Rise and Fall of an Information Technology Outsourcing Program: a qualitative Analysis of a Troubled Corporate Initiative

 
 

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Moral Careers in Information Technology
Moral career. 
As is discussed at length in Chapter Four, one of the unique aspects of this 
research is that I am both the researcher and an actor within the organizational habitus and 
information technology field. I started my career as a computer programmer and am now an 
executive with responsibilities for IT negotiations, procurement, and vendor management. Put 
another way—that of Erving Goffman—I have developed a number of “moral careers” that 
characterize the developmental stages of a successful information technology professional.
Goffman’s (1961) view of “moral career,” or the sequence of change and reputational attributes 
one develops over time while working within a field or organization. Goffman further explained: 
Each moral career, and behind this, each self, occurs within the confines of an institutional 
system, whether a social establishment such as a mental hospital or a complex of personal 
and professional relationships. The self, then, can be seen as something that resides in the 
arrangements prevailing in a social system for its members. The self in this sense is not a 
property of the person to whom it is attributed, but dwells rather in the pattern of social 
control that is exerted in connection with the person by himself and those around him. This 
special kind of institutional arrangement does not so much support the self as constitute it. 
(p. 168) 
Goffman’s research on “moral career” also considered the “total institution” within which one’s 
career takes place. Although Goffman did not consider corporate bureaucracies to be “total 
institutions” in the same manner as hospitals, asylums, prisons, boarding schools, and 
monasteries, the concept of “moral career” is applicable to my career and those of the other 
actors in the present research. 

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