IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhb/hanken/0527.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Constructing Stability in Software Product Development during Organizational Restructurings

Author

Listed:
  • Segercrantz, Beata

    (Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration)

Abstract

We all have fresh in our memory what happened to the IT sector only a few years ago when the IT-bubble burst. The upswing of productivity in this sector slowed down, investors lost large investments, many found themselves looking for a new job, and countless dreams fell apart. Product developers in the IT sector have experienced a large number of organizational restructurings since the IT boom, including rapid growth, downsizing processes, and structural reforms. Organizational restructurings seem to be a complex and continuous phenomenon people in this sector have to deal with. How do software product developers retrospectively construct their work in relation to organizational restructurings? How do organizational restructurings bring about specific social processes in product development? This working paper focuses on these questions. The overall aim is to develop an understanding of how software product developers construct their work during organizational restructurings. The theoretical frame of reference is based on a social constructionist approach and discourse analysis. This approach offers more or less radical and critical alternatives to mainstream organizational theory. Writings from this perspective attempt to investigate and understand sociocultural processes by which various realities are created. Therefore these studies aim at showing how people participate in constituting the social world (Gergen & Thatchenkery, 1996); knowledge of the world is seen to be constructed between people in daily interaction, in which language plays a central role. This means that interaction, especially the ways of talking and writing about product development during organizational restructurings, become the target of concern. This study consists of 25 in-depth interviews following a pilot study based on 57 semi-structured interviews. In this working paper I analyze 9 in-depth interviews. The interviews were conducted in eight IT firms. The analysis explores how discourses are constructed and function, as well as the consequences that follow from different discourses. The analysis shows that even though the product developers have experienced many organizational restructurings, some of which have been far-reaching, their accounts build strongly on a stability discourse. According to this discourse product development is, perhaps surprisingly, not influenced to a great extent by organizational restructurings. This does not mean that product development is static. According to the social constructionist approach, product development is constantly being reproduced and maintained in ongoing processes. In other words stable effects are also ongoing achievements and these are of particular interest in this study. The product developers maintain rather than change the product development through ongoing processes of construction, even when they experience continuous extensive organizational restructurings. The discourse of stability exists alongside other discourses, some which contradict each other. Together they direct product development and generate meanings. The product developers consequently take an active role in the construction of their work during organizational restructurings. When doing this they also negotiate credible positions for themselves.

Suggested Citation

  • Segercrantz, Beata, 2007. "Constructing Stability in Software Product Development during Organizational Restructurings," Working Papers 527, Hanken School of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:hhb:hanken:0527
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://openax.shh.fi:8180/dspace/bitstream/10227/245/1/527-978-951-555-962-3.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ahlgren, N. & Antell, J., 2008. "Bootstrap and fast double bootstrap tests of cointegration rank with financial time series," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 52(10), pages 4754-4767, June.
    2. Rokkanen, Nikolas, 2007. "With Good Reputation Size Does not Matter: Issue Frequency and the Determinants of Debt Maturity," Working Papers 522, Hanken School of Economics.
    3. Böckerman, Petri & Johansson, Edvard & Jousilahti, Pekka & Uutela, Antti, 2007. "The Physical Strenuousness of Work is Slightly Associated with an Upward Trend in the Body Mass Index," Working Papers 523, Hanken School of Economics.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kulp-Tåg, Sofie, 2007. "An Empirical Comparison of Linear and Nonlinear Volatility Models for Nordic Stock Returns," Working Papers 525, Hanken School of Economics.
    2. Wägar, Karolina & Björk, Peter & Ravald, Annika & West, Björn, 2007. "Exploring Marketing in Micro Firms," Working Papers 531, Hanken School of Economics.
    3. Sjöholm, Hans-Kristian, 2007. "The Impact of New Capital Requirements on the Portfolio Decisions of Finnish Pension Institutions," Working Papers 532, Hanken School of Economics.
    4. Strandvik, Tore & Holmlund, Maria & Edvardsson, Bo, 2008. "Customer Needing - Conceptualising Industrial Service from a Customer Perspective," Working Papers 536, Hanken School of Economics.
    5. Niklas Ahlgren & Mikael Juselius, 2012. "Tests for cointegration rank and the initial condition," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 42(3), pages 667-691, June.
    6. Kascha, Christian & Trenkler, Carsten, 2011. "Bootstrapping the likelihood ratio cointegration test in error correction models with unknown lag order," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 55(2), pages 1008-1017, February.
    7. Ren, Tongxian & Long, Zhihe & Zhang, Rengui & Chen, Qingqing, 2014. "Moran's I test of spatial panel data model — Based on bootstrap method," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 9-14.
    8. Ahlgren, Niklas & Antell, Jan, 2008. "Cobreaking of Stock Prices and Contagion," Working Papers 537, Hanken School of Economics.
    9. Ekholm, Bo-Göran & Wallin, Jan, 2006. "Flexible Budgeting under Uncertainty: A Real Options Perspective," Working Papers 520, Hanken School of Economics.
    10. Böckerman, Petri & Johansson, Edvard & Kiiskinen, Urpo & Heliövaara, Markku, 2010. "Does physical capacity explain the height premium?," MPRA Paper 20108, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    11. Niklas Ahlgren & Paul Catani, 2017. "Wild bootstrap tests for autocorrelation in vector autoregressive models," Statistical Papers, Springer, vol. 58(4), pages 1189-1216, December.
    12. Nicoleta ISAC & Cosmin DOBRIN & Mehmood HUSSAN & Asad ul Islam KHAN & Alina- Andreea MARIN, 2020. "On The Ranks Of Tests Having Null Of Cointegration: A Monte Carlo Comparison," Management Research and Practice, Research Centre in Public Administration and Public Services, Bucharest, Romania, vol. 12(2), pages 58-69, June.
    13. Ou Bianling & Long Zhihe & Li Wenqian, 2019. "Bootstrap LM Tests for Spatial Dependence in Panel Data Models with Fixed Effects," Journal of Systems Science and Information, De Gruyter, vol. 7(4), pages 330-343, August.
    14. Ahlgren, Niklas & Antell, Jan, 2009. "The Power of Bootstrap Tests of Cointegration Rank with Financial Time Series," Working Papers 541, Hanken School of Economics.
    15. Niklas Ahlgren & Jan Antell, 2013. "The power of bootstrap tests of cointegration rank," Computational Statistics, Springer, vol. 28(6), pages 2719-2748, December.
    16. Ahlgren, Niklas & Antell, Jan, 2010. "Stock market linkages and financial contagion: A cobreaking analysis," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 50(2), pages 157-166, May.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    development; organizational restructurings; stability; discourse;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhb:hanken:0527. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Staffan Dellringer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/shhhhfi.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.