The social foundations of the bureaucratic order

This article views the bureaucratic form of organization as both an agent and an expression of key modern social innovations that are most clearly manifested in the non-inclusive terms by which individuals are involved in organizations. Modern human involvement in organizations epitomizes and institutionally embeds the crucial yet often overlooked cultural orientation of modernity whereby humans undertake ac-tion along well-specified and delimited paths thanks to their capacity to isolate and suspend other personal or social considerations. The organizational involvement of humans qua role agents rather than qua persons helps unleash formal organizing from being tied to the indolence of the human body and the languish process of per-sonal or psychological reorientation. Thanks to the loosening of these ties, the bu-reaucratic organization is rendered capable to address the shifting contingencies un-derlying modern life by reshuffling and re-assembling the roles and role patterns by which it is made. The historically unique adaptive capacity of bureaucracy remains though hidden behind the ubiquitous presence of routines and standard operating procedures –requirements for the standardization of roles– that are mistakenly ex-changed for the essence of the bureaucratic form

Green IT: Everything starts from the software

In this position paper we discuss the importance of Green IT as a new research field that investigates all the environmental and energy issues related to IT and information systems in general. In particular we focus on the energy consumption of software applications, which is amplified by all the above IT layers in a data center and thus is worth a greater attention. By adopting a top-down approach, we address the problem from a logical perspective and try to identify the original cause that leads to energy consumption, i.e. the elaboration of information. We propose a research roadmap to identify a set of software complexity and quality metrics that can be used to estimate energy consumption and to compare specific software applications

MODELLING REALITY: CONTEXT, SYSTEM AND MEANING

The paper draws on Italo Calvino\u27s acclaimed novel Invisible Cities to describe a few recurrent issues associated with the tasks of describing and modelling reality intrinsic to the use and development of IS. The analysis initially confronts the intrinsic ambiguity that haunts any effort to transform experiential knowledge to a formal representational system. It then moves on to capturing the puzzles created by the establishment of such system as manifested in its potent capacity to describe and model reality, on the one hand, and its inescapable limitations and rigidities, on the other hand. Though these issues have variously been discussed in IS re-search, the literary analysis pursued here casts them in new light that shows the double-edged nature of the task of modelling reality

On Shadows and Ghosts: Constructing Life out of Digital Records

Widespread as they are, the attitudes of trivilization (negation) and euphoria (and hype) tend to overlook subtle and often surreptitious shifts in our modes of framing, perceiving and acting upon reality that the new technologies of information and communication and the internet are beginning to bring about. The inspection of these massive records of data is able to construct a new perception of what is available (states, persons, services), influences the understanding of reality and circumscribes opportunities and possible courses of action

Patient data as medical facts: social media practices as a foundation for medical knowledge creation

This paper investigates a web-based, medical research network that relies on patient self-reporting to collect and analyze data on the health status of patients, mostly suffering from severe conditions. The network organizes patient participation in ways that break with the strong expert culture of medical research. Patient data entry is largely unsupervised. It relies on a data architecture that encodes medical knowledge and medical categories, yet remains open to capturing details of patient life that have as a rule remained outside the purview of medical research. The network thus casts the pursuit of medical knowledge in a web-based context, marked by the pivotal importance of patient experience captured in the form of patient data. The originality of the network owes much to the innovative amalgamation of networking and computational functionalities built into a potent social media platform. The arrangements the network epitomizes could be seen as a harbinger of new models of organizing medical knowledge creation and medical work in the digital age, and a complement or alternative to established models of medical research

Miradas entrecruzadas de espacios urbanos periféricos. Paisajes transitorios y transiciones narrativas en Los siete locos y Los lanzallamas.

Este artículo trata sobre miradas y paisajes de zonas periféricas, y en particular de la periferia urbana industrial de Buenos Aires, en Los siete locos (1929) y Los lanzallamas (1931) de Roberto Arlt. Lo que intenta señalar nuestro trabajo es, por un lado, la literaturización de lugares feos, incoherentes y antiestéticos y, por otro, la significación que estos espacios obtienen en el proceso narrativo. La transición topológica del personaje hacia las afueras de la ciudad se combina con tentativas de escaparse de la «vida puerca», en el sentido de la abolición de los valores morales y legales establecidos que culmina con la actividad delictuosa y conspirativa, el invento y la mentira. El paisaje se presenta como un elemento complejo cuyo papel no es solamente decorativo.The article deals with views and settings of peripheral zones, and in particular with the urban industrial periphery of Buenos Aires, in Roberto Arlt’s novels Los siete locos (1929) and Los lanzallamas (1931). The aim is to highlight the making of literature from ugly, incoherent and anti-aesthetic places and also the significance that these places gain in the process of narration. The character’s topological transition from the outskirts of the city is combined with attempts to escape from the «pig’s life», in the sense of an abolition of established moral and legal values which culminates in criminal and conspiratorial activities, in inventions and deceit. The setting is presented as a complex element which plays a role that is not simply decorative

Organizations decentered: data objects, technology and knowledge

Data are no longer simply a component of administrative and managerial work but a pervasive resource and medium through which organizations come to know and act upon the contingencies they confront. We theorize how the ongoing technological developments reinforce the traditional functions of data as instruments of management and control but also reframe and extend their role. By rendering data as technical entities, digital technologies transform the process of knowing and the knowledge functions data fulfil in socioeconomic life. These functions are most of the times mediated by putting together disperse and steadily updatable data in more stable entities we refer to as data objects. Users, customers, products, and physical machines rendered as data objects become the technical and cognitive means through which organizational knowledge, patterns, and practices develop. Such conditions loosen the dependence of data from domain knowledge, reorder the relative significance of internal versus external references in organizations, and contribute to a paradigmatic contemporary development that we identify with the decentering of organizations of which digital platforms are an important specimen

Big data revisited: a rejoinder

We elaborate on key issues of our paper New games, new rules: big data and the changing context of strategy as a means of addressing some of the concerns raised by the paper’s commentators. We initially deal with the issue of social data and the role it plays in the current data revolution. The massive involvement of lay publics as instrumented by social media breaks with the strong expert cultures that have underlain the production and use of data in modern organizations. It also sets apart the interactive and communicative processes by which social data is produced from sensor data and the technological recording of facts. We further discuss the significance of the very mechanisms by which big data is produced as distinct from the very attributes of big data, often discussed in the literature. In the final section of the paper, we qualify the alleged importance of algorithms and claim that the structures of data capture and the architectures in which data generation is embedded are fundamental to the phenomenon of big data