Taylored Flexibility: Agile, Control, and the Software Labor Process
Date
2021-11-23
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University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation research examines the work arrangements of software workers in high-technology industries in order to raise questions, dispel myths, and develop a labor process theory of knowledge-based work in the 21st century. Software work is largely regarded as a “sunrise” occupation: full of opportunities for interesting work in a flexible environment. Moreover, software production, like other forms of knowledge-based work, is presumed to pose challenges to managerial control methodologies, because of employers’ increasing dependence on software workers’ skills and creativity and the difficulty of subjecting complex, immaterial, and cognitive work like software production to traditional methods of control. As a result, knowledge-based work appears to require new forms of control, distinct from those used in manufacturing settings. This research, however, reveals continuities between managerial methodologies used in manufacturing-based settings and those used to organize software work through an analysis of Agile, a popular project management methodology. Agile’s roots are in Toyota’s lean production processes, though Agile also draws upon tenets of Taylor’s scientific management as well as High-Commitment Management schemes. Drawing upon 45 interviews with workers and managers who use Agile, as well as content analysis of Agile training videos, I show how Agile aims to achieve what I call Taylored Flexibility: an attempt to maintain flexibility to respond to the complex and turbulent nature of knowledge-based work alongside strategies to render invisible and immaterial work like software production more calculable and predictable. This dissertation also explores collective organizing strategies of software workers, emphasizing how struggles over control may not take the traditional form of conflict over pay, benefits, or the conditions of work, but of the outcomes of labor. Through this research I show that managerial strategies used to achieve Taylored Flexibility complicate common understandings about control over knowledge-based work in the new economy, showing how hybrid control regimes can operate as powerful mechanisms to render knowledge-based work more productive.
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Keywords
control, high-commitment management, just-in-time, labor process theory, project management, software development