Merged high-tech cultures in a public bureaucracy: Micropractices of organizational change in information technology teams

This dissertation explores independent work cultures that were merged as a result of technological convergence in the computing and telecommunication industries. This area of study has become important because (1) the boundaries between the public and private sectors are blurring, and (2) cultural clashes appear more complex in high-technology organizations. The research project encompasses a three-year analysis of an information technology (IT) services department at a large, Western university, a unique arena for examining organizational change because this IT department is negotiating the gap between the culture of a public bureaucracy and that of the high-technology private sector.; This study concerns the discursive micropractices of two competing teams representing the merged cultures. The microanalysis of team practices reveals how organizational members are adapting to pressures to incorporate a businesslike culture in public organizations, where the state and its bureaucratic subsystems are envisioned much like a customer-driven private organization in an economic environment of supply and demand. The merged knowledge workers are struggling to determine what it means to be a public-sector IT services provider in an environment of technological and operational change.; Adapting Deetz's (2001) conceptualizations within a multidimensional approach to research, this study attempts to address criticisms of unidimensional approaches, offering a more holistic perspective of the organization studied. This approach to research enabled the discovery of three discursive micropractices used to distinct ends in team meetings of the competing cultures: orientation to organizational structure, the construction of workplace identities, and the use of humor to either reproduce or challenge team practices. Distinctions in the team micropractices provided the cultural twist in organizational meaning, enabling one team to reproduce the telecommunication culture and the other team to resist that culture---while both teams simultaneously enacted organizational change.; One benefit of a better understanding of distinctions in discursive micropractices between the computing and telecommunication cultures centers on the planning of interventions in high-technology environments. Interventions based on such knowledge would not resolve organizational differences, but provide a means for ongoing negotiation of tensions---the next step in my research focus. Such work remains important in the continually evolving high-tech workplace.