Disclosing and concealing: internet governance, information control and the management of visibility

The ubiquity of digital technologies and the datafication of many domains of social life raise important questions about governance. In the emergent field of internet governance studies, most work has explored novel governance arrangements, institutional developments and the effects of interactions among public and private actors in the emergence of the internet as a matter of concern in global politics. But the digital realm involves more subtle forms of governance and politics that also deserve attention. In this paper, I suggest that the 'ordering' effects of digital infrastructures also revolve around what I term the ‘management of visibilities’. Drawing on insights from science and technology studies and sociologies of visibility, the paper articulates how digital technologies afford and condition ordering through the production of visibilities and the guidance of attention. The basic tenet of the argument is that there is an intimate relationship between seeing, knowing and governing, and that digitalisation and datafication processes fundamentally shape how we make things visible or invisible, knowable or unknowable and governable or ungovernable. Having articulated this conceptual argument, the article offers a number of illustrations of such forms of ordering

Datafied corporate political activity : Updating corporate advocacy for a digital era

Digital transformations have significant consequences for organizational attempts to shape their environments. Our focus is on how corporate political activity evolves in ways that require us to pay more attention to how information gets structured in digital spaces, and on how information ecosystems operate and shape strategic communication activities in organizational settings. We outline these digital transformations, offer a focus on corporate political activity as informational and develop a typology of datafied corporate political activity techniques to illustrate how the workings of digital spaces shape political issues more concretely. This serves to highlight the necessity of extending the focus of informational corporate political activity beyond the contents of overt and direct messages to include the more covert and subtle forms of influence made possible through the strategic structuring of information itself. This also contributes to our understanding of the political significance of corporate political activity, which is less about influencing political issues by composing appealing messages and distributing them to relevant audiences, and more about influencing political issues by organizing digital information and feeding algorithms. We suggest that such datastructures and algorithmic forms of sorting will become as important as message contents, and that datafied advocacy will become a central component of corporate political activity and other organizational activities

Anticipation and Organization : Seeing, knowing and governing futures

Anticipation is part of organizational attempts to manage their future affairs and shape their surroundings. Still, the ways in which organizations engage in anticipation have not been sufficiently conceptualized in the field of organization and management studies. This article conceptualizes organizational ways of shaping and orchestrating futures by engaging insights from Foucauldian scholarship that highlight the intersection between what we can see, know and govern. We highlight the importance of processes of knowledge production in governance efforts, and articulate how anticipatory governance is crafted through intricate combinations of resources such as narratives, numbers and digital traces. The main contribution is a conceptual typology outlining four different templates for anticipatory governance in organizational settings that we term â\u80\u98indicative snapshotsâ\u80\u99, â\u80\u98prognostic correlationsâ\u80\u99, â\u80\u98projected transformationsâ\u80\u99 and â\u80\u98phantasmagoric fictionsâ\u80\u99. We posit anticipatory governance as a knowledge-based, performative phenomenon that addresses potential and desirable futures in and between organizations. Such anticipatory activities gauge and guide organizational processes and modes of thinking and acting along different temporal orientations, and have governance effects that makes anticipation performative by its very nature. This understanding of anticipatory governance, we suggest, offers both conceptual contributions and empirical avenues for research in organization and management studies