"It’s About Business not Politics": Software Development Between Palestinians and Israelis
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This paper focuses on the collaboration in an Israeli-Palestinian tech start-up company. We investigate the strategies enacted by the IT developers for managing the political dynamics and making collaboration possible under the highly challenging political conditions. We found that one of the key strategies was explicitly separating the work domain of software development from the domain of politics. We argue that the IT developers manage to collaborate by displacing the political conflict through strategies of non-confrontation instead of engaging in translating conflicting agendas against each other. By insisting on keeping politics outside of the workspace, the IT developers adopt a strategy of keeping the collaboration together by keeping politics and work apart. However, we found that despite the attempts to manage the sub-group dynamics, politics constantly invade the workspace and challenge the collaboration. Significant resources are invested into managing the regimes of differentiated identity cards, permits, and checkpoints, all of which have consequences on the employees’ freedom or restriction of mobility. Thus, we argue that the IT development domain is inseparable from and deeply dependent upon the political domain.
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Number of citations to item: 9
- Maria Menendez-Blanco, Pernille Bjorn, Antonella De Angeli (2017): Fostering Cooperative Activism through Critical Design, In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, doi:10.1145/2998181.2998198
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- Pernille Bjørn, Juliane Busboom, Melanie Duckert, Susanne Bødker, Irina Shklovski, Eve Hoggan, Kellie Dunn, Qianqian Mu, Louise Barkhuus, Nina Boulus-Rødje (2024): Achieving Symmetry in Synchronous Interaction in Hybrid Work is Impossible, In: ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 4(31), doi:10.1145/3648617
- Valeria Borsotti, Pernille Bjørn (2022): Humor and Stereotypes in Computing: An Equity-focused Approach to Institutional Accountability, In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 4(31), doi:10.1007/s10606-022-09440-9
- A’ndre Gonawela, Joyojeet Pal, Udit Thawani, Elmer van der Vlugt, Wim Out, Priyank Chandra (2018): Speaking their Mind: Populist Style and Antagonistic Messaging in the Tweets of Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Nigel Farage, and Geert Wilders, In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 3-6(27), doi:10.1007/s10606-018-9316-2
- Nina Boulus-Rødje (2023): Messy Tales from Fieldwork for Design, In: Human–Computer Interaction Series, doi:10.1007/978-3-031-31642-5_3
- Stina Matthiesen, Pernille Bjørn, Claus Trillingsgaard (2022): Implicit bias and negative stereotyping in global software development and why it is time to move on!, In: Journal of Software: Evolution and Process 5(35), doi:10.1002/smr.2435
- Samantha McDonald, Melissa Mazmanian (2019): Information Materialities of Citizen Communication in the U.S. Congress, In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction CSCW(3), doi:10.1145/3359149
- Melanie Duckert, Pernille Bjørn (2024): Revisiting Grudin’s eight challenges for developers of groupware technologies 30 years later, In: i-com 1(23), doi:10.1515/icom-2023-0039