Despite the ongoing critique of Internet as the ultimate engine for social change, Internet visions continue to influence society through the everyday practices. That these visions are produced and presented by ways of global advertising is well known. However, visions also pass via academics, business writers and knowledge workers through their everyday work practices, conversations, and dialogues with other tech intensive, mobile, and transnationally aware élites. This produces an ongoing visionary flow that exaggerates the virtual component in high tech work.
- These more mundane visionary flows are previously little documented, yet immensely effective, says Trond Arne Undheim, researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Visionary flows are effective because they seem to rely on the authority of scientific evidence from everyday work practices. But in practice, most knowledge workers in high tech corporations spend less time using their own technologies than they will openly admit. This is documented in a groundbreaking study of high tech knowledge workers in Silicon Valley and Norway.
- Many studies of work practices that show technology irradicates place making and only is about global spaces of flows (of people, technology, information, and capital) have shallow empirical grounding, says Undheim
So, while the high tech workers themselves herald technology's role in the pursuit of 'working across boundaries in time and place', their own work practices testify otherwise. Coordination, creative teamwork, and especially the first phases of idea development seems to occur less frequently through virtual means. This is the case even within companies that consist mainly of computer programmers.
To account for the situated character of work in the Information Age, Undheim has developed a theory of place making. The theory says that work consists of grounding and pitching ideas that are picked up from spaces of flows (Internet, 'weak ties' of friends and colleagues, and various other globally aspiring networks). For instance, to acquire venture capital to a start-up firm you have to go many rounds with venture capitalists, lawyers, employees, and your professional network. It is a physical process of many face-to-face meetings, in order to establish trust, to get across complex ideas and to simplify and packet the information so that it can and will be acted upon. These networks are situated in particular city regions like Silicon Valley and City of London, both because people with common interest converge and because the infrastructure is costly to establish.
The Ph.D thesis What the Net can't do: The everyday practice of Internet, globalization, and mobility, is based on research conducted when Undheim was a Visiting Research Fellow at UC Berkeley, California as well as in Norway between 1998 and 2001. Undheim (28), a native of Norway but with research sojourns in France, Belgium, Italy and the US, has written extensively on issues related to work and technology, innovation and regional studies. He regularly consults Norwegian companies on issues relating to technology, knowledge and innovation, and is a frequent public speaker. A board member of InnoVisionHouse as (http://www.ihouse.no), an incubator for high tech firms in Norway, he is the co-founder of several high tech companies. Undheim is currently conducting research on the work practices of Open Source companies and is conducting fieldwork at Trolltech (www.trolltech.com).
A public defence of his thesis is held at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology on Friday, May 23rd 2002 at 10AM. The thesis is available from the Faculty of Social Sciences and Technology, or as a PDF-version directly from the author.
Contact: Trond Arne Undheim, tel: +47 92 29 84 46, email trond.undheim@hf.ntnu.no
Doktorgrader ved NTNU - kontinuerlig oppdatert
