2019 Organization Studies Summer Workshop | Call for Papers
Technology and organization
23-25 May 2019
Conveners
Timon Beyes | Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
Wendy Chun | Simon Fraser University, Canada
Jean Clarke | EM.Lyon, France
Mikkel Flyverbom | Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Robin Holt | Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Introduction
At present, hardly a week passes without new revelations of how networked technologies organize life. Lives are saturated with data: movements are monitored; moods are modulated and perceptions manipulated in order to target consumers, educate workers, or help sway elections. Technological processes and infrastructures of gathering, identifying, sorting and connecting or manipulating data have ushered in platform-based organizational forms (Srnicek 2016) and automated processes of organizing (Neyland 2015). They enable new possibilities of collective action (Nunes 2014) and at the same time establish segregated, ‘homophilic’ networked communities (Chun 2018).
Organization can thus no longer be thought without recourse to technology and technological mediation. It never could be: the very word organon means tool of thought in Greek, and in Latin organum, instrument. Yet arguably, the past 20 years have brought about a more wide-ranging and ‘grounded’ change in the way that organization and organizing are thought about and researched in relation to the apparatuses and objects of what is a socio-technically organized world. This transformation in organizational scholarship has many names and nuances: we might call it ‘new materialism’, or a theorizing of sociotechnical entanglement, or more recently, an attention to the infrastructural or mediated condition of organization. It can be traced back to: the emergence of actor-network-theory, as well as science and technology studies, to feminist studies, to studies of cyborgs and robotics, to affect, spatial and affordance theories and their increasing awareness of materiality, to cybernetics and the study of networks, to theories of time and the instantiation of time in technology, and to media studies. Recent scholarship on digital data, algorithms, social media and artificial intelligence also feed into a growing realization of the need to revisit and extend our understanding of organization. Importantly, technology here is not limited to production technology, and neither is media limited to questions of organizational mass media or social media communication. Rather, the study of how objects, devices and protocols that constitute technology are also constitutive for all forms of organizational life.
Perhaps we can detect an early mover of this kind of work in Robert Cooper’s notion of ‘cyborganization’, developed in conjunction with John Law and Martin Parker (Cooper and Law 2016; Parker and Cooper 2016). Fusing cybernetic thought and Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics (with a nod to Stafford Beer, Gregory Bateson and Mary Shelley) here organization was conceived of as information processing, yet without succumbing to cybernetic ideals of control, stressing instead the unfinished and varied nature of technological-human ordering. In a similar way, the architectural and media theorist Reinhold Martin argues that post WWII ‘organization man’ - fixed in nature as of a singular and predictable type and gender - needs to be understood as “a technologically mediated module circulating within the organizational complex” (Martin 2003: 12). We are emphasizing the notion of “cyborganization” because such attempts ask us to more fully and radically consider the implications of taking the technological and mediated constitution of organizing seriously. It is increasingly difficult to separate organization from technologies, material infrastructures and digital resources. So rather than adding objects and actants to given understandings of formal organizations or processes of organizing, the challenge is to rethink what organization is and what it can become with and through the technologies and infrastructures that condition and enable it.
Much of the current focus on technology and media has to do with what, in EU parlance, is called the ‘digital shift’: how digital networks reconfigure the ways in which management and control, innovation and entrepreneurship take place, and how digital data constitutes a new ‘resource’ for organizational development and innovation. Yet much of this ‘turn’ regards technology as a powerful but additional force that can be controlled and put to organizational use. What we want to encourage are studies of how technology transforms the nature of control itself: studies of how management, entrepreneurship, community and political engagement, innovation, policy making, and many other organizational activities are configured by and through networked technologies. And in posing the question of organization with regard to technology, media and data in this more constitutive way, we should not yield to a cult of the new. In fact, the ubiquity and pervasiveness of digital media brings us back to age-old concerns. As John Durham Peters (2015: 7) has pointed out in his recent ‘philosophy of elemental media’, “digital media traffic less in content, programs, and opinions than in organization, power, and calculation.” As media they hark back to and evoke “ancient navigational functions: they point us in time and space, index our data, and keep us on the grid.” They thus cast the oldest troubles and concerns into fresh relief, such as how information, life and bodies and their relations are organized, steered and governed. In reflecting such fundamental troubles and concerns, we would thus do well to look at older transformations of technology and technological media in their interrelations with forms and processes of organizing.
