Suchergebnisse

PurposeAs the shortage in the information technology (IT) workforce continues, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the cultural dimensions of IT occupations that attract or drive away potential IT professionals. In the present study, the authors take an occupational culture approach to study the cultural fit of newcomers to IT occupations and to understand how young people perceive the culture embedded in this occupational community as they become part of it.Design/methodology/approachThe authors take a sequential mixed methodology approach composed of two phases, one qualitative and the other quantitative. In the first phase of the study, nine focus groups and 27 interviews with college students were conducted to learn about the challenges and barriers that they personally experienced while becoming part of the IT occupational community. The second phase used results from the first qualitative phase to design a survey instrument that was administered to 215 IT college students who were currently or had recently been involved in IT work experience to evaluate their cultural fit to the IT occupational culture (ITOC) and its influence on their occupational commitment.FindingsThe results suggest that women, ethnic minorities and those with less work experience encountered greater difficulty fitting into different dimensions of ITOC. The results also showed that cultural fit is a good predictor of occupational commitment and affective commitment in particular.Practical implicationsAn initial survey instrument was developed to measure cultural fit to ITOC. This instrument can be further modified and adapted to be used in the hiring process by HR departments to measure cultural fit to organizational subcultures, such as the one in the IT occupational group.Originality/valueThis paper constitutes an important contribution to the rigor and development of the theory and research of human resources in information technologies.

Responding to new government regulations about reporting data, a social service agency decided to require caseworkers to use laptop computers extensively, taking these devices with them on calls to clients. The resistance of caseworkers to this mandate and this change provided an opportunity to examine the phenomena of technology resistance. Initially rooting the study in known models for examining technology resistance, researchers found the need to expand upon these models to acknowledge other social aspects, as well as individual aspects to alterations in work behavior. Perceiving that professional identity was at issue, the study employed concepts from Kling's social aspects of computing and Schein's career anchor theory, and used qualitative methods including an adaptation of Sacks's membership category analysis method from the field of ethnomethodology that led to insights about the underlying causes of IT resistance among social service workers. The originality of this micro-level approach lies in its ability to explore moral aspects of professional and personal identity. The approach revealed, in this situation, that workers' resistance was based particularly on a local history of organizational dysfunction in addition to elements such as performance and effort expectancy, attitudes, and anxiety that is typically discussed in the information technology acceptance literature.

The underrepresentation of women in IT related majors such as computer science, computer engineering, and information systems (IS) has been evident all over the world. As a result, many private and public institutions have created programs aimed to increase enrollment, recruitment, and placement of women in the field and reduce the gender gap in the field. Several journal publications about this kind of research can be found in the scientific literature about studies mostly conducted in the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia, but very few publications about this kind of research in Latin American countries is available in the literature despite the fact that in the last ten years, countries in Latin America also developed a variety of programs with the same goal with the support of international organizations like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), giant technology corporations like IBM, and local governments. There are very few publications in international scientific outlets about Gender Gap in IT in Latin America. In this panel, seven Latin American academics will share recent related projects they have been part of, compare project results, challenges, and discuss what kind of dissemination practices could be more appropriate.