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May 06, 2005
Are we still dot.conned?
Preparing for the 11th Annual PhD Summer School in Design and Management of Information Technology, I have spent the last couple of days reading eight papers for Jan Ljungberg’s lecture about the dot-com era and open source software in the public sector.
Especially, I found an article by Andrea H. Tapia (2004) about the power of myths during the dot-com bubble from 1996 to 2001 very interesting. Tapia states that several IT companies used the myths that were readily available during the dot-com bubble in the wider American culture of the time to motivate and manipulate their employees. The managers motivated their employees to put in long hours at the worksite, to be continually on-call, to intensify their work pace, and to self police their co-programming teams. The myths used were 1)the Silicon Valley myth, 2)the circumventing rules myth, 3)the future downtime myth and 4)the engineer managers myth.
But are we still dot.conned? I see many of the trades that Tapia noticed during the dot-com bubble in software companies and public agencies today. Are we not still obsessive compulsive, socially stunted and easily duped? We are working like newer before – but what is the driving force today? According to Tapia, the myths from the dot-com era have no legibility anymore – but what is then driving us to work long hours, to always be on-call via our mobiles and e-mail and to intensify our work pace?
Posted by khm at May 6, 2005 11:39 AM
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