinion, persons employed in what they call the TIC “hipersector”: 214.000 persons, according to the conclusions of the studies consulted in http://www.mityc.es/NR/rdonlyres/01428F2C-0F92-4C0C-9F51January and March 2007, 2470C89DCF9B/0/Conclusiones.pdf.
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constitution of the “software industry” actors itself. It is about the evolution of the role of computing in the sector, or for the banking sector. This research work stays unsettled, given its extension. This case study should include the process through which a set of companies are externalized, the form and way it is carried out, the consequences for the restructuring of the software collective worker, the transformations in the work process itself and in the constitution of fluent work 57 . 2. How we have constructed our qualitative approach. After what all we have said in previous sections and this introduction we can briefly present the two complementary perspectives that base our starting point in the field work presented below. In order to identify the diverse collective workers of software production, we propose to: A) Follow the product-program from its design to all the different pieces of work that are successively carried out around it until it is placed in the final market, being it an individual company or a possible group of companies. This obviously includes the different trial and error methods used. Many of these works consist on giving it to third parties which really make them. These third parties make high qualified works on the product, add value, and then give it back to the company who ordered it. Well then, we have to stress that the distinctive fact is that what was considered before, in a previous form of division among companies, as a handicap, is now the most remarkable characteristic: knowledge worker is the central feature, the most emphasized in the current transformation of our societies, European society included, keeping in mind the challenge of the ‘Lisbon program’. Among the classifications and typologies that flourished in the golden years of the industrial districts, between 1982 and 1992, those companies that just made lavori, using the word from the best Italian research tradition, were the last link in the value chain. From labour division between ‘head’ and ‘hand’ companies. Sometimes simple detached pieces of an assembly-line in the territory. In this process, that can currently be done at a few, hundred, distance kilometers, the program is created or transformed, it is elaborated, tacit and explicit knowledge and tasks are inverted on it. If it is a service: the product can be changed or transformed in the same head office of the company that will use it, its final addressee. Without the physical presence of the worker, with no physical migration. For a long time already in the specialized literature they have been called “electronic immigrants”. As opposed to bodyshopping that prevailed before: ‘imported’ programmers under highly degraded working conditions, who were not recognized labour rights 58 . To be able to identify the global or whole work who thinks, constructs, and develops the programs, the complete process not just in work, but in production, the collective worker, we also propose, simultaneously, to B) Identify the production processes, including of course the design, the preparation, the tryal, the tuning, the application. Whether it follows some of the methods traditionally used in the sector (Hellander, 2004), whether it is about identifying, from the client demand, and a product up to its elaboration and tuning, and the following attention service. One of the explicative keys we found in very different case studies, as we have already mentioned, has been trying to analyze, if possible, to what extent, for which products, and with which support computer tools, routinizing proceedings, fragmenting the production, fragmenting creative work that, at least in the social imaginary, the computer work involves, to the point of constructing software factories. This is a discussed and contradictory argument, but, obviously, fundamental in the approach of labour process. As we recalled in the introduction, this argument has figured for thirty years in the research agendas, and in the best interpretations of the phenomenon. Today we count on abundant research on the matter, also with historical perspectives, that show the 57
58
See, for example, the excellent discussion of Panteli and others, 2001,p. 3, note 1. See, for all, Mair, “ Codes of migration…”.
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evolution and the maturing of the ‘sector’ in different national and regional contexts, as well as the transformation of the game rules of the so-called “informational economy” and its labour division at the present time. 3. First picture of software ‘chains’: work and labour division among companies in Spain. In the model for big projects, Telefónica for example, in which three or four big companies can be participating at the same time, there is always something equivalent to the units in the building sector: a technical office for coordination, that “works with specifications, with the control of the issues related to the specifications and so on, and then realizes a preliminary design, where it already knows what is going to be ordered to each one, how to assemble the different fragment, how the mechanisms for interconnection have to be, and what can be demanded from each of them, for the integration of the product and so on” 59 . Of course, the persons forming this committee have to be of top level qualification, and also have lots of experience. They configure a team in which seniors predominate, “seniors with also, lots of experience. And overall, not just general experience, but preferably in all the aspects concerning these projects, in this kind of environment. Because sometimes from one project to the others it is difficult or very complicated, so they have to be very very qualified persons, because their choice is very very important. Then when you go [down the scheme] then yes it is true that for some of the partners their heading, their leader, also has to be qualified. But then you find a much wider work force, which is the base programmer. What does he need to have?: Well, he always has to have qualification, logically, and passion and necessity. But it can accept other type of profiles”. Let’s take a well-known example: France Telecom. “France Telecom has a core of persons on staff, highly qualified, also very well paid because they have a very very large level and practically even if you see them there in their installations [my italics, JJC], all the rest of the staff is subcontracted. But this core is the one that designs, even take the specifications. They don’t trust anyone. For example, in projects for the management of critical data, in marketing terms, all invoicing data, interrelate them to check if a campaign is successful. This is key for the company because problems with money are problems in the rest. The specification is made by this core group of France Telecom, its own staff. And then it comes the pure development etc., this part is ordered to any of their providers. And this core is the one that makes the supervision of deliveries, of working methods and so on for suppliers; and it has to be very hard (…), they have to be very very hard on suppliers. When the delivery takes place they make a set of audits, with regulations and so on, etc. And this is the scheme. Because, besides, the majority of companies are considering that work forces for the developing of projects are very large (projects are always temporary, aren’t they?), it is not the core business… So the tendency is to subcontract that part. What is left are the hard cores of highly qualified professionals working in the company, who control everything about suppliers, they even control the initial and the final phase of the project, the specification, the delivery, and so on, final tests… And that is the tendency in practically all companies”. And how are they carried out, these controls, these specifications, these exigencies? The most common way is to use concrete formats, metrics, “a set of techniques usually put together in what is called, quality assurance and so on. And it is a very large set that covers all aspects, including the trials or some elements of the process itself , how the work has to be generated”. Labour division is clearly shown in this way, if we take as a referee the complete process that 59
This general model of labour division among companies framed in the way it is set up labour organization in software development serve here as a first and general illustration. The words in quotation marks belong to an interview of a representative from the Association of Computer Technicians ATI (Asociación de Técnicos de Informática). In this case some context information has been taken from other experiences in order to validate the usefulness of this general scheme.
