Volume 19, Number 3 Article by Sumita Mishra and Rajen K Gupta September, 2007
Understanding the Culture of a Young Offshore Software Development Organisation: A Semiotic Analysis :
The Indian IT and ITES sector has witnessed tremendous growth and so, consequently, has outsourcing and the offshore business. India has proved to be one of the most attractive destinations for global offshore software development. The software space today has Indian MNCs, subsidiaries, outsourced business units, offshore businesses and small business units competing with one another. Though Indian software giants have made their presence felt internationally, smaller business units also have experienced a meteoric rise and have consequently been the subject of research. Recent research on such units has mainly focused on their cost effectiveness, infrastructural concerns, survival chances, and other concerns, strictly from the business point of view. In-depth research on understanding the contextual realities of such companies from an employee perspective has been limited. In addressing this gap Sumita Mishra and Rajen Gupta analyse the collective employee understanding of the organisational culture of a small, nascent offshore software development organisation, using semiotics as an interpretive tool. They arranged the empirical data, collected through in-depth interviews, into three semantic codes – work processes, human resource management and integration mechanisms. These codes were systematically analysed through the rules of semiotics.
The findings provide fresh insights from two perspectives. Firstly, from the standpoint of organisational culture research, the results indicate that startup software companies operating in volatile environments, with chaotic work processes, do possess a coherent pattern in their organisational culture as understood by the employees. Secondly, a semiotic analysis explains that it is not just overt rituals, symbols and practices in an organisation that create an organisational culture, but also simple words and expressions used by the employees in the day-to-day functioning of the organisation. Each semantic code provides an endogenous reflection of organisational realities and challenges unique to such offshore software units.
Reprint No 07308b
