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Sub-theme 61: The Reorganization of Knowledge and Ignorance Practices in the Digital Era {MERGED with sub-theme 42}

Convenors:
Mahaut Fanchini
University of Paris-est Créteil, France
Meghan Van Portfliet
University of Colorado, USA
Anne K. Krüger
Weizenbaum Institute, Germany

Call for Papers

Organizations produce, offer and structure knowledge that not only provides us with new insights but also triggers new developments. They display information that is supposed to support decision-making of people, enterprises, or politicians ranging from statistic reports, e.g. on demographic developments (Desrosières 1998), evaluation, e.g. of the credit-worthiness of individuals and nation states (Besedovsky 2018; Kiviat 2019) or of the performance of hospitals (Reilley and Scheytt 2019) and prisons (Mennicken 2013) to rankings of start-ups (Pollock and D’Adderio 2012), universities (Espeland and Sauder 2016; Wilbers and Brankovic 2021) or entire cities (Kornberger and Carter 2010). Much of our “knowledge about the world” is provided by organizations and highly organized processes. Particularly in times of perceived uncertainty and existential environmental threats (Bacevic 2021) such knowledge is having a crucial effect on our understanding of social problems and possible solutions.
 
Yet, in light of mounting demands for open access, open source, open data and open science (Bacevic and Muellerleile 2018; Dobusch et al., 2023) as well as increasing accumulation of mass data and their automated analysis (Crawford 2021), digitization presents a crucial crossroad for organizational knowledge production. These developments reorganize the ways how and which kind of knowledge is produced and offered. They not only amplify the possibilities of knowledge production in organizations and of access to knowledge through organizations but also allow for entirely new and very diverse forms of organizing knowledge creation and distribution, ranging from algorithm- and AI-based to volunteer- and crowd-driven. They furthermore influence what counts as knowledge, who has the authority to provide knowledge and how this knowledge informs our decisions and perception of what counts, e.g. as a trustworthy seller (Kornberger et al. 2017), as excellent science (Krüger and Petersohn 2022) or simply as good music (Alaimo and Kallinikos 2020).
 
This sub-theme thus deals with the focal issue: how do organizations reorganize creation and access to knowledge in the digital era – and how does this affect our “knowledge about the world”? Specifically, we are interested in conceptual and empirical studies addressing questions such the following:

  • How do processes of datafication and automated data analysis affect what kind of knowledge organizations produce?

  • Are new practices of knowledge production driven through social questions and problems or rather through the availability of mass data and automated analysis?

  • How do digital infrastructures for generating, processing, analyzing and evaluating data reorganize established practices of producing and managing knowledge within organizations from enterprise resource planning systems to algorithmic management?

  • How does opening organizational knowledge practices to new topics and/or participants change knowledge produced in the process?

  • How do different intellectual property (IP) right regimes structure (the reorganization of) knowledge practices?

 

References

  • Alaimo, Cristina; Kallinikos, Jannis (2020): Managing by Data: Algorithmic Categories and Organizing. In Organization Studies 42 (9), 1-23.
  • Bacevic, Jana; Muellerleile, Chris (2018): The moral economy of open access. European Journal of Social Theory, 21 (2), 169-188.
  • Bacevic, Jana (2021): Unthinking knowledge production: from post-Covid to post-carbon futures. Globalizations, 18 (7), 1206-1218.
  • Besedovsky, Natalia (2018): Financialization as calculative practice: the rise of structured finance and the cultural and calculative transformation of credit rating agencies. In Socio-Economic Review 16 (1), pp. 61–84.
  • Crawford, Kate (2021): Atlas of AI. Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. New Haven, London: Yale University Press.
  • Desrosières, Alain (1998): The politics of large numbers. A history of statistical reasoning. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
  • Dobusch, Leonhard; von Krogh, Georg; Splitter, Violetta; Whittington, Richard; Walgenbach, Peter (2023): Open Organizing in an Open Society? Conditions, Consequences and Contradictions of Openness as an Organizing Principle. Special Issue forthcoming in Organization Studies, in press.
  • Espeland, Wendy Nelson; Sauder, Michael (2016): Engines of Anxiety. Academic Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
  • Kiviat, Barbara (2019): Credit Scoring in the United States. In economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter 21 (1), pp. 33–42.
  • Kornberger, Martin; Carter, Chris (2010): Manufacturing competition: how accounting practices shape strategy making in cities. In Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 23 (3), pp. 325–349.
  • Kornberger, Martin; Pflueger, Dane; Mouritsen, Jan (2017): Evaluative infrastructures. Accounting for platform organization. In Accounting, Organizations and Society 60, pp. 79–95.
  • Krüger, Anne K.; Petersohn, Sabrina (2022): ‘I want to be able to do what I know the tools will allow us to do’: Practicing evaluative bibliometrics through digital infrastructure. In Research Evaluation. DOI: 10.1093/reseval/rvac009.
  • Mennicken, Andrea (2013): ‘Too Big to Fail and Too Big to Succeed’: Accounting and Privatisation in the Prison Service of England and Wales. In Financial Accountability & Management 29 (2), pp. 206–226.
  • Pollock, Neil; D’Adderio, Luciana (2012): Give me a two-by-two matrix and I will create the market: Rankings, graphic visualisations and sociomateriality. In Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (8), pp. 565–586.
  • Reilley, Jacob; Scheytt, Tobias (2019): A Calculative Infrastructure in the Making: The Emergence of a Multi-Layered Complex for Governing Healthcare. In Martin Kornberger, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Julia Elyachar, Andrea Mennicken, Peter Miller, Joanne Randa Nucho, Neil Pollock (Eds.): Thinking Infrastructures. Research in the Sociology of Organizations (62). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing, pp. 43–68.
  • Wilbers, Stefan; Brankovic, Jelena (2021): The emergence of university rankings: a historical‑ sociological account. In: Higher Education. DOI: 10.1007/s10734-021-00776-7.
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Mahaut Fanchini is a Junior Professor at the Sport & Social Sciences Department of the University of Paris-est Créteil, France. Her current research investigates elites’ forms of ignorance and whistleblowing from a gendered perspective. Mahaut has authored a book on rhetorical tactics from French political elites in court (2021). Her work is published in ‘ephemera’, ‘Industrial Relations’, and ‘Organization Studies’, among others.
Meghan Van Portfliet is an Assistant Professor at Leeds Business School at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. Her research interests include the role of advocacy groups in whistleblower protection, and how strategic ignorance is wielded by those in power. Meghan has published her work in journals such as ‘Organization’ and ‘Journal of Business Ethics’, and currently consults for Transparency International Ireland’s Integrity at Work program.
Anne K. Krüger is leading the research group “Reorganizing knowledge practices” at Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin, Germany. In her current research she works on digital infrastructures of performance measurement in academia. Anne has published on new institutionalist theory, research evaluation, and digital infrastructure.