Place, space and knowledge work: a study of outsourced computer systems administrators

Information technology has the capacity to change time–space configurations making new organizational forms possible. Two principal time–space configurations known as space and place are used to characterize some of the broad transformations occurring in social and organizational structures associated with the intensified use of information technology. The time–space configuration of place with its sense of boundedness, localness and particularity, is contrasted with that of space and its sense of the universal, the generalizable and the abstract. Today's evolving organizational forms reflect an increased reliance on space as a guiding image for organization design and technology deployment. Space as a guiding image brings the hope of making an organization more flexible by freeing it from the constraints of place. This is reflected in the emergence of market-based forms of organizing with their emphasis on outsourcing and inter-organizational alliances.

We present an ethnographic account of outsourced computer system administrators in a company that is seeking to be a lean, knowledge-intensive, learning organization. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice we explore the tensions between place and space in the firm as well as in the system administrators' work lives. We argue that place and space are always operating simultaneously in an organization, and that they provide an ongoing source of dialectic tension for the individual worker. In keeping with Bourdieu's generative structuralism, we further argue that the computer contractors' work practices, especially their practice of writing, serve to reproduce the conditions under which those tensions emerge.