The social life of Learning Analytics: cluster analysis and the ‘performance’ of algorithmic education

This paper argues that methods used for the classification and measurement of online education are not neutral and objective, but involved in the creation of the educational realities they claim to measure. In particular, the paper draws on material semiotics to examine cluster analysis as a ‘performative device’ that, to a significant extent, creates the educational entities it claims to objectively represent through the emerging body of knowledge of Learning Analytics (LA). It also offers a more critical and political reading of the algorithmic assemblages of LA, of which cluster analysis is a part. Our argument is that if we want to understand how algorithmic processes and techniques like cluster analysis function as performative devices, then we need methodological sensibilities that consider critically both their political dimensions and their technical-mathematical mechanisms. The implications for critical research in educational technology are discussed

Performing a myth to make a market:The construction of the ‘magical world’ of Santa

If you believe in Santa, do not read this paper. Through an in-depth, qualitative, empirical study, we follow the Santa myth to a remote northern location in Lapland, Finland where, for 1 month a year, multiple actors come together to create a tourist market offering: the chance to visit Santa in his ‘magical world’. We explore how the myth is transformed into reality through performative, organisational speech acts, whereby felicitous conditions for the performance of visits to Santa are embedded in a complex socio-material network. We develop the performative turn (Gond et al., 2016) in organisational studies by introducing a new category of speech act, ‘translocution’, a compendium of imagining, discussing, proposing, negotiating, and contracting that transforms the myth into a model of an imaginary-real world. Through translocutionary acts, actors calculate, organise the socio-material networks of the market, and manage the considerable uncertainty inherent in its operation. Details of the myth become market facts, while commercial constructs fade into the imaginary. The result, when felicitous conditions are achieved, is a ‘Merry Christmas’ of magical, performative power

A Sociology of Market-Things: On Tending the Garden of Choices in Mass Retailing

International audienc