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

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

Digital Transformation(s): On the Entanglement of Long-Term Processes and Digital Social Change; An Introduction

Digitalisation oscillates between profound promises of transformation and a nebulous buzzword. The analysis of digital transformation processes leaves hardly any (analysis of) so- cial phenomenon untouched. We argue for understanding digitalisation as a complex and heterogeneous process that cannot be rashly reduced to individual principles or uniform transformation effects. Starting from a working definition of digitalisation, we outline the challenges for social sciences research aiming to conceptualize this heterogeneity. We argue for a more differentiated and socio-historically informed analysis not only of processes of disruptive change through digitalisation, but also of continuities, modifications, and reinforcements. In view of the large number of individual case studies and to avoid one-sided generalisations, comparative analyses of different or supposedly similar digitalisation processes are central. Finally, micro-macro analysis opens up important insights into the multifaceted nature of digital transformation(s), especially in terms of breaks, frictions, and enablements of digitalisation through organising and organisations. Understanding digitalisation as a heterogeneous process does not imply multiplying observations of differences but paying attention to the complexity and embeddedness of digitalisation

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

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

Managing by data: algorithmic categories and organizing

Data and data management techniques increasingly permeate organizations and the contexts in which they are embedded. We conduct an empirical investigation of Last.fm, an online music discovery platform, with a view to unpacking the work of data and algorithms in the process of categorization. Drawing on Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues, we link the making of categories with the construction of basic objects that function as key filters or registers for perceiving and organizing the world and interacting with it. In contexts such as the ones we have studied, basic objects are made out of data rather than expert or community-based knowledge. In such settings, basic objects work as pervasive reality filters and as the entities on which other organizational objects and categories are built. As they diffuse, such objects and the categories they instantiate become naturalized, increasingly reconfiguring the social order of organizations and their environments as a data order. Once key organizational activities such as the making of objects and categorizing are rearranged by data and algorithms, organizations can no longer be framed as separate from the technologies they deploy

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

New games, new rules: big data and the changing context of strategy

Big data and the mechanisms by which it is produced and disseminated introduce important changes in the ways information is generated and made relevant for organizations. Big data often represents miscellaneous records of the whereabouts of large and shifting online crowds. It is frequently agnostic, in the sense of being produced for generic purposes or purposes different from those sought by big data crunching. It is based on varying formats and modes of communication (e.g., texts, image and sound), raising severe problems of semiotic translation and meaning compatibility. Crucially, the usefulness of big data rests on their steady updatability, a condition that reduces the time span within which this data is useful or relevant. Jointly, these attributes challenge established rules of strategy making as these are manifested in the canons of procuring structured information of lasting value that addresses specific and long-term organizational objectives. The developments underlying big data thus seem to carry important implications for strategy making, and the data and information practices with which strategy has been associated. We conclude by placing the understanding of these changes within the wider social and institutional context of longstanding data practices and the significance they carry for management and organizations

Regimes of information and the paradox of embeddedness: an introduction

This introduction outlines the problematic that has served as the basis for this special issue. Interaction weaves the fabric of social life in the form of events that are usually embedded in a series of particulars, variously referred to as contexts or situations. At the same time, actors, and the contexts in which they are embedded, are constituted by social rules, role systems, and normative frameworks that transcend situated encounters. Furthermore, most interactive events involve a range of resources and technological capabilities that recur across contexts and situations. This special issue deals with how the multivalent involvement of information and communication technologies in social practice alters this basic problematic. It entails six research articles that investigate particular social practices and the ways each of these practices are refigured by the deepening involvement of information and communication technologies. This special issue also features an invited perspective piece by distinguished philosopher Albert Borgmann