The role of ICTs in the servitization and degradation of IT professional work

Recently IT work has been subjected to management approaches that apply production methods to service work. Specialized ICTs used by IT professionals have played an important role in this ‘service turn’, but this has not been adequately explored in the literature. Via a qualitative study of IT professionals situated across the servitized IT functions of five UK-based organizations, this article considers how these ICTs are inscribed with managerial logics that afford control benefits to managers while undermining professional autonomy and job quality. The article makes two main contributions to the literature. Firstly, it sheds light on how ICTs introduced into organizational IT functions support managerial control objectives and impact the job quality of IT professionals. Secondly, it suggests that ICTs may infect the logic of professionalism that takes pride in the quality of the work performance with a dominant managerial logic that places an emphasis on meeting management objectives.