ANTECEDENTS OF IT-ENABLED ORGANIZATIONAL CONTROL MECHANISMS

Organizational control is one of the fundamental management functions. Literature on control design suggests two underlying antecedents for designing organizational controls: \u27knowledge of the transformation process\u27 and \u27ability to measure output\u27. We conducted an exploratory case study, drawing on archival data and interviews to test organizational control theory (OCT), taking into account the role of Information Technology (IT) in control design. We operationalized OCT as characterized by literature and classified 525 organizational controls. We found OCT correctly predicted the control type based on the antecedent conditions in approximately two out of three cases. We found the other third being influenced by automation, centralization, and mass data analysis. We argue that IT allows management to implement behavior controls in situations, where processes and procedures are unknown and therefore ?knowledge of the transformation process? is low. As contribution for theory, we reveal exploring capabilities of organizational control in addition to exploiting activities. As contribution for practice, we introduce new antecedents for designing organizational controls. This research is in line with others to test control theory, but it is the first to explain the catalyzing functions of IT on organizational control design within a case study

Summarising the 7 dimensions of an action-oriented framework for video games

This article summarises our Ph.D. thesis – an analytical view on the player-game relationship through the lens of an action-oriented framework, centred on fundamental entities defined as actors, entities through which action is enacted in the game and of which the player and the game system are a part of. With this in mind, the grounding principles of this framework are seeded in a transition of action into experience, based on communicational systems that structure the dynamic formation of networks of actors from which distinct behaviours emerge, which, in turn, promote the enactment of diverse sequences of events establishing narrative, which is a source of experience of the player. Chronology, responsiveness, thinking and actuation, transcoding, focus, depth, and traversal are the 7 dimensions we unveiled through the lens of this action-oriented framework. This work proposes that video games can be regarded as action-based artefacts and a call to awareness for game designers that when designing for action they are working with the foundations on which video games are built upon. &nbsp

Conveying interpretations of the past with interactive narratives

This master’s thesis sketches a theory upon which a heuristic for the effective conveyance of scholarly historical interpretation of the past to a non-scholarly audience can be built. For this heuristic to yield methods that do not only respect academic standards of critical inquiry, but simultaneously ensure that thus produced historical knowledge can be imparted to and retained by laymen, the interplay of a range of factors has to be understood first. This thesis builds on and connects theories and concepts from philosophy, psychology, media- and game studies, cognitive sciences, semiotics, and computer science. It takes a stance that emphasizes the capacity of scholars and laymen alike to form informed and critical interpretations of the past under the right circumstances. In order to facilitate these circumstances most effectively, it takes a pragmatic approach which rejects maximizing either of the variables in the triplet verisimilitude, veracity, and verifiability at the expense of the other