In this spirit, the 14th Organization Studies Summer Workshop seeks to take stock and, more importantly, stimulate and move forward the study of organization, technology, media and data. This means that we are less interested in ‘more of the same’: for instance, more ANT-inspired studies of organizational life. Rather, we are interested in new developments and next steps: How do we rethink the question of organization, its forms and its processes, through and with technology and its theories? Which theories and approaches have been overlooked and need to be pulled into the study of organization’s technological constitution? Do we need to fundamentally reconsider questions of agency, power, control and resistance, and if so, how? What different or other phenomena or aspects of organization come into view? What are the epistemological and methodological consequences for an organizational scholarship that is invariably predicated on media of knowledge and research?
With this call for papers, we hope to foster academic attention in this broad, topical area by creating a workshop environment that is generative and developmental. Consistent with the mandate of Organization Studies, we aim to promote the understanding of organizations, organizing, and the organized, and the social relevance of that understanding in relation to the challenges identified here.
This summer workshop seeks to (re)pose the question of organization in light of its technological and mediated conditions and conditioning. In doing so, submissions from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, and using different methodological approaches, are welcome. We also encourage submissions that can craft an interdisciplinary conversation and are marked by fruitful engagements with e.g. media theory, philosophy of technology and further cultural- and social-theoretical approaches to technology and media. In particular we encourage submissions engaged with the following:
· historical investigations of how media technologies effect and affect organizational form and of the interrelations between technological and organizational change, as they have been conducted in relation to, for example, files (Vismann 2000/2008), paper (Kafka 2012), cybernetic computing (Pias 2003);
· studies of the changes in organizational form, as they for instance coalesce around the notions of ‘organized networks’ (Lovink and Rossiter 2011) and ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2016);
· studies of the changes in processes of organizing that are connected to or rely upon technological apparatuses, as for instance constituted by “algorithmic organizing” (e.g. Neyland 2015; Borch et al. 2015) or new forms of “visibility management” (Flyverbom, Leonardi, Stohl and Stohl, 2016);
· studies of overlooked or hidden phenomena of social organization that a ‘technological gaze’ allows us to see, for example the ‘technological unconscious’ (Beverungen and Lange 2018; Hayles 2017) or atmospheric and pre-subjective forces of life (Beyes 2014; Sloterdijk 2009);
· reflections of hitherto neglected or new theories of technology and technological media that enable fresh insights into the nexus of organization and technology (e.g. Software Studies, Infrastructure Studies, ‘German Media Theory’);
· interrogations of organizational and entrepreneurial subject positions and their technological milieus, such as the question of a ‘new organization (wo)man’ (Easterling 2004) and work practices (Beyes 2017; Flemming 2016; Weil 2014);
· interrogations of the affective and phantasmatic dimensions, investments and affordances of technological media and their organizational implications, such as they routinely resurface in conjunction with so-called media revolutions (e.g. the printing press, radio, and of course the ‘digital shift’);
· studies of how technologies and media configure, structure and condition human agency (Campbell 2011) as well as information, knowledge and communication (de Vaujany and Mitev, 2016, Innis 1950/2007; Peters 2015);
· studies of how technologies and media configure, structure and condition of production, for example in relation to craft (Holt and Popp 2016), creativity, design and innovation (Reckwitz, 2017: 88);
· interrogations of how digital transformations and data extraction industries underpin new formations of power and control and their political implications, such as they are discussed in relation to the “surveillance economy” (Zuboff 2015), the “security-entertainment complex” (Thrift 2011), the “internet-industrial complex” (Flyverbom, Deibert and Matten, 2017) or the “cybernetic hypothesis” (Tiqqun 2001; Galloway 2014);
· inquiries into the epistemological implications of technological media for organizational scholarship, e.g. how knowledge production is tied to certain technologies and their effects;
· inquiries into the methodological implications of studying organization in terms of its technology and media, e.g. on ‘media of method’.
Submissions
The 14th Organization Studies Workshop will take place on 23-25 May 2019, in Greece. Interested participants must submit an abstract by December 5th, 2018, through the conference’s website: www.os-workshop.com . Abstracts should be of no more than 1,000 words.
Authors will be notified of acceptance or otherwise by January, 2019. Full papers must be submitted by April 30th, 2019.
The venue of the workshop is Mykonos, Greece
Further details on the logistics of the workshop will be published through the OS Workshop website (www.os-workshop.com).
Following the workshop, a Special Issue will be announced in Organization Studies. To be considered for publication, papers must be submitted via the OS website at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/orgstudies by November 30th, 2019. There you can also find guidelines for submission and information on the review procedures. Please note that participation in the workshop is highly recommended (but not a prerequisite) if you intend to submit a paper to the Special Issue.
