Darryl Coulthard

Not just a job: Preparing graduates for careers in the IS workforce

If IS educators are to provide their students with an understanding of the overall context in which they will develop professional careers, they must have good information about graduates’ employment destinations and their workforce experiences. That information is difficult to obtain from standard data collections. This paper explores the early job experiences of IS graduates using survey and interview data. While the graduates have a strong IS professional orientation and experience friendly work environments, their expectations of access to interesting work, career advice and opportunities for advancement appear to outstrip their experience in the workplace.

Complexities in the Career-Family Perspectives of Young Professionals

Abstract Work-life balance issues are not a constant but are framed differently at different stages of the life-course. In addition to analysing behaviour, it is also important to develop an understanding of the meaning that actors attach to what they do. This article examines the perspectives of young Australian professionals on career, relationships and family formation as these evolve over the early years after university graduation. It provides an insight into their views about the balance between their career goals and family in the early years of their professional working lives. It reports a longitudinal study of 86 young Australian professionals from 1997 to 2003, which highlights the emergent and contingent nature of decisions about careers and relationships and their relevance for childbearing. Gender plays a role in their plans and expectations but they reject the traditional male breadwinner model. The high value given to dual career relationships may put stress on their ability to balance family aspirations with satisfactory careers.

ICT and Dataveillance

Dataveillance, the collection, storage and mining of data and images, is increasing and new emerging technologies seem to inevitably contribute to ever more dataveillance. In this chapter, we outline the key social drivers for dataveillance and illustrate some of the roles emerging technology plays in dataveillance. We then turn to the question of the relationship of technology to its use and how non-neutral outcomes eventuate. Why does new technology seemingly lead to dataveillance rather than empowerment of the citizen, worker and consumer? To unravel this, we develop a social ecological model of technology cooption. In this model, we show how technology cooption is contested at each stage of technology development. Further, we show that the outcome of such contestation is the non-neutrality of the technology. The technology cooption model provides a middle range theory for empirical analysis by identifying the key elements of technology cooption and their proposed links and the role of the stakeholders in such cooption.