Adventures of Ludom: a Videogame Geneontology

Within the last few decades, the videogame has become an important media, economic, and cultural phenomenon. Along with the phenomenon’s proliferation the aspects that constitute its identity have become more and more challenging to determine, however. The persistent surfacing of novel ludic forms continues to expand the conceptual range of ‘games’ and ‘videogames,’ which has already lead to anxious generalizations within academic as well as popular discourses. Such generalizations make it increasingly difficult to comprehend how the instances of this phenomenon actually work, which in turn generates pragmatic problems: the lack of an applicable identification of the videogame hinders its study, play, and everyday conceptualization. To counteract these problems this dissertation establishes a geneontological research methodology that enables the identification of the videogame in relation to its cultural surroundings. Videogames are theorized as ‘games,’ ‘puzzles,’ ‘stories,’ and ‘aesthetic artifacts’ (or ‘artworks’), which produces a geneontological sequence of the videogame as a singular species of culture, Artefactum ludus ludus, or ludom for short. According to this sequence, the videogame’s position as a ‘game’ in the historicized evolution of culture is mainly metaphorical, while at the same time its artifactuality, dynamic system structure, time-critical strategic input requirements and aporetically rhematic aesthetics allow it to be discovered as a conceptually stable but empirically transient uniexistential phenomenon that currently thrivesbut may soon die out.Videopeli on kasvanut edellisten vuosikymmenten aikana tärkeäksi ilmiöksi niin median, talouden, kuin kulttuurinkin näkökulmasta. Kasvun myötä ilmiön itsensä määrittäminen on kuitenkin muuttunut yhä haastavammaksi: uudet leikin ja pelaamisen muodot venyttävät jatkuvasti ’pelin’ ja ’videopelin’ käsitteitä, mikä on jo nyt johtanut kivuliaisiin yleistyksiin sekä akateemisessa että populaarissa kielenkäytössä. Kyseisten yleistysten seurauksena ne asioiden joukot, joihin ’pelit’ ja ’videopelit’ tänä päivänä viittaavat, ovat hämärtyneet äärimmäisen epäselväksi. Tämä hämärtyminen on tuonut mukanaan lukuisia käytännön ongelmia, jotka nousevat esiin ilmiöitä koskevassa tutkimuksessa, kulutuksessa, kuin myös journalistisessa käsittelyssä. Edesauttaakseen näiden ongelmien ratkaisua luettavanasi oleva väitöskirja esittelee lajiontologisen tutkimusmetodologian, joka mahdollistaa videopelin tunnistamisen suhteessa sitä ympäröiviin ja sitä muistuttaviin kulttuuri-ilmiöihin. Lajiontologista tutkimusmetodologiaa hyödyntäen väitöskirja ottaa tehtäväkseen tarkastella videopelin suhdetta neljään sitä ympäröivään tai muistuttavaan kulttuuri-ilmiöön: ’peleihin’, ’puzzleihin’, ’tarinoihin’, ja ’esteettisiin artefakteihin’ (ns. ’taideteoksiin’). Tarkastelut tuottavat videopeli-ilmiötä selittäviä aspekteja, joiden avulla sille rakennetaan alustava taksonominen identiteetti itsenäisenä kulttuurisena lajina (Artefactum ludus ludus, lyhyesti ludom). Löydetyt aspektit ja niiden mukainen taksonominen identiteetti puoltavat näkemystä siitä, että videopelin historiallinen asema ’pelinä’ on lähinnä metaforinen. Videopelin esineellisyys, dynaaminen systeemirakenne, aika-kriittiset strategiset manipulointivaatimukset sekä (aporeettisesti) remaattinen estetiikka tuntuvat sen sijaan muodostavan vankan pohjan käsitteellisesti vakaalle mutta vain hetkellisesti menestyvälle kulttuurilajityypille, joka parhaillaan kukoistaamutta saattaa pian kuolla pois.Siirretty Doriast

Calculated error

This paper proposes a reconsideration of the aesthetic category of ‘glitch’ and advocates for a more careful theorisation around indexing — in the sense of both locating and naming — errors of a digital kind. Glitches are not as random as they seem: they are ordered and shaped by computational hardware and software, which impose a mathematical rubric on how glitches visually manifest and set ontological and technological constrains on glitch that limit how digital errors can and cannot be made to appear. Most crucially, this paper thinks about how one particular type of glitch — a compression artefact called a macroblock — can often appear as random, erratic, or unpredictable but is, in fact, materially constrained and visually conditioned according to the principles of computing and computer design. At its core, compression aesthetics can shed light on the operations of algorithms, the structures of digital technologies, and the priorities and patterns which occur as a function of algorithmic manipulation. The randomness, unpredictability, or messiness which glitch studies invokes around the glitch is in danger of overlooking the ways that the material architectures and algorithmic protocols structure the digital glitch by organising, constraining, and given form to its appearance

The Machinic Imaginary: A Post-Phenomenological Examination of Computational Society

