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Dr. Winiecki's Curriculum Vita

Courses currently taught by Dr. Winiecki:

IPT532/SOC502: Ethnographic Research in Organizations/Qualitative Social Research Methods: Ethnography is an approach to learning about the social and cultural life of communities, organizations, institutions and other settings that discovers how the activities of people in those settings contribute to the creation of society and culture. Students receive a foundation in philosophical perspectives and methods supporting ethnographic research, learn when to conduct ethnographic research, and explore strategies for presenting and critiquing ethnographic research. They will also be provided with an opportunity to implement ethnographic research in organizational settings.

IPT529/SOC497: Needs Assessment/Assessing & Planning Organizational Change: Through analysis of existing social science theory of organizations and organizational members' behavior, field & discipline specific readings, independent fieldwork, guided practice and other methods, students learn to use systematic methods to assess organizational needs, identify problems and causes, produce reports that help decision makers target critical problems and suggest feasible solutions.

SOC497: Sociology of Science, Technology and Engineering: Science is one process by which human knowledge is created. Technology is the encoding of human knowledge into tools and processes. Engineering is a discipline that employs and contributes to science and technology to prototype processes and products for use. All three affect society and its members. In this course, students will review and analyze scientific, technological and engineering concepts, processes and products from a sociological perspective to understand how they affect society and its members.

IPT59X: Sociology of Labor: (in development)

Current activities

With promotion to the rank of professor and a subsequent decrease in pressure to publish, I am pursuing a project to investigate alternative means to communicate the findings of my own research and that of selected social science fields. This includes changes in the way I teach, involvement in service organizations such as the Committee on Practice, Applied and Clinical Sociology through the Pacific Sociological Association and through visual presentation media, including artistic norms and forms. This is in part prompted by the view that people who are not professional social scientists are among those best positioned to make and/or lead social change, and that publication of research in conventional social science journals almost categorically misses this group. Thus, with an interest in influencing (but not being the leader of) social change in various facets of society by communicating with people who are not professional social scientists, this project aims to inspect and learn how to communicate research through alternative means.

I have suspended work on a project to study the 'open source' software phenomenon.  Once restarted, the intent of this research will be to pursue many distinct sub-projects involving (a) social organization of the movement, (b) ideological, philosophical and political orientation of the movement, (c) production and instantiation of power, knowledge and subjectivity in distributed activities, (d) economic factors and impacts of the movement, among other things.

I have recently completed work on an ethnographic analysis of the creation of subjects and subjectivity in legal proceedings, focusing on expert witnesses.  This project allowed me to study the institutional interactions of 'science' and 'law' within the context of the practice of trial law.  This project led to several publications and presentations, as listed on my curriculum vita.

Prior research involved a multi-year ethnography of call center work.  This research was guided by post-structuralist and especially Foucaultian analytics.  Fieldwork for the project involved over 2000 hours of participant and non-participant observation in four inbound call centers, over 130 interviews, nearly 1000 photographs to document the venues and events common to those venues and well over 1000 pieces of 'official documentation.' 

While specific to labor and call centers, this project is really about the subjectification of individuals within regimes of technologically-oriented processes, technical apparatuses and technology-mediated measurement. 

At present the research has resulted in the journal papers, presentations and books, as listed on my curriculum vita.

Future projects will continue to use ethnographic methods to focus on the subjectification of individuals within modern regimes of power/knowledge.  In my current position in the College of Engineering at Boise State University, future projects will likely focus on the production of subjectivity in networks and collectives involving engineered products, including open source software, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies.

Send feedback to  dwiniecki@boisestate.edu