Jannis Kallinikos

The Project of Rationalization: A Critique and Reappraisal of Neo-Institutionalism in Organization Studies

This article critically approaches various neo-institutional accounts of the process of formal organizing. While acknowledging the importance of the overall orientation marked by neo-institutional studies, the article identifies several crucial aspects that have escaped the attention of neo-institutional research. In particular, it criticizes the inability of neo-institutionalism to provide an account of the means linking situated forms of organizing with wider instrumental beliefs and practices, in terms other than adaptivist, diffusionist. Such a limitation is partly a consequence of unwillingness of neo-institutionalism to focus on and analyze the very architecture of the rationalized patterns and relationships which neo-institutionalists claim to be diffusing across organizational populations and fields. Drawing on several sources, the article develops a framework that seeks to outline the conceptual means for decomposing the carriers of rationalized patterns, models and techniques and showing the distinctive ways in which they implicate the building blocks of formal organizing.

Deconstructing information packages: Organizational and behavioural implications of ERP systems

Argues that the organizational involvement of large scale information technology packages, such as those known as enterprise resource planning (ERP), has important implications that go far beyond the acknowledged effects of keeping the organizational operations accountable and integrated across functions and production sites. Claims that ERP packages are predicated on an understanding of human agency as a procedural affair and of organizations as an extended series of functional or cross‐functional transactions. Accordingly, the massive introduction of ERP packages to organizations is bound to have serious implications that precisely recount the procedural forms by which such packages instrument organizational operations and fashion organizational roles. The conception of human agency and organizational operations in procedural terms may seem reasonable yet it recounts a very specific and, in a sense, limited understanding of humans and organizations. The distinctive status of framing human agency and organizations in procedural terms becomes evident in its juxtaposition with other forms of human action like improvisation, exploration or playing. These latter forms of human involvement stand out against the serial fragmentation underlying procedural action. They imply acting on the world on loose premises that trade off a variety of forms of knowledge and courses of action in attempts to explore and discover alternative ways of coping with reality.

The ambivalent ontology of digital artifacts

Digital artifacts are embedded in wider and constantly shifting ecosystems such that they become increasingly editable, interactive, reprogrammable, and distributable. This state of flux and constant transfiguration renders the value and utility of these artifacts contingent on shifting webs of functional relations with other artifacts across specific contexts and organizations. By the same token, it apportions control over the development and use of these artifacts over a range of dispersed stakeholders and makes their management a complex technical and social undertaking. These ideas are illustrated with reference to (1) provenance and authenticity of digital documents within the overall context of archiving and social memory and (2) the content dynamics occasioned by the findability of content mediated by Internet search engines. We conclude that the steady change and transfiguration of digital artifacts signal a shift of epochal dimensions that calls for rethinking some of the inherited wisdom in IS research and practice.

The order of technology: Complexity and control in a connected world

This paper examines some of the implications associated with the growing complexity of the contemporary world, consequent upon the expanding economic and organizational involvement of ICT-based systems and artefacts. Drawing on Luhmann, traditional forms of technological control are analyzed in terms of functional simplification and closure. Functional simplification involves the demarcation of an operational domain within which the complexity of the world is reconstructed as a simplified set of causal or instrumental relations. Functional closure implies the construction of a protective cocoon that is placed around the selected causal sequences to ensure their recurrent unfolding. While possible to analyze in similar terms, current developments, as manifested in the diffusion of large-scale information systems and mostly the internet spin a web of technological relations that challenge the strategies of functional simplification and closure and the organizational practices that have traditionally accommodated them.

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.

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.

On the computational rendition of reality: artefacts and human agency

The paper seeks to lay open the computational logic by which reality is rendered as information. Computation is claimed to involve a drift away from the palpable and extendible character of things, a trend that both continues and breaks with the prevailing strategies of technological mediation in industrialism and modernity. Computation entails the relentless analytic reduction of the composite character and complexion of the world. Reality is meticulously dissolved and regained after a long analytic retreat and technological reconstruction. The outcome of this analytic strategy is that processes taking place at the human-technology interface are sustained by an elaborate vertical stratification, entailing a variety of other programmes and systems that reach down from the level of the interface to machine language and the mechanics of binary parsing. The deepening involvement of computation in instrumental settings thus reframes the perceptive and action modalities by which human agents confront the world. This way, a coherent set of techniques for building up reality is established accompanied by a new model of human agency that increasingly takes the form of a combinatoria of data and information items, remaking the shape of things out of the digital fragments produced by computation.

The Architecture of the Invisible: Technology is Representation:

The article explores the idea that the utilitarian and technological orientation of modernity coincides with the conception, position and instrumentation of the world in ways that promote mastery and the distillation of utility. A central strategy in this direction is to reduce the complex and synthetic character of the world to limited domains that can be surveyed, inspected, reversed, controlled and so forth. Rather than being accidental, the principle of limited and selected objectification comprises a world-view that, following Heidegger (1977), I refer to as representation. These points of view make up a theoretical framework that is employed with the purpose of evaluating the current technological trajectory from the industrial to digital technology and its impact upon the work habits and the nature of formal organizations. Shorn of the insights supplied by the Heideggerian view, the differences between these two basic technological epochs and paradigms tend to be overstated and their common representational inheritance tend to be lost. For both represent detached and decontextualized systems of work that impose their own material and behavioural requirements. The article attempts, then, to reveal and illustrate the complex texture of questions related to the increasing distancing from the immediate world and the proliferation of formal and codified methods through an interpretation of Italo Calvinos novel Invisible Cities.

Information out of information: on the self‐referential dynamics of information growth

Purpose – The paper seeks to develop a theory of information processes that invokes three major explanatory factors to account for the escalating patterns of information growth that have been taking place over the last decades.Design/methodology/approach – Conceptual analysis and review of relevant theories.Findings – First, information is claimed to have a dual value as a description of a reference domain and a relationship that such a description may have or develop with already available descriptions within that domain or across reference domains. Second, the intrinsic combinability of technologically mediated information is substantially strengthened by the interoperable character of contemporary information infrastructures. Finally, information growth dynamics are intimately connected with the perishable and disposable character of information.Originality/value – The paper presents a novel theory of information growth dynamics.

Organized Complexity: Posthumanist Remarks on the Technologizing of Intelligence

This article deals with the notion of organized complexity which it identifies with the selection of an order seen as developing at the cross-roads of generic functions, formal role systems and technologies. While functions contribute to organized complexity by defining and constituting specific domains of action-e.g. economic, political, scientific, etc.-technologies and formal role systems serve as important means for the constitution of human interaction along predictable and recurrent lines. Technology differs, however, from formal role systems in that it attempts to detach agency from humans and embody it in material artefacts. Investigating the project of technologizing intelligence at some length, the article claims that technology currently assumes an increasingly important role in the regulation of human interaction. The technical embodiment of perception, cognition and communication patterns redefines the stratified social topology of formal organizations in ways that tend to limit the prescriptive significance which formal role systems have traditionally assumed in modernity.