How IT Professionals’ Digitization Work Shapes Jurisdiction Transfer Among Occupational Groups

Abstract

Prior research has characterized technology’s role in shaping occupational jurisdictional change as involving direct conflict as occupational groups enact technology to compete over who has the right to perform particular tasks. In this study, we find and theorize a process of jurisdiction transfer through technology, wherein one occupational group develops a digital technology that results in jurisdictional changes among adjacent occupations, but with no intent to claim jurisdiction over the newly digitized tasks. We draw on a 14-month ethnography of a U.S. government lab to show how an occupational group made design choices when developing a new digital technology that shaped who could use the technology and for which tasks, in ways that altered adjacent groups’ jurisdictions. We analyze three design choices that the IT professionals made—unstructured text fields, open-ended workflow approval, and decentralized dashboard access—that accomplished a transfer in jurisdiction over remote work contracts from the HR professionals to front-line managers. These decisions ultimately aligned with some powerful managers’ preferences for the lab’s remote work strategy but were framed as neutral IT development decisions and unfolded with minimal direct interaction or conflict between the original and new task claimants and without the IT professionals gaining expanded jurisdiction.