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starts with the gathering of requirements, in the demands from the company, and ends in the programmers of the subcontracted companies ‘writing codes’. In this example of a big company, the most important part, the core for the design, the system skeleton remains inside the company, in the hands of a part of the collective worker highly qualified, well paid, with large experience, loyal to the company or even attached to its high direction. It continues with the fragmentation of the big projects-processes in processes of smaller size, but that yet keep high complexity, and which reproduce, in the prime contractors, the big integrator companies (most relevant examples can be Soluziona, Azertia, Capgemini, Atos-Origin, Coritel, etc.), other labour division that allows dividing each of the projects in smaller projects that can be subcontracted, in turn, inside the integrator itself, or to other different or distant company. In each step, the person that captures these works is usually a salesperson (sometimes assisted by an analyst) who gets the requirements that then a functional analyst turns into work packages, units that can have sense on their own, that are arranged accordingly to an “assembly” or construction sequence, which has to pass through a set of unitary tests, etc., until its delivery as an integrated partial product in this intermediate stage, that will be part of the global project, controlled and supervised from the center, from the head of the complete production process. In each company, then, and at a different level, and with different sense, we have an structure that includes: project managers and analysts, “who in general are more qualified”. The path usually pass from a junior to a senior programmer and, with experience, with more capacity, to become an analyst. But –based on the large personal own experience of our own interviewed person- “it is true that [then] there are many programmers. Because this is a very intensive activity in labour force, because programmers have a reasonable limit, by means of quality and productivity, instructions and code line that can be generated per day. Because we are talking of huge quantities, of this enormity of thousands of code lines. Even if some are used from project to project, they are still a very large quantity. And so you need lots of people. Just like that. If not, you don’t have people enough to write all you need…” The picture of the big factory is present in the definition itself of such work so needed of direct labour force work. And the problem of routinization, of standardization, imposed by the way of organizing work itself is an obliged consequence. These workers must have the most possible precise instructions of what needs to be done: “indeed, you have to give them very clear specifications. Because they cannot take decisions, not because they lack capacity, but because they must not do so, because if they take an independent decision, it may be that what they have done is not compatible with the rest. And you have to give them very clear specifications and guidelines. Specifications, because they have to know very well what they have to do. And, deplorably, this has failed a lot. Analists, for one reason or another, gave few elaborated, detailed, specifications. In some cases even just oral communication, which leads to many misunderstandings, problems and so on. And besides they have to give other kind of guidelines also on how they want the product to be developed. That is to say not just what but some ideas on how. And that can be with the internal norms or with other issues. For example, there is a set of tools that verify if a programmer, for example, is fulfilling the rules, even for his own self-control. There are many proposals, for example, on programming rules; this means that the code chosen directly by you… is too tough!... So then, what is usually done? Comments are inserted, documentation inserted as lines, in case you have to touch up, if there is a rotation and a programmer leaves, the new person has to have a guide because if there isn’t any the majority tends to reject that code and write it again, which is not economic 60 . Or even determinate forms to do a series of operations, that depending on how you do them you can fall in risk questions. That is to say that certain
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Documentation allows, according to the interviewed person, the possibility of post rotations and substitutions. Which is an habitual norm in the use of standards, like CMMI, as we will show in other places of this report.
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instructions are per se, in some way, non recommendable, because under certain conditions they can induce a fail; so what is usually made is saying: “please, never use these”. Then there are tools used by the project managers, the analysts, to say: “well, you say you are delivering this to me, you say it is finished, hold on, we are going to pass the tests…, well yes, at least this is ok, now let’s make the trials, etc., etc.”. And that is the reception task, key to assure that the work of all these persons fits and has a minimum of quality”.
4. ‘SAL’: A model of the sequence of labour division and organization of a typical company in Castilla-León. Small software companies in Spain usually have between 100 and 150 workers and are, obviously, very different among them. Whether it is for the specialization in a programming tool; for their ability to work in certain sectors (health, public administration, bank sector or others); or for they link to a “big integrator”. But all these circumstances, as we have confirmed in our research, leave a sufficient frame in order to be able to identify a typology of confronted problems, common to the majority of companies. Always followed by the convenient nuances and precisions. For this reason we have considered convenient to show how this kind of company receives a project, a work proposal. Which are the characteristics of labour division among, generally, the ‘big integrator’, who contracted the complete project, and this software factory, SAL, who is in charge of a part, more or less important, significant, or qualified, in the global project. As we schematically present this case based in real life, we identify the problems, the dependencies of the factory regarding the contractor. The imposition or negotiation of deadlines, the quality control, the conditions in which work will be done and its organization 61 . “For us a factory project is: the one contracted by an integrator of a concrete project, and we are just contracted for that part. Analysis is already given to us, functional analysis, and we make the technical design, the construction and the trials. Then we pass it to them [to the integrator], and they make the implementation for the client. And well, if there is any mistake, we make a corrective maintenance until the product is ready [correctly functioning]. And then it would come the user-driven maintenance. This is a factory project. [As you can see these are projects] that come from a client which is a big integrator itself, it is not the final client of the development but an integrator, such as INDRA, AZERTIA, SOLUZIONA. These are usually projects of millions of Euros, projects of two, three years of development and implantation that afterwards have a maintenance cost. These are teams of up to 20-25 FTEs, full time equivalents (persons), in a year. And these projects cover all the life cycle [of the product], from the assessment of the client needs, the specifications, the analysis, and so on, to the implantation. And we, the factory project, we cover the stage of the technical design up to the trials. When one of our salespersons has a client, that in this case are integrators, who needs our services to fill a factory project, the first thing we do is: they give us the functional analysis, with the use cases, all defined. (…) Those are then functional documents, with the use cases persons have or the processes interacting and how they are related among them inside the application we are going to develop. With these use cases, the production director states which, in fact in those technology is usually already given, we do not have to choose the technique, they say it is Java, with this architecture, with this specialty, so... we already have the technology.
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All the text that follows is based in the interviews realized in a company we will call SAL, to different responsible persons, and carried out in October 2006. Texts in italics correspond to the textual transcription of the interviews. Specially in this case, they correspond to the Directress of Planning and Control.
