Prelims

Thinking Infrastructures

Research in the Sociology of Organizations

Series Editor: Michael Lounsbury

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Title Page

Research in the Sociology of Organizations

Volume 62

THINKING INFRASTRUCTURES

Editors

Martin Kornberger

EM Lyon Business School, France, University of Edinburgh, UK and WU Vienna, Austria

Geoffrey C. Bowker

University of California, USA

Julia Elyachar

Princeton University, USA

Andrea Mennicken

London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Peter Miller

London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Joanne Randa Nucho

Pomona College, USA

Neil Pollock

University of Edinburgh Business School, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2019

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78769-558-0 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78769-557-3 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78769-559-7 (Epub)

ISSN: 0733-558X (Series)

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

About the Editors

Martin Kornberger received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Vienna in 2002. Prior to joining EM Lyon he worked at the University of Technology Sydney as associate professor in design and management, and as research director of the Australian Creative Industry Innovation Centre; and at Copenhagen Business School as professor for strategy and organization. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh Business School and a research fellow at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. His research focuses on collective action and strategy in non-command and control settings, with the aim to stretch the imagination of practitioners and scholars.

Geoffrey C. Bowker is the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor at the School of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine, where he directs the Evoke Laboratory, which explores new forms of knowledge expression. Recent positions include the Professor of and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship at the University of Pittsburgh iSchool and Executive Director, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara. Together with Leigh Star, he wrote Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences; his most recent books are Memory Practices in the Sciences and (with Stefan Timmermans, Adele Clarke and Ellen Balka) the edited collection: Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star. He is currently working on big data policy and on scientific cyberinfrastructure; as well as completing a book on social readings of data and databases. He is a Founding Member of the Council for Big Data, Ethics and Society.

Julia Elyachar is Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. She was previously Associate Professor of Anthropology and Economics at the University of California at Irvine, where she was also Director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies. Her Ph.D., from Harvard University, is in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. Elyachar’s research lies at the intersection of political economy, social theory, and anthropology; she has conducted ethnographic research in Egypt, Israel/Palestine, former Yugoslavia, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Elyachar has published in top journals in anthropology, history, and social theory, and won the first book prize of the American Ethnological Society for her book Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development and the State in Cairo. Her forthcoming books are Embodied Infrastructure: Commons, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Prioprioception, and Factories: An Anthropology of Western Economic Order from the Levant.

Andrea Mennicken is an Associate Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation. Her work has been published in Accounting, Organizations and Society, Financial Accountability and Management, Foucault Studies, Sociologie du Travail, among others. She co-edited Zahlenwerk: Kalkulation, Organisation und Gesellschaft (2007), and with Peter Miller a special issue on Foucault and Accounting in Foucault Studies (2012). Recently, she has begun work on an international research project exploring the changing relationships between quantification, administrative capacity and democracy in healthcare, correctional services and higher education.

Peter Miller is a Professor of Management Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an Associate of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation. He is an Editor of Accounting, Organizations and Society, and has published in a wide range of accounting, management and sociology journals. He co-edited The Foucault Effect (1991). More recently, he co-edited Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice (1994), and Accounting, Organizations and Institutions (2009). In 2008, he published (jointly with Nikolas Rose) Governing the Present.

Joanne Randa Nucho is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Pomona College. Her research interests include critical infrastructure studies and urban studies as well as non-fiction film and video and visual ethnography. Her book Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services and Power (2016), part of the Princeton University Press series on Culture and Technology, is based on 16 months of ethnographic research in a neighborhood widely known as Beirut’s Armenian quarter. She is also a documentary filmmaker whose work has screened at the London International Documentary Film Festival and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Neil Pollock, who was originally trained in computing and Science & Technology Studies, is the Professor of Innovation and Social Informatics at the University of Edinburgh Business School. He is primarily known for his interdisciplinary research on information technologies that sits at the intersection between Information Systems, Innovation Studies and Economic Sociology. He has published in the highest rated academic journals which include MIS Quarterly, Organization Studies, Information Systems Research, Accounting, Organizations & Society, Social Studies of Science and Science, Technology & Human Values, and has also co-authored three books Putting the University Online (OU Press), Software and Organisations (Routledge) and How Industry Analysts Shape the Digital Future (Oxford). He is also a Senior Editor at the journal Information and Organization.

About the Contributors

Cristina Alaimo is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Digital Economy at Surrey Business School, University of Surrey, UK. She holds a PhD in Information Systems, from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research is concerned with the datification of user platform participation. She studies the mechanisms and social consequences of how platforms engineer user participation and the broader ecosystem of data exchanges in which these platforms are embedded. Her recent publication “Computing the Everyday: Social Media as Data platforms” (2017, The Information Society, 33/4 with Jannis Kallinikos) has been the first runner up in the category Best Published Paper Award, for the Academy of Management, OCIS, 2018.

Celine Cholez is a Lecturer in Sociology at Grenoble-Institute of Engineering and at the PACTE (Politique, Action, Territoire) Research Centre of the University of Grenoble Alpes, France. Her works aim at establishing, from an ethnographic perspective, how people achieve, through tinkering, various complex and normally disrupted activities, especially in the context of rural popular economies in Africa. Her most recent publications in English appeared in M@nagment, Consumption, Markets & Culture and Review of Policy research.

Franck Cochoy is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France, and a researcher at the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Solidarités, Sociétés, Territoires, at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. His work concerns how technical devices such as packaging, self-service or QR codes, frame consumer behavior.

Daniel Curto-Millet is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Spanish National Research Council and is affiliated with the UAM-Accenture Chair at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). He recently completed his PhD at the London School of Economics.

Paul N. Edwards is William J. Perry Fellow in International Security and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University, USA. He is the author of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), a history of climate knowledge infrastructures.

Amany Elbanna is a Reader (Associate Professor) at the Royal Holloway University of London. Her current research revolves around information infrastructure including digital platforms and cloud computing in addition to technology adoption and project management. Her research has been published in leading journals including Management Information Systems Quarterly, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology and Journal of Strategic Information Systems, among others.

Ingrid Erickson is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, where she researches the influence of ubiquitous digital technologies and artificial intelligence on work, communication and new sociotechnical practices

Marian Gatzweiler is a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh Business School. His research focuses on the role of quantification and metrics as tools that actively shape organising processes and policy in response to grand social challenges. Rather than examining metrics as merely providing “evidence” for managers and policy makers, his research places numbers and visualisations in the foreground to understand how notions of knowledge, innovation and accountability are constructed and practiced in such settings.

Andreas Folkers is a Postdoc Researcher in Sociology at the Justus-Liebig University Giessen. He received his PhD in 2017 from the Goethe-University Frankfurt. He works on infrastructure, security, energy, economic sociology and social theory. Book publication: Das Sicherheitsdispositiv der Resilienz. Katastrophische Risiken und die Biopolitik vitaler Systeme. Frankfurt: Campus, 2018.

Johan Hagberg, PhD, is Professor of Business Administration specialising in Marketing at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He received his doctorate in 2008 with a thesis on retail change. