Peter Buxbaum

Jeffrey Stanton, assistant professor of industrial and organizational psychology at Syracuse University, takes a new perspective on the failure of projects by focusing on occupational subcultures within organizations.

IT people express their cultural differences in part by complaining about other groups. The following examples of IT complaints are taken from Jeffrey Stanton's research paper, Conflict and Cooperation: Occupational Subculture of IT Employees.

When Janet Wejman was hired as CIO of Continental Airlines Inc. in 1995, she found herself heading an IT staff of a mere dozen people. Continental, it seems, had outsourced nearly all of its IT to Electronic Data Systems Corp. four years earlier.