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And the production director first identifies the team that is going to estimate the work that needs to be done. Because the integrator give us all that and we have to give them back a PES (Plan de Especificación del Servicio), which is a Plan Specifying the Service we are going to realise. That is, an estimation of hours, time, a planning and an economical estimation. And including the profiles and the curricula, even of the profiles that we are going to assign to work in the project. Then the production director with this functional analysis, determines a team, the team suitable to make that estimation, that PES. This is the point, the date, the project, the work that is going to take place here, in SAL. The planning, the men- hour, the cost by profile, the curricula, all the particularities that need to be closed. It is like the previous contract that you would close with a client but here in this case for the total project, because this part, this part is going to take you this time and this cost. And the deliverables, all we are going to deliver, in which dates ... Once we have this PES, we send it to the integrator. In this case as I am talking about the TRI project, from X, that is an application for taxes. This project is still alive, we still have work, and we have already been working on it for three years now. Yes, it is a big quite established project. Well, once we have the PES we give it to X and the project manager, of the whole project, given that we just make a part of it, fixes it in the global planning of the project, see if costs and dates are ok, if everything fixes. All parameters that we have taken into account there. If there is something that needs to be changed, the project keeps on coming back so we make the adjustments until we have the final one. From there it is as if we had a signed contract: , and from there the project goes to the production chain. Usually in these factory projects we do not make the graphic interface part, the design of the screens comes already from the analysis and from X, so our part is developing, make the technical design and its develop. Weekly or on a regular basis, depending on the criticality of the project, its risks, of some parameters, on how that project from X has to be done, because sometimes from the distance they are not quite trustful, until they get the pace, they are not calm having a project that is being developed not there close to your desk that you cannot control at any moment. Then, depending on several variables, we make a series of weekly, daily, monthly follow-ups. Depending, as I say, on the order of the project, its criticality; of the visibility inside the company, because many times when it is a project for the directors you pay much more attention to everything being ok. Maybe you make an almost daily follow-up. [Well. We already have the project. Now we go see the] team that develops the project here. After the contract, it is put into the production line and here it goes through a pyramid, that even if it is not the complete project, for this project, for this fragment we are going to settle, there is a hierarchy, a coordinator, inside the team, which is the one acting as correspondent with the project manager in X. All the communication is unified in one person. In the daily follow-up, he is the one giving the reports, if there is any variation, because once the PES is closed not everything is fixed, usually you find something that was not foreseen. You have to re-plan, re-estimate. Or we are asked to shorten the deadlines because they had to move something. We make adjustments on the way. And that is the role of the team coordinator, who would be as the project manager but at a lower level. [-In order to plan the amounts of work of the whole factory, a right calculation in the PES is fundamental, isn’t it?] - For all my planning of the whole factory, meaning all the projects, all those that are opened in the factory; for everything to fit, I have to trust these coordinators have really fined tuned. As you can understand, we are not machines, we are not perfect, and all works just on a trial and error basis. And not even so because every project is unique. And he who has lots of experience is supposed to make less mistakes, but it comes a very different project and you can be there for hours..., but well, it’s about skills and experience.
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Anyway, in the men-hour estimation, it is just an estimation without all possible variables that you have to take into account so when the project is being made then (…) distortion comes up and they have to be corrected on the way. With the handicap that when you close the economic cost of the project with the integrator, it is very difficult to open and double it. (…) Closing a PES is, for the rest of the project very, very, very important. [And there is also the time pressure]. Usually, depending on the project, but since you are asked an estimation until you send it, it takes around two or three days. Well then sometimes when you are asked the ideal person to make the estimation is in another project and overloaded, and you cannot remove him/her from there. And it is very difficult, the idea is to have a constant occupation, but there are always peaks, a week you need many extra hours to be made and the other half of the factory doesn’t have enough amount of work. This is what you have to avoid. We usually do RTD, prepare for a project that we know it’s going to come, but well, it is difficult to balance the workload. [Coming back to the concrete real case we have taken as an example, TRI, it is this kind of projects] we like because when they last for so long they get quite stabilized. It gets more monotonous and as this particular project, they go so smoothly that we constantly make PES, from one day to the other we make the PES. Sure. [Because] the part of the work that we have to do, it is not in just one PES, it is divided into WUs, Work Units, into modules. We may have to make many applications and all the development of the application. But it has several modules. For example, if it has more modules of payment, invoicing, human resources and so, it is divided into WUs and every WU is a PES, which shortens it. [Each of these modules could be parts that need to be sequenced, in the same way than in traditional organization they are sequenced inside the assembly line]: the parts that are related must be done at the same time for the trials. Then when you see the project and the relations it comes the functional analysis. [The technician] that is estimating knows this part has to go with the other and cannot be left for six months. Because then you cannot test the other part. Then you cannot know until you have started the next part, and then it’s about using logics. In any case we don’t usually do it ourselves, usually it comes from X, because functional analysis is already divided into packages, modules. [In order to form the teams for each module], we usually group the persons by projects in rooms. At the beginning we didn’t do it like this but when we started a long term factory project, we saw it was much better having the persons of the same project in the same place. Before we had them all grouped by technologies. There were the graphical designers, the ones of the interfaces of mock up, animation, then the part of development, then databases, then systems... Gathered as blocks, with the same profiles. But a project is composed of several profiles. A team of persons with different profiles. So you had people working in all production room, in the same project, in every where, everybody standing up, phoning, loads of noise… Because the project depends a lot on how people get involved, connected. Because a same Work Unit can be developed by four programmers. A WU can have 20 screens on a row, passing from one to another. From the one I am working with I pass into yours. Then if the four of them are in the same table and can speak it makes much less noise, everything is easier. Then we chose for this long term projects, to group the people on the project. Then we have in two tables all people working in this project and like that they talk as much as they need. And that facilitates the work and the coordination because the coordinator needs to group them some times, they go to the drop [round space at the end of each table available for that purpose] and people do not need to be in the meeting room. It is a bit optimizing resources because at the end it is men-hours, even if we don’t want to recognize it, and as we optimize all those pieces of time and as they get more involved, that is
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to say if one of them has a doubt he can stand up and say . Then these are little things that help. Yes, you see this makes things easier 62 . Inside a project team there is a coordinator, technical designers, senior programmers, junior programmers, programming assistant, and then, finally, different creative profiles like the graphical designer or mock up, when projects require also that we make the visual part. What is style, graphic part of a project. But everyone has his own profile, and then they learn from one another of course. When you are working in a project, when you have been programming for a time and for example, the next step in your career is a technical designer, and he is working close to you. Even though sometimes there are persons that prefer to stay in programming. They don’t like making PES, because it is more responsibility. If you don’t make a good PES and you make a mistake measuring a piece of work, that can have an impact on the team, they may have to make extra hours... These are responsibilities some people don’t want to take, they just want to work developing and that’s it”. 5. ‘ALAR’: a mixed center for development, University-Company in Castilla-La Mancha 63 . 1. Origin of the company, constitution and localization. First news of the company we will call ‘Alar’, placed in an intermediate city of Castilla-La Mancha, are found in 1998, when its constitution takes place, as a company specialized in software development and independent from “Y”, a big company of the electrical sector 64 . Its origins come back to its installing in this city in Castilla-La-Mancha in 1999, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the European Communities regional development initiative of European Business and Innovation Centers that arose in 1984, with the support of several institutions including the Chambers of Commerce. In 1999, “Alar” settled down in the business park of the city with just 14 persons in staff. That’s how the present Director of the company relates it: “we found ourselves in a place with everything, with the electronics. It was ready to plug in the equipment and work. And that’s how we started in October 1999, with 14 persons. The fist thing we did was establishing contact with the University, in particular with the School of Computer Science (Escuela de Informática) [recently created, as we’ll see, jjc]. And we quickly established a good level of relations: “hey, we are going to need computer technicians” 65 . This feature is the most characteristic of the situation and perspectives of this company, as we’ll see further on in detail, and becomes at the end a rare example of collaboration between Public University and a concrete company, with very important consequences for both institutions. And also for the explanation on how this company works. But we will come back on this later on.
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The building of this factory, placed in an industrial area, forms part of the design itself of work organization. As the director of the company says: “we designed this building; this building is ours, we thought it to avoid the problems we were suffering [in town center]. To facilitate the communication, the integration of the teams, for the flexibility for the inclusion of persons from the clients, for everything a factory needs to have. Then well when you see it you are going to see it is just thought for software development in a factory model”. Interview realized on 17th October 2006. SAL Director. 63 We present here in detail, for space reasons of the text, just three of the cases analyzed in depth. This is a specially successful case study. 64 ‘Alar’, the false name we give to this company in the localization we are studying, forms part of that big development company that will be called “Y” in this research. As in other studied cases, we have used first hand information of both, Alar and Y, including its current situation, undergoing big transformations and acquisitions. Most part of this documentation is internal documentation of the company, facilitated to the public in its web page, in the specialized press or in its own publications. We only use here indispensable situation data that allows an understanding of the problems we are tackling, keeping the necessary discretion about the company itself. 65 Interview to DIR-ALAR, 24th February 2006.
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As we said, the company settled at the end of 1999, and all seems to indicate that there is a clear and defined strategy for its future evolution. The economic press will point out that “this initiative is framed in the software development delocalization project of the professional services company, [Y], outside traditional centers, mostly placed in Madrid or Barcelona, with the aim of obtaining advantages, not just in costs, but in quality, productivity, efficiency and professionals training, with a view on competing with international leaders of the sector” 66 . They will soon reach an agreement with the University, according to which they promote a Mixed Development Center (Centro de Desarrollo Mixto), in the University campus, whose general direction will be hold by a University Professor, and that counts on resources from the company. The agreements, signed in 2001, state, through a specific document signed by the Rector of the University and the top management from Y, the implementation of what, in words of the local press and company newsletter, is considered “the greater initiative for technological boost in the region, regarding the field of software development and new computer technologies”. In a period of forty years the terrains of the University will come back to it. The company, on its side, invests, accordingly to the data given by the press, eight million euro in model installations that will be able to hold up to 500 developers. When the Mixed Center for Software Research and Development (CMID, Centro Mixto de Investigación y Desarrollo de Software) was inaugurated in April 2003, Alar already had 80 employees. And in the moment of our fieldwork, visiting the company and making the interviews, the total of employees will be close to 250 persons, working in an organization that has been standardized level 3 of CMMI. Alar’s Director thinks that “all we can say is that we are a real software factory, with all this implies, since three years ago, not more. The time we have been here, 3 or 4 years. Because you have to have really consolidated technologies and the productive environment, the reuse… All we say about Software Factory, it is not easy to get to this point. Because, as every one else, we have been called software factory even if we were a handcraft factory. And then yes, it is very easy to call yourself software factory, you surf the web and anyone is called software factory. But from a handcraft factory to a software factory there is a long path. You have to have the capacities, the processes, the metrics… 2. University, company and labour market. A 83 per cent of developers employed by Alar, in 2006, according to the data given by the company, comes from the local University itself. This striking fact is a good indicator of the special characteristics of this company. For the Director of the School of Computer Sciences, who reminds us that the School had started precisely in October 1998: “Then, at that period, it was crazy times, tremendous. In fact, companies were coming, many of them came at that period to present themselves and so on, saying: ‘for us it is the same if its higher or technical education’. Then they talked to the students and I said: ‘Hey, don’t say that, you are discouraging [people]’. Because we do know the difference between higher education and technical studies. Another question is whether companies are desperately looking for people and don’t care about anything. But don’t say it is the same profile because it is not true. And if it’s the case, something is going wrong, isn’t it? Then this perception was transmitted to the students. They registered in technical studies and said: ‘then if I want I can continue in the higher studies’. But then when they finished the technical studies, or even without finishing, they started working” 67 .
Finanzas.com, 29th April 2005. Interview to the Director of the School of Computer Sciences, 24th February 2006. This trend to resort to the lowest qualification offered by the University is an indicator of the type of professionals demanded, at least in the lowest positions in Alar, as trainees. They will be then integrated as junior programmers. In any case, the low mean age of workers occupied in 2006, 27 years, is very striking and would require a detailed study on work rotation and leave.
66 67
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The remark that needs to be done is the kind of jobs offered to these students, of which, notably, 98 per cent are men, with a striking lack of women. “The problem –continues the Director of the School- is that sometimes there were not very qualified works either. There were computer works, but fundamentally programmers. Then obviously those persons were not the ones managing or designing the projects. They were those for the maintenance, programming… [Because] it comes a moment when companies have very automated methodologies to do things. Then all they need is people that works routinely, just write codes as it is usually said. Well then there were people that said: ‘well you told us higher engineer made some things and then companies want these other things’. It was a period when there was a big demand of workers, but specially for those kind of works”. [The company] let’s say they have always liked the people graduated here, their professional profile. So they have been asking for people; in the worst period they asked for 10 or 15 persons. And in the best periods, like now, they are asking for 30 or 35 persons per year. They want them for training periods. But well, our function is to take persons to the labour market, and I think no one can complain […]. I think we produce now an important quantity that is more or less absorbed by the local company, there is also people that decide to go to Madrid. In fact, there are surveys we made a few time ago and it came out that the time a person takes from he leaves here to when he finds a job was about a month, a month an a half. We cannot complain” 68 . Another professor from the School of Computer Sciences, the CMID Director, specifies in this sense: “In school we have three profiles. One is oriented to multimedia, other oriented to hardware, networks, the one of the Director of the School, and the third is oriented to information systems, which is the one I am in charge. The school was already made with a profile, oriented to software development. So they are very well prepared. It is not because we say it but because it is oriented to that. If it’s about other fields, maybe they are not so well prepared. But for this, yes, they are. So then, they are ready… They are employed as trainees, with the program signed with school, and then they join the company” 69 . 3. Synergies and reinforcement: university research and Alar. University, since Alar is near by, has been able to attract professors and researchers of great worth, to the point that a first kind research team with international presence has been constituted and participates in numerous research projects. The Director of this group, Professor in the University is also the Director of the CMID, and has a long professional experience, as well as publication and current projects. For him, Alar does not ‘represent’ a ‘normal’ company in Spain. It is a remarkable exception, “one of the most advanced ones”, with a CMMI level 3 implemented, and a model building, as we said in the University campus, together with other first line research centers. His research team works “in fact just in one theme. Even if we are fourteen doctors and around fifty PhD students. We work on quality of information systems”. “Inside quality of information systems, we work in the software part, and there we approach different aspects. For example, on one side, the methodological aspect, we develop methodologies for software development. Methodological aspect: we work a lot with metrics, for the quality and improvement of the quality. As you already know, CMMI and all that are processes for the improvement of quality of software development. But also knowledge management: because it is an important part of quality management and quality improvement too. And then, we deal with different aspects of processes, etc.[and we have several research ongoing projects in these fields]” 70 . Among these international projects there is “a kind of CMMI, but Latin American. Because CMMI at the end is North American, and there is a cultural problem. You cannot 68
Interview to the Director of the School of Computer Sciences, 24th February 2006. Interview to the Director of CMID, 5th July 2006. 70 Interview to the Director of CMID, 5th July 2006. 69
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transfer the culture of the United States to a Latin-Spanish culture, it doesn’t work. Besides, even if you manage to transfer it, it is really expensive. Because you have to pay royalties to the Software Engineering Institute, and it doesn’t have any sense that these small business in these countries pay those royalties”. [Because] one thing is what we do for the people in Latin America, for the SME also in Spain; and another thing is here, Alar, which is much higher level because it is a software factory. It is one of the few certified level three in Spain (we estimate a maximum around 10 or 14 over level three, from three to five), and it will get to level four in 2007; and obviously they have quality staff, persons responsible of processes, infrastructures, a whole well defined process… other characteristics”. At the same time, the University works in the elaboration of new methodologies going ahead current practice, that can face radical changes that may or will come. An example of this is the “Model Driven Architecture Engineering”, that is to say to generate codes from models in an automatic way. And that is going to change all the way of working, it is already changing. What happens is that companies don’t believe it yet, but this already exists. In computing unfortunately the stress is done at the end in codifying and programming. And the analysis and design phases do not get enough attention or are forgotten. In some places, more advanced, time is taken for analysis and design. But it is also that when you generate these tools and technologies, once we have finished the model, you push the button and the application is automatically generated. It is the computerization of computing. But this situation –says the Director of CMID- “at business level is not yet implemented”. “That is to say the reality is still that there is much codification, lots of codification is needed, and well, you have to give the persons the specifications so they can codify. And from the [companies] I know, both in Latin America and here in Spain, at the end they codify a lot. And there is much emphasis in the trials, the verification that the code is all right and so on; but still it is mainly about codification. It is the reality because in computing there is a problem: the difference between the state of the art and the state of the practice. There is a huge gap […] 71 . 4. Alar in action: many and diverse project, just one methodology. In Alar many different projects were taking place when we made a detailed visit, guided by its Director, paying attention to the details of each of them (15 to 20), to get to know the diversity of the raised problems, depending on the length of the project, three years, two years, one year, several months…. Depending on the used architectures and the teams and staff engaged in it. Well then, as our guide and speaker insisted, “the methodological environment is the same; methodology is one thing and then the technique, you can use the tool you want” 72 . The distribution of space, “in greenfield”, gathers different teams, according to the amount of work, all close to one another and at the same time perfectly delimited. The design of the work space has been very carefully made and it is noticeable that it is the same in the different development centers the company has, either in Madrid, Bratislava or Panama. We will point out now, as examples, some of those multiple projects, with the limitations due to confidentiality and professional deontology that can give the reader a minimum view of the environment in which takes place the Public Health project we study in detail in section 5. A first team works for the Regional Service for Employment (Servicio Regional de Empleo) in an incremental development project for the management of continuing training. It is a small team of five persons. In another place another team is working in the construction of a customs module, for commerce, for a Latin American government. In another a program for a television channel is under development. Further on a short project for a consumers portal of a nearby Institutional Region (Comunidad Autónoma) is carried out. In this case the module also serves as formation for a recently incorporated trainee. Further on a complex system for the management of arms and explosives that has taken place for a year and a half and it’s going to follow-up as an European project, is being finished. Public Health, “the area with a clearer 71 72
Interview to the Director of CMID, 5th July 2006. Interview to DIR-ALAR, 24th February 2006.
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future prospect”, holds a privileged place, and several projects for several Regions (called in Spain Comunidades Autónomas) are under development, together with several projects and modules (see next section). Sixty persons are in charge of bank software for ISBAN in a wing of the building. “We get big development batches. The only difference in this one is that we work with their methodology. They give us their methodology and, logically, we make the pieces that then they fit in their puzzle. These pieces may not work on their own. They have the mosaic and we make just the pieces for them”. A big group takes a remarkably bigger surface and designs the fiscal system for Palestine, working with the Spanish Fiscal Authority (Agencia Tributaria), and funded by the European Union. Many other projects are carried out in the center but in all them the sequence of steps to be deployed is given by Alar methodology. Obviously such complex and different projects do not need the same level of precision: “The methodology has to be a practical aspect that addes value to work and that is usefull. A methodology, ours, with alive lines”, particularized and particular to the company, based in CMMI level 3. 5. A particular manufacture or the recuperation of labour division. Conception plus execution in a complex program 73 . “It was not like that before [the richness and diversity of programming]. Programmers before, I mean in the times in which just big corporations had computers, big machines, in that period a programmer was a mere translator of what was called charge notebooks that were issued by the analysts. The analyst made all the work in their head and the programmers just translated what was written in those charge notebooks. This has changed a lot through the years and of course the perception a programmer has of his work is much different and encouraging. Because at the end the motivation of a person working in software development is, like for any other worker, related to the degrees of freedom: “what, when and how”. If you tell a person “what he has to do, how to do it and when it has to be done”, you kill his work. Well not, you prevent him/her from being creative and you make him/her a kind of automat or a robot, with is many times the aim behind these actuations, isn’t it? […]. But what I mean is that people in my opinion, people that works programming, has some part of a creator, that is to say, they are somehow artists because they create something. In the case of software factories they are obviously much more focused in the production task than in complete task. The complete task is the one of creation, isn’t it? You divide it into parts, the final part, one of the almost ending parts, is production. But in software factories what is also appreciated is being able to deal with the process since the beginning, and that’s what we do in software. It’s like the requirements, at the end, doctors dictate what they want to do, it is quite complex to explain of formalize in a document, we use a technique called ‘Incremental with Mock-up’: this means that we close very functional, very delimited requirements, we do the layout in a very short time, so that the doctors tell us is immediately, as they seen in a papier-mâché model in computer, and so they see themselves the results of the conversations we have. At the moment it is closed it becomes a functional package, with whole sense, the analysis is already done, and that’s what goes to the factory. Then this technique is used when clients, the ones who say what they want, in reality do not have a clear idea of what they want. Then this requires a small piece of consulting at the beginning, in which you define with them which are exactly the requirements. It is very different from working in a bank. A bank has its processes perfectly and tightly catalogued. It is obviously a much different work, more voluminous. Loads of proceedings but little creativity. That is to say there is not much to add. Everything is perfectly settled. That is mainly what we do. Then in the production stage is
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In this section we use the information gathered in the work field, the field notes, and the interviews realized in “Alar”, with the occasion of two visits, on 24th February and 5th July 2007, for general considerations. The quotes put in quotation marks, unless other indication is made, correspond to the second interview to the Manager of the Public Health Area (Gerente del Área de Sanidad), on 5th July 2007.
