From: Paul Adler (padler@USC.EDU)
Date: Wed Oct 12 2005 - 16:32:36 EDT
Jerry -- By "routinization" Schumpeter meant bureaucratic rationalization. In this, Schumpeter was greatly influenced by Weber as well as Marx. The organizational sociology literature inspired by Weber has several well-established scales for assessing the degree of bureaucratization of organizational structures, the main ones being formalization, standardization, centralization, importance of staff functions, etc. Moreover in the part of the software industry I focus on (software services), there is a rather wide-spread assessment tool developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie-Mellon Univ,: the Capability Maturity Model. The CMM identifies 5 levels of "maturity" that map rather easily to degrees of overall bureaucratization/rationalization. In my paper, I study 2 units at Level 3 (which is considerably more bureaucratic than the industry average) and 2 units at Level 5 (which is rather rigorously bureaucratic by any accounting.) Many of my interviewees had in the past worked in software development organizations that were considerably less routinized/bureaucratized (Level 1 and 2). I synthesize their assessments, and use them to illustrate a theoretical argument in which this routinization is simultaneously (and contradictorily) a vehicle for socialization and for valorization. There are other branches of activity that are more innovative than this one. But on the scale of innovativeness, software development businesses like the ones I studied are certainly towards the more innovative end of the spectrum. The forms of routinization that I describe are used (altho usually in less elaborate form) in other innovative branches of activity (the design of consumer hardware products, industrial equipment, etc.) -- but they are shunned by other innovative branches (notably by folks who design shrink-wrap software products). There's a sizable literature on the "conflict" between bureaucracy and innovation -- but this literature is quite incapable of accounting for the considerable prevalence and success of bureaucratic rationalization/routinization that we observe in large swaths of industry. My paper is a Marxist intervention in that debate, designed to account for this observed pattern and in process, show the scientific value of these Marxist concepts... Does that help? Cheers P . At 3:35 PM -0400 10/12/05, glevy@PRATT.EDU wrote: > > My paper is framed as a Marxist account of the routinization of >> innovation postulated by Schumpeter. I focus specifically on >> software development as it is practiced in large software >> services businesses. > > >Hi Paul A: > >I'd be interested in knowing what measures you use to calculate >the degree of routinization. Also, how do you know that the >degree of routinization in large software service businesses is >typical of the degree in other branches of production? Are there >any measures which can be used to compare routinization across >sectors? > >In solidarity, Jerry
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