[...]... analysis of the lack of precise typologies, points out that in the literature there are three distinctive approaches to defining the high-tech industry It is based on: ● ● ● the analysis of the social potential, in which the major criterion is the quantitative ratio of the employed engineers and scientists to the rest of the employees; the financial indicators, in which the criterion is the ratio of the R&D... material gathered during observations and the interviews 10 The new knowledge workers completed in all five companies The organizations studied are described in detail in Chapter 5, in the section The Research Problem” As the subject of this book is work in knowledge- intensive companies and organizational relations at the knowledge workers workplace, it is necessary to discuss that basic terminology The. .. 4, describe the work-related issues, the knowledge companies, and the term knowledge workers in the context of the sociology and management literature on employees Chapter 5 describes the research methods and the methodological assumptions for this project The Chapter 6 refers to the contemporary bureaucracy and starts the presentation of the research findings Chapters 7, 8 and 9 cover the topics... to us by others (Latour, 1986), and as carrying with it the right to abstain from some submission rituals One of the main signs of these transformations is the creation of new professions (in other words, the common acceptance of the rights of these new professions to make authoritative judgments; address the topic of “professions” in Chapter 4) That new elite is mostly made up of knowledge workers (Brante,... to Marx, the bourgeois system would lead inevitably to the exploitation of the manual workers (Marx, 1992) Every capitalist had to aim to maximize the value of output over the basic productivity of the employed they people (which was equal to the cost of their employment) Separation of the means of production from their ownership resulted in an excess exploitation of workers, “surplus value” The next... systems) developed in the US Poles, on the other hand, frequently win prestigious international programming competitions (including for example the TopCoder competition, the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, the Google Code Jam, the Microsoft Imagine Cup and the like); and the University of Warsaw has led the TopCoder.com3 rank for several years, 6 The new knowledge workers and as of now... pretenses to take over the role of the grand narrative 4 Knowledge workers This book is based on the study of programmers In the literature they fall into the category of knowledge workers, professionals, engineers and white-collars All these categories are justified, although each one takes account of slightly different dimensions of their role, which is why these terms and categories are the subject of... production organizations, they seemed to be a more interesting research subject for the topic of this book Moreover, knowledgeintensive companies in the service and consulting sector can rely more on propaganda and on the development of “persuasion systems”, that is, 20 The new knowledge workers on convincing clients about the superiority of their solutions rather than about their real expertise (Alvesson,... population of knowledge workers in the R&D sector Nevertheless, whenever in this interpretation the subject of knowledge workers is mentioned, it should be taken into account that the practical part of the project has relied mainly on software engineers THE IT REVOLUTION One of the first writers about the effects of the IT revolution was Daniel Bell (1973) He predicted the dawn of the post-industrial era, in... is the other way around Thus, the statement that a company can be knowledge- intensive emphasizes the fact that in many organizations a key resource, and the primary product, is knowledge (Starbuck, 1992) – something distinctive both from capital and from the people themselves For example, in the case of Google, people play a very important role in new product development, yet for the search engine the . which the major criterion is the quantitative ratio of the employed engineers and scientists to the rest of the employees; ● the  nancial indicators, in which the criterion is the ratio of the. Programming Contest, the Google Code Jam, the Microsoft Imagine Cup and the like); and the University of Warsaw has led the TopCoder.com 3 rank for several years, 6 The new knowledge workers and as. basic terminology. The next three chapters, Chapters 2, 3, and 4, describe the work- related issues, the knowledge companies, and the term knowledge workers in the context of the soci- ology