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where I say that, to my understanding, there is not an unique way to do things, it doesn’t exist […]. Now we are doing a process of that kind. 5. 1. We are designing an application for primary health care, and we are doing it like this: There is a commission of doctors. Well this was made as follows. [We see it] from the beginning. The ‘Health Service’ 74 (Servicio de Salud) decides it wants to make its own application for primary health care, and the first thing they propose is that we propose ourselves an application, that is to say that we make the list of requirements; pay attention that in theory [it should be them]. ‘We propose an analysis, a gathering of requirements for the application for primary health. That is to say describing in a document and a mock-up what should be, to your understanding, an application for primary health’. We hired a doctor, we talked to him, we worked with one that has already experience in using other products of primary health care. We keep on gathering. Software included. So that there is no possible distinction about the origin of the software. I keep on composing this kind of document. And then, once we have all this, I ask the Health Service to settle a medical commission. That is to say, a meeting of four, five, ten doctors of primary health care, from different background, like pediatricians, nurses, general practitioners, etc. We distribute the mock-up to them and the document, and we lead the meeting. […] And then they get their “homework”, we ask them to study the document, see whether they understand, the problems they can get. Then from there we start the work with the doctors’ commission. Every meeting, once a week, they make comments on the mock-up, they meet again the following week […]. Then, at the moment they agree on the mock-up, let’s say, you stop there to gather more requirements. They accept that’s what they want. And we stop there. And this is the documentation that gets into the production circuit, the factory. It’s like plans in a car factory, the moment you have the plans the factory makes the car perfectly if the plan is correct. So what we’ve done here is to split two parts, one the work of making up the plans and the other the execution of the system. There are trials, there is production set-up, training, more steps in the project; but the part that concerns the software factory is: of course, the production, and in some cases like this, the make-up of the plans themselves, of the requirements themselves. This is more or less the technique. It is called, ‘Incremental with Mock-up’. There is also a cascade, with or without mock-up… This is a bit more expensive, but it has the advantage that you make safe steps. That is to say, the users see the work step by step, there is no surprise. There are other methodologies that say: . So when you are going to put it in production and show them to the users, thousand problems can arise. Then when the initial requirements from the users are not clear, the technique to employ is this one; and it this is a bit more expensive, not much more expensive, of course, it is much safer.[…] 5.2. “And this goes to production”: the conception. [How is production organization?] -This is another issue. Also for this case everyone has their own way of doing things.[…] Concerning the organization of production itself, let’s see, here there are different phases [in the ‘conception’], different profiles. There is a high level analyst that is taking the requirements with the client. To these meetings I usually take technical staff, but not to contribute with something functional but because many times when I am showing the mock-up some of them have ideas: -Hey, and if I do this in this way and so?-; then maybe the technician says: careful, trouble! [Because it’s not so easy]. 74
It is a Public Health Service of a Region, one of the seventeen Automous Communities (Comunidad Autónoma), that exists in Spain.
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So there are profiles: analyst, and a support technician. Simply to validate that what is being asked can be reasonably be done. Once we gather the requirements we pass to what I call: design. That is to say, here is where we get the pieces, where we use the methodology, let’s say internal, it is the first step inside the factory. There is a designer and an architect. Usually the architect is a person of a high level profile, that works just once, setting the technical architecture of the project. That is to say, how many servers there will be, which data bases, how are they settled, that is all what ‘architecture’ implies. And the designer, who is the one that finally puts the application into pieces, the use case, generates the documentation and the skeleton so each of the teams that are going to carry out each functional part, can deal with it. Then these two profiles are very important, the first one being the person that dictates how the product is going to behave physically, technically; the other is the one that says how it is going to behave functionally. And what they do is distributing work. They can be both the same person even. If the architect has the functional capacity. I like best when profiles are mixed, in this sense, well, I mean, I don’t like it much, even if I understand it is necessary, people absolutely technique with no functional skill. Because it is very difficult to talk to them, you just can’t. And the contrary either, meaning a completely functional profile and that has no idea of technology, because they are usually kamikazes. They think everything can be done… There is a balance that can and needs to exist between functional and technical aspect, which for me is the ideal. That is a person that knows what you can do or not and that when is talking to a doctor can follow the conversation, talk the same [language]. Then these, this person, one or two, is the one that later on is in charge of giving the work to the teams depending on the size of the project. 5.3. Work organization, the execution: the teams and their composition, methodology, standards. These teams normally consist on four programmers and a team manager. In the case of the ‘Public Health Service”, of primary health care, there are three teams of four persons each one with its team manager. And the internal organization of the team and the responsibility of each team, connects with Alar’s methodology […]. Here each team’s responsibility is to realize the work you have been assigned by the designer inside the environment and the use cases, and it is responsible of its part of development inside the versions trial. Then there is a team manager too. He is an important person also here that is in charge of doing the “merger” or the fitting of all the development pieces from each of the teams. What we do when we register a new project is, in accordance with the client, tackling with the methodology phases that are relevant for that project. That is to say, for the short cycle projects, with a length of less than twelve months, more or less, what we do is using a simplified methodology. And then for bigger projects what we do is choosing from the general methodology of Alar those parts that make sense for that concrete project. Because obviously not all methodology has always sense 75 . Usually what also happens is that the methodology is something that makes the development more expensive. It is a very good quality index, because it gives you the security that everything is going to be all right, but unfortunately sometimes you do not get enough money to do it like this. And occasionally we have certain problems because well we have to have, or maintain a balance, between doing it or doing the project […], and making it under minimally assumable conditions […]”. 75
We have directly consulted ourselves in detail both simplified and complete methodologies, going through all the requirements, the tools for gathering information, etc., with the aim of understanding the functioning form of the work organization for the projects inside this company. For this we could access, thanks to the company kindness, to its intranet, consulting and printing for further study the complex weave of the methodology, which as we talked with our speakers, both the company director and this manager, is a hard mechanism that uses and widens Métrica Tres (Metric Three) the standar used by Public Administration in Spain; and also, as we’ll see further on in the text, the certification acquired by Alar in CMMI level 3. We want to stress our gratitude here again. JJC.
