Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: Foreign Knowledge in the Work of Brazilian Software Developers

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation improvement grant, funded by the Science and Society Program, will support a series of interviews with software developers (computer programmers) in Rio de Janeiro, which will be combined with ethnographic observation of their work. The experience of Rio software developers provides a critical case of a local occupational community that is engaged in a global (and largely foreign) profession and is dependent on the daily access to the codified knowledge of the larger profession both for accomplishing its local technical tasks and for maintaining its status through its link with the larger global industry. The global aspirations, however, run into conflicts with local and national identities. The interviews will focus on those tensions and their effect on local recreation of technical knowledge. Fifty developers, recruited through a theory-driven snowball sample, will be interviewed in the spring and summer of 2007. Additionally, software development work will be observed in two organizations. The work combines three theoretical perspectives that have been recently used to understand professional knowledge and knowledge work, using the experience of Brazilian programmers as a tool to highlight the shortcomings of each approach and working towards a synthesis by looking at the interaction between the factors privileged by each of the accounts. The work considers a rational actor approach to individual investment in learning, a set of theories that stress identity and communities, and the ""networked economy"" framework that stresses global linkages. Each approach helps understand different aspects of modern professional knowledge: the often rational basis for individual investment into learning, the importance of shared meaning and membership, and the role of global links that tie together industrial clusters around the world. Integrating those approaches is important since each of them runs into serious problems when faced with a case where individual strategies, membership and global linkages are in clear interaction with each other. The experience of Rio software developers is exactly such a case, and thus provides for an exciting opportunity for comparing the three frameworks and making steps towards synthesizing them. The successful understanding of how the tensions experienced by Rio developers affect the local recreation of technical knowledge will contribute to our understanding of knowledge work in the context of global industries where the workers must often balance their allegiances to local and global networks. It will thus provide a deeper understanding of some of the fundamental assumptions that underlie the discussion of knowledge in development. The work would also be of specific interest to the Brazilian software development community itself as it strives to understand its place in the world. Such understanding would help the developers look for better ways of engaging with foreign technology.