For further information and clarification contact one of the conveners.
References
Beverungen, Armin and Lange, Ann-Christina (2018) ‘Cognition in High-Frequency Trading: The Costs of Consciousness and the Limits of Automation’, Theory, Culture & Society, first published online February 26, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418758906
Beyes, Timon (2014) ‘Peter Sloterdijk’, in Jenny Helin et al. (Eds.) Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 567-584.
Beyes, Timon (2017) ‘“The Machine Could Swallow Everything”: Satin Island and Performing Organization’. In Performing the Digital: Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures, edited by Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper and Timon Beyes. Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 227–43
Borch, Christian, Hansen, Kristian Bondo, and Lange, Ann-Christina (2015) ‘Markets, bodies, and rhythms: A rhythmanalysis of financial markets from open-outcry trading to high-frequency trading’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(6): 1080–97.
Campbell, Timothy (2011) Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (2018) ‘Queerying Homophily’, in Apprich, Clemens et al. (Eds) Pattern Discrimination. Minneapolis/Lüneburg: University of Minnesota Press/meson press, forthcoming.
Cooper, Robert, and Law, John (2016) ‘Organization: Distal and Proximal Views’ in Burrell, Gibson and Martin Parker (Eds) (2016) For Robert Cooper: Collected Work. London: Routledge.
de Vaujany, Francois. X., & Mitev, Nathalie (2016) ‘The post-Macy paradox, information management and organising: Good intentions and a road to hell?’, Culture and Organization, 23(5): 379-407.
Hayles, N. Katherine (2017) The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Easterling, Keller (2004) ‘The New Orgman. Logistics as an Organising Principle of Contemporary Cities’, in Graham, Stephen (Ed.), The Cybercities Reader. London 2004, pp. 179–184.
Flemming, Peter (2016) ‘Confronting the Robots’, Demos Quarterley, December.
Flyverbom, Mikkel, Deibert, Ronald and Matten, Dirk (2017) The Governance of Digital Technology, Big Data, and the Internet: New Roles and Responsibilities for Business, Business & Society , published doi.org/10.1177/0007650317727540.
Flyverbom, Mikkel, Leonardi, Paul, Stohl, Michael and Stohl, Cynthia (2016): The Management of Visibilities in the Digital Age, International Journal of Communication 10: 98–109.
Galloway, Alexander R. (2014) ‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 25(1): 107-131.
Holt, Robin and Popp, Andrew (2016) ‘Josiah Wedgwood, manufacturing and craft’, Journal of Design History 29(2): 99-119
Innis, Harold A. (1950/2007): Empire and Communications, Toronto: Dundurn Press.
Kafka Ben (2012) The Demon of Writing. Powers and Failures of Paperwork. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lovink, Geert and Rossiter, Ned (2011) ‘Urgent Aphorisms: Notes on Organized Networks for the Connected Multitudes’, in Deuze, Mark (ed.), Managing Media Work. London: Sage, pp. 279-290.
Martin, Reinhold (2003) The Organizational Complex. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Neyland, Daniel (2015) ‘On organizing algorithms’, Theory, Culture & Society 32(1): 119-132.
Nunes, Rodrigo (2014) The Organisation of the Organisationlessness: Collective Action after Networks. London: Mute.
Parker, Martin, and Cooper, Robert (2016) ‘Cyborganization: Cinema as a Nervous System’ in Burrell, Gibson, Parker, Martin (Eds) (2016) For Robert Cooper: Collected Work. London: Routledge.
Peters, John Durham (2015) The Marvelous Clouds. Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pias, Claus (Ed.) (2003) Cybernetics / Kybernetik: The Macy Conferences 1946-1953 (2 volumes). Zurich: diaphanes.
Reckwitz, A (2017) The Invention of Creativity. London: Polity Press.
Sloterdijk, Peter (2009) ‘Rules for the Human Zoo: A response to the Letter on Humanism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27: 12-28
Srnicek, Nick (2016). Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.
Thrift, Nigel (2011) ‘Lifeworld Inc – and what to do about it’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29(1): 5-26.
Tiqqun (2001) ‘L’Hypothèse cybernétique’, Tiqqun 2: 40–83.
Vismann, Cornelia (2000/2008) Files. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Weil, David (2014) The Fissured Workplace. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Zuboff, Shoshana (2015) ‘Big other: Surveillance Capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization’, Journal of Information Technology 30(1): 75-89.