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We go through what we have called complete production process, guided by our speaker, in which all is included, as we have also detailed in other case studies, in this same research, all the path, detailed, crossed, of planning, the analysis of risk, viability, calculation, with homologated and tested metrics, of possible costs (which were preceded by a meticulous study of possible risks). And even of the following maintenance function of level three assigned by the company. Together with all this it comes the possible externalization –to a different company- of some of the trials, both for the units and for the integration, which are- we believeone of the central problems in the recomposition of the puzzle, as some speakers define it, of the fragments that were attributed to the different teams, both in this software factory, in this concrete location, and in other factories that can be placed anywhere, more or less distant. Here we will talk in several occasions about the center in Madrid, or Bratislava, or Panama, or in the past years in Buenos Aires. Talking of unitary trials, those foreseen by the methodology, they remind us that “they are forced by CMMI 3”. “But CMMI three just forces to document the trials. That is to say, which data did you have at the registration? Which were the expected data? Which are the obtained data at the end? Doing that in a middle-sized project I have calculated that the added cost of documentations is approximately a 20%. A fifth part of the time devoted to documentation will be taken by the Unitary Tests. But well, that’s the way it is![…] The quality staff is in charge of having a quality plan for all the projects I manage, a project plan and a quality plan in accordance to ISO, CMMI or any other required certification. Usually nobody asks for the documentation of the Unitary Tests, because you have to bear in mind that a project of twelve months can have around 500 function- points. Each of these function- points requires around 5 Unitary Tests, approximately. That is to say, one person working a year should have to document 2.500 tests!. [-And the clients?] -They know our methodology is available. They know at a precise moment, if its agreed like that, they can ask for it. But that is not useful information for the client, he doesn’t care about unitary tests you have done. The client is interested, above all, in the in the integration tests, in the volume tests. He is really really interested in the volume tests because it is not the same to make the application trials with 2 users than with 2000, then the volume tests are usually much more important. And then there are also stress tests, that consist in taking [the system] a bit to the limit, overcharge it, to see how it behaves, above all to see if it has lateral effects on other applications working in the same server”. 6. The teams do not lose “head”: the project of primary health care. For our informant, with over fourteen years of experience in computer management and construction, of which six in Alar, where he has constituted a team that lasts in time and recognized by him, with no hesitation, as his “major asset”, it is fundamental, as for the case of the Primary Health Care Service acting as concrete example, not to loose sight on the process part included under the section of gathering requirements. This distance, separation, this loss of division of the productive process, is a first construction of a separation that, in classical terms for the sociology of work, can be identified as the separation between conception and execution. Later on there will come other divisions, more rooted in the work process, like the loss of control or surveillance of the own work and creativity. But this is, of course, the first separation, the one between conception and execution. We express here, in first instance, its ideal (applied in practice, we are not talking about a non applied ideal) of what can be an organization that, according to their sayings and the collected data, is a path in with professional careers, the use of the accumulated knowledge, not just in the technique for codification problem’s resolution itself but also in the real functioning of the area in which they work, public health, lead to an specialization that is, in the Italian sense of the word for labour organization, a mayor qualification and broad professional display. And, therefore, to a bigger business success.
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“This is the ideal for me –he says. Here the size [of the group] depends on the project size, meaning the number of teams. The teams, in my opinion, have four people plus a team manager, that is to say five persons. The responsibility is split into teams. There is a team manager, an architect, an analyst. These are usual transversal to teams. There is a design task that can be done by the analyst or separated, but those are tasks apart. Ant the communication flows between designer and teams. Once it enters production [the project], this person is under consultation if there is a doubt. And the work is carried out by the designer, which I like too, who is the team manager. Because this one is the one in charge, responsible for everything”. The company manager, our interviewed person, is responsible for several projects. Inside the project of primary health care there are three teams, that is to say fifteen people, organized in the already mentioned structure, under the responsibility of a team manager. The methodology used, “incremental with mock-up”, leads to a way of working in which the swinging between gathering of requirements, the analysis, the presentation of the final mock-up to the client, the discussion, the place in common and the return back to the factory is recurrent. And it is foreseen to take place in three different phases, of which the first has already finished when we do our fieldwork. “In this moment, a mock-up is available, reflecting exactly what the client wants. On that piece will work the analyst and the designer (who came both with me to the meetings to take first hand information in this case). [They will take] maximum two weeks to piece the development and from there they will split the work into the teams. These persons are in charge of the development environment, that is to say, to fit out the space in the versions controller, where all files will go. Establishing which hierarchy, which structure of directory the project is going to have. They will assign the permissions corresponding to these persons, so that each one can work in his own place. They will organize the project from the point of view of systems. And these persons start working, with the guidelines given by the designer, according to the methodology: use cases, scenarios and so on. That is what each team manager gets […].” This kind of organization of software production allows to stabilize people much more, generating confidence and knowledge in an area like public health, where accordingly to our correspondent, technical qualification meets the “business” knowledge, both functional skills. The length of this public health project is estimated in a year for its complete development, plus the evolutive or corrective maintenance. For these the part of the team that participates is a fundamental asset. Team managers are computer engineers with lots of experience, at least three years, combined with people with less experience, one year, to compose a work unity of reference. They have “ability to get on well with people, they know when to ask people to make an effort, and they do it in such a reasonable way that people jus do it. It’s different, isn’t it? And they use to work very well with documentation panels, they know how to read them, they don’t have trouble reading and producing documentation, they don’t find it hard to monitor it inside their area”. A further step against piecing and routinizing of work is to provide the team with a meaningful work, a functional unit, or a use case, coherent: “the work received by this team is not unconnected, is a functional block that has sense in itself; I can cut the project, but this part makes sense in itself, I am not giving you [something] beheaded, ok?”. “He has to be capable of understanding that this [his work], is going to be used in this functional circuit […], but this is a complete functional circuit. That is to say, it is a procedure that has a sense on its own, that has a beginning as an event, easily detectable, and that needs to have a complete development. Then I like teams to work this way. So integration tasks are infinitely easier, obviously. If I cut into pieces the functionality in another way I would have then trouble to put them together. And, above all, I wouldn’t have anyone with an overview of it. Then what I require is that this person is really keen on reading the documentation, capable of reading an analysis and a functional design in a perfect way”.
