1. Intra organisational relationships in
times of austerity – End culmination in
historic trend?
Joint conferences IREC 2012/ESA RN 17
Challenges for Public and Private Sector Industrial
Relations and Unions in times of crisis and Austerity
Lisbon, 4-7th September 2012
Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari
Stenvall

2. Agenda
 Research Questions and aims of presentation
 Overarching character of IS
 Biopolitics
 RE for IS development
 Summary
Austerity in the System Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari Stenvall 2
IREC 2012/ ESA RN 17

3. Research Questions and aims of
presentation I
 Can we learn something when examining IS
design with a theoretical perspective of
biopolitics?
 How did work condensation and increasing
informationalisation in the public and private
sector affect micro- structuring of work in IS
design?
 Is austerity confined to wage economics, or
does it go deeper into work structuring?
Austerity in the System Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari Stenvall
IREC 2012/ ESA RN 17

4. Overarching character of IS I
 IS have become ubiquitous in the public and
private sector
 They structure and define the workflow in many
different ways
 More and more they have become integral part
in the communication of organisations
 Utilisation of IS is less and less oriented to the
standard function of Online Transaction
processing (OLTP), but more and more future
oriented
Austerity in the System Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari Stenvall 4
IREC 2012/ ESA RN 17

5. Overarching character of IS II
 IS are employed with the intention of increasing
span of control, while simultaneously attempting
overcoming reliance on staff
 IS – understood in broad terms as ICT – have in
times led to a shift of the roles between ICT and
humans/staff
⇒ staff has become an annex, or getting to stage
of “cyborg” (Harraway in Dillon/Reid)
⇒ Information captured with IS is used controlling
and evaluating performance of employees
Austerity in the System Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari Stenvall 5
IREC 2012/ ESA RN 17

6. Biopolitics I
 „Making life“ is the one core notion of biopolitics
 Includes the idea of „valuable“ life that ought to be
protected and nourished
 Encapsulates rights of the „sovereign“ to dispell when
 Individuals are not complying to and with „natural“
given rules of individual behaviour and relations to
other
 Under conditions of liberal-market oriented
societies “making life” originates in individual
optimisation
Austerity in the System Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari Stenvall 6
IREC 2012/ ESA RN 17

7. Biopolitics II
 Describes in modern guise a form of governance
that relies on community based control
 Often uses as expression of its „tacit“ character
technological expert knowledge
 Behaviour is evaluated by others and staff itself in
line with role-models of a given work community
 Diverse knowledge's and work communities are an
expression of different arena in which biopolitics is
acting
Austerity in the System Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari Stenvall 7
IREC 2012/ ESA RN 17

8. RE for IS design - I
 RE for IS is a process that defines processes and
outcomes to be achieved in order to ensure good
quality of a software tool
 Is characterised by role duplications and different
interests of different parties/stakeholders
 Is highly communicative interactive, but faced by
differences of technological knowledge that
participants have
 Is an organisational activities in which the different
sets of technological knowledge compete
Austerity in the System Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari Stenvall
IREC 2012/ ESA RN 17

9. RE for IS design - II
 RE forces staff to rely on their departmental
community as reference for behaviour
 Community based references of behaviour are
identical to “professionalism”, and how the
professional is supposed to behave
 Individual behaviour is not assessed primarily in
congruence to achieving project aim, but
 In line with the expectation act professional as bearer
of a technological knowledge
Austerity in the System Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari Stenvall
IREC 2012/ ESA RN 17

10. RE for IS - III
- Shades of professionalism
 IS staff is held to
 Be Rational and efficiency oriented
 Prefer clear cut rules (right or wrong)
 Be Highly sceptical on the human capacity to act rational
and thus
 Avoiding as much as possible human interventions into
running of software
 Be rather individualistic and monetary oriented, while
simultaneously seeking individually economic profit
Austerity in the System Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari Stenvall
IREC 2012/ ESA RN 17

11. RE for IS - IV
- Details of the work
 RE for IS is characterised by a number stressors that
are to be carried as part of the “professional
package”
 Stressors are mutually reinforcing, and can induce
negative stress that might induce different forms of ill-
being
Austerity in the System Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari Stenvall
IREC 2012/ ESA RN 17

12. Stressors in IS –
A cursory overview
 Stressors identified are
 pace of work and considerable overtimes
 problems of communication and work overload
due to cooperation
 highly intellectual demanding tasks
 fast obsolescence of knowledge
 need for intrinsic work motivation
 the service character of SD project work
 professional character of work with corresponding
work structures
Austerity in the System Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari Stenvall
IREC 2012/ ESA RN 17

13. Summary
 Austerity relies for IS design in three main aspects:
 The professional work ethic and its basis for assessment
 The highly restrictive options for project specific and fitting behaviour at the
customer site
 The professional character of work and the formal detailed structuring of
work induce add-on stress to employees working in that field
 We suggest that over time professional work ethics in
combination with minute detailed work description are to
become standard
 The current prevalence in Germany of “examining” work
relations in terms of their impact on psychological well-being is
in times short sighted, as it does not consider the underlying
structural changes
 We suggest examining more and other fields of occupation with
the lens of biopolitics, as we observe that in different areas of
job-life biopolitics has taken a hold
Austerity in the System Dr. Oliver Krone & Prof. Jari Stenvall
IREC 2012/ ESA RN 17