Beyond the Professions? Work in the Age of Social Media
Author: Giovannipaolo Ferrari, giferrari@unisa.it
Department: Department of Social & Political Studies
University: University of Salerno, Italy
Supervisor: Paolo Diana & François Perea
Year of completion: 2016
Language of dissertation: Italian, French
Keywords:
professions
, workplace
, social media
, Interactions
Areas of Research:
Professional Groups
, Work
, Institutional Ethnography
Abstract
This Ph.D. thesis is firstly about the change in the occupational practices of the employees of an American high-tech company, driven by ICT. In this study, we have attempted to develop a dynamic and practical description of the daily lives of workers observed in "technologically dense environments" (Bruni 2005; Bruni & Gherardi 2007) who live habitually during their work activities. The "narrative" of these work environments has furthered the understanding of the functioning of the "technological infrastructure" (Bruni & Gherardi 2007) of the team responsible for managing the social media presence of this multinational company. Thus, we have been able to observe that this technological infrastructure is completely different from the one observed by many scholars in the 90s of the XX century (Joseph 1994; Heath e Luff 1992; Suchman 1997; Star 1999; Grosjean 2004). This difference almost translates into an anthropological and social change that is evident in the way they work and present themselves at work.