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“Here the functional asset is important again. Usually if this person, the team manager, has been working in several health projects, he already knows a lot about the concept, about the concepts used in health, so he makes himself responsible of all this, of the functional package. And of course he has to get into the program. Because he is the one in charge of revising the code of these [programmers of his team]. Maybe he doesn’t end writing much code; which sometimes happens too. But that of course, to review the code you need to have experience, to have seen much code. So you can detect the problems…”
5. Conclusion. 1. Clear tendencies, but nuanced. When closing this research, and as the reader has been able to realize, the tendencies shown up in the deployment in Spain of the software factories, are, more or less, quite similar to the ones reflected in literature and international reality. In fact, as we set out in the first lines of this work, one of our main concerns in our research, was, and still is, to get close to what is really taking place. How new production organizations on software manufacture are developing, in order to be able to identify, even in a summarized way, the big trends of fate, present and future that the workers of the software sector have ahead. Men and female workers that turn out to be the emblematic representation of all that is actually under discussion about the fate of work in the information society. At the beginning of this study we posed a set of questions. They were also peak points from which we have a look at this reality of fluent work in information society. But we also wanted to give precise indications to the reader of the intellectual interests behind and the policy of application of research results to the reality around us that moved our work. These questions have arisen from the research we carried out, of course. But also from the questions that other researchers have posed and, somehow, achieved to answer, even partially, in their studies. Its fundamental core is linked to the exploration of the kind of work transferred, of the possibilities for the places where these new factories are moved or created, the role they can play in the promotion or even creation of virtuous circles of wealth and decent and qualified work creation. Of possibilities for the social territories in which they are settled. Of the eventual futures of hope for the thousands of young people that put on these jobs their illusions and knowledge. What we find, as nuanced evidence, as we say, is that the tendency to separate conception from execution, with a renewed reiteration of labour division among companies (or among working centers of the same company), is a strong sign of the current developments. The ‘noblest’ part –and that conditions the rest of the work process- the gathering of requirements, the analysis, the direct contact with the final client, is left aside. On the other side, in factories, as a general tendency, just (!) “plain and simple development” is carried out, as we have been told. ‘Writing code’. With contrasts and stresses like the last case developed in depth, the Public Health in ALAR, which shows the contradictions, limits and problems that also set the extreme labour division. At the same time the absolutely prevailing tendency is that standards, which seem to be implemented as an unavoidable form of work organization, set out the guidelines of labour division in companies and concrete work centers. As a paradigm that limits the possibilities for ‘new organization forms’. But also, as some other authors have pointed out, even if we have not found consistent traces in our case studies, as a possibility of widening the object of work, of better socialization of the workers, of larger interrelation among them, etc. The tendency to the simplification of work that is transferred to the factories, that moves to the big centers, seems to strengthen, even in the tendencies to engage, as junior programmers in these companies, medium level technicians instead of higher level ones. Or persons with vocational training rather than university bachelors or masters. And as a reflection of these tendencies towards the separation of conception from execution work, and to routinization and simplification, in a context of standardized and much formalized organization, the companies end up facing problems of rotation and work leave. For some of the companies we have studied in depth, the
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politics of human resources management have as a fundamental concern to be able to build a professional path for their workers, so that the large rotation rate decreases. Moreover, as they have explained to us in detail, the companies consider taking to their software factories more sophisticated products and work lines that allow constructing these career paths on real grounds. In our study, we have also shed light on some deeper reflections, opening underlying problematic questions in the sociology of work. Even if we just can outline some arguments now. Open questions for future research works. In fact, in this study of software creation, production, manufacturing or development processes we have approached, as it became necessary, that is to say, because it was imposed by the theoretical object, immaterial, qualified, work, and the empiric referent, some of the classical problems in labour organization, even if it is just in a tentative form for this first approach: the implication of workers; the forms of collaboration and constitution of the collective worker and its coordination; the constitution of work teams, or work in teams and its linking among them; the so called “virtual teams” and the problems for coordination and integration in complex work systems. In the localization of the case studies we have looked for those places where, as research has shown, and in cases in which comparison is a good starting point, we have the fundamental interpretative elements to frame the fragmented processes of software production. The companies we have studied are focused in industrial areas, which strengthen their apparent identification with a factory: a development pole; an industrial area; an office building… Buildings can be new, specially designed for the organization of software development ‘assembly line’, as will be repeatedly said in the interviews we have realized. Even if the metaphor is not a really adequate description of the disposition and chaining of production in each case, it should be noted that, in every case, the spatial disposition, and even the architectural design, has been though on purpose with more rigor, consciousness and intention than the usual one for other productive sectors. For this, with no exception, in each case it will be stressed that it was designed specially for that purpose. That they are a specially designed structure for a given organization and labour division that tends to the productive chain, to the fragmentation. As it has been already said in several occasions, concerning the greenfields, localizations of this kind are, also, suitable for isolating the plant, the separated productive process from the global production, from the other productive areas of the same company, or the same ‘industry’ or sector 76 . But, above all, these internal delocalizations, inside the Spanish territory, that are already called nearshore, catch our attention on the influence that they might have in their spatial, and social, localization, the facilities granted by national, regional or local governments. Or all at the same time: the fiscal incentives or direct or indirect subventions to hiring. The policies for the fixation of qualified young people to their territories of origin. The (increased) reduction of labour cost and the lack of demands and trade union experience. The existence of advanced technological infrastructures, in our case, easy to use and offered at much lower prices than in the market. Real public information superhighways with no toll. Training institutions almost free of charge. Technological institutes or public institutes for economic development that are ready to settle viability or marketing studies. Finally, a set of social frames that constitute the possibilities of a territory in the terms that have been used in social sciences, in political economy and in the economic policies, from the already distant times of industrial districts, the innovative milieux, or the local systems for endogenous development. 2. Fluent work in information society. Much of what today is presented as new interpretation in social sciences is rooted, limited and boosted, at the same time, for what was the dominant school, mainstream of social sciences. With make-up more concerned to manage to get a mark, a label, in the pigeonholes of respectable social sciences than to interpret the reality. 76
See Helen Newell, “Training in greenfield sites”, in Helen Rainbird, 2000, pp. 101-125.
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In this sense, it will be said, like in irrelevant handbooks, that companies do not use the “international division of labour”, but that they have become “manufacturing companies with no manufactures”: they just hold the trademark, and all that was before called productive work, now is made in remote places, far away in the oceans, in China or in any hidden industrial area of a non developed zone of Europe. However we call it, the change of words can just hide the reality. We do not move forward changing the name of precarious work by the one of ‘contingent’. And, behind this new international division of labour, beneath this new fluent form the qualified work is taking, what matters today, to social sciences and to citizens and to those responsible of taking decisions and orienting the development policy, is to be able to distinguish the current tendencies. Because today we have to state that- even though the tendency of dispersion and externalization of ‘traditional’ works, be it industrial or services sectors, perpetuates- also highly qualified works, and in many cases, the most emblematic, like the manufacture of software programs, is moving. It disperses all around the world, changing work processes, local social situations, compositions of the collective worker, deregulations, new forms of control and of work possibilities and of workers- men and women. We do not discover anything new, since, as scientific literature shows, specially for this point, for the target of our research, this is not a suddenly emerged tendency, but that has been developing for many years. A large set of countries, now integrated in the world production chain of software programs, of services to the companies, of remote attention, etc., or wishing to be, give a precise idea of the big quantity of qualified workers that can, thanks to technological development and remote communication, that is true, integrate the collective worker of software production. And, of course, it does not look like the dreams of information society will be the most probable horizon of this brave new world of services’ economy.
Revised in June 2008. JJC, San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Translated from the Spanish by Almudena Bravo, July 2008.
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