The central claim of this thesis is the postulation of a machinic dimension of the social imaginary—a more-than-human process of creative expression of the social world. With the development of machine learning and the sociality of interactive media, computational logics have a creative capacity to produce meaning of a radically machinic order. Through an analysis of computational functions and infrastructures ranging from artificial neural networks to large-scale machine ecologies, the institution of computational logics into the social imaginary is nothing less than a reordering of the conditions of social-historical creation. Responding to dominant technopolitical propositions concerning digital culture, this thesis proposes a critical development of Cornelius Castoriadis’ philosophy of the social imaginary. To do so, a post phenomenological framework is constructed by tracing a trajectory from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late ontological turn, through to the process-relational philosophies of Gilbert Simondon and Castoriadis. Introducing the concept of the machinic imaginary, the thesis maps the extent to which the dynamic, interactive paradigm of twenty-first century computation is changing how meaning is socially instituted in ways incomprehensible to human sense. As social imaginary significations are increasingly created and carried by machines, the articulation of the social diverges into human and non-human worlds. This inaccessibility of the machinic imaginary is a core problematic raised by this thesis, indicating a fragmentation of the social imaginary and a novel form of existential alienation. Any political theorisation of the contemporary social condition must therefore work within this alienation and engage with the transsubjective character of social-historical creation

What is an internet? Norbert Wiener and the society of control

By means of a philosophical reading of Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, this thesis attempts to derive anew the concepts of internet and control. It develops upon Wiener’s position that every age is reflected by a certain machine, arguing that the internet is that which does so today. Grounded by a critical historiography of the relation between the Cold War and the internet’s invention in 1969 by the ‘network’ of J. C. R. Licklider, it argues for an agonistic concept of internet derived from Wiener’s disjunctive reading of figures including Claude Bernard, Walter Cannon, Benoît Mandelbrot, John von Neumann and above all, his Neo-Kantian inflected reading of Leibniz. It offers a counter-theory of the society of control to those grounded by Spinoza’s ethology, notably that of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, and attempts to establish a single conceptual vocabulary for depicting the possible modes of conflict through which an internet is determined

TOWARDS A MODEL FOR ARTIFICIAL AESTHETICS - Contributions to the Study of Creative Practices in Procedural and Computational Systems

Este trabalho propõe o desenvolvimento de um modelo analítico e da terminologia a ele associada para o estudo de artefactos estéticos computacionais. Reconhecendo a presença e uso crescentes dos media computacionais, começamos por estudar como através da remediação eles transformam quantitativamente os media precedentes, e como as suas propriedades procedimentais e computacionais os afectam qualitativamente. Para perceber o potencial criativo e a especificidade dos media computacionais, desenvolvemos um modelo para a sua prática, crítica e análise. Como ponto de partida recorremos à tipologia desenvolvida por Espen Aarseth para o estudo de cibertextos, avaliando a sua adequação à análise de peças ergódicas visuais e audiovisuais, adaptando-a e expandindo-a com novas variáveis e respectivos valores. O modelo é testado através da análise de um conjunto de peças que representam diversas abordagens à criação procedimental e diversas áreas de actividade criativa contemporânea. É posteriormente desenvolvida uma análise de controlo para avaliar a usabilidade e utilidade do modelo, a sua capacidade para a elaboração de classificações objectivas e o rigor da análise. Demonstramos a adequação parcial do modelo de Aarseth para o estudo de artefactos não textuais e expandimo-lo para melhor descrever as peças estudadas. Concluímos que o modelo apresentado produz boas descrições das peças, agrupando-as logicamente, reflectindo afinidades estilísticas e procedimentais entre sistemas que, se estudados com base nas suas propriedades sensoriais ou nas suas estruturas de superfície provavelmente não revelariam muitas semelhanças. As afinidades reveladas pelo modelo são estruturais e procedimentais, e atestam a importância das características computacionais para a apreciação estética das obras. Verificamos a nossa conjectura inicial sobre a importância da procedimentalidade não só nas fases de desenvolvimento e implementação das obras mas também como base conceptual e estética na criação e apreciação artísticas, como um prazer estético

Text and Genre in Reconstruction

In this broad-reaching, multi-disciplinary collection, leading scholars investigate how the digital medium has altered the way we read and write text. In doing so, it challenges the very notion of scholarship as it has traditionally been imagined. Incorporating scientific, socio-historical, materialist and theoretical approaches, this rich body of work explores topics ranging from how computers have affected our relationship to language, whether the book has become an obsolete object, the nature of online journalism, and the psychology of authorship. The essays offer a significant contribution to the growing debate on how digitization is shaping our collective identity, for better or worse. Text and Genre in Reconstruction will appeal to scholars in both the humanities and sciences and provides essential reading for anyone interested in the changing relationship between reader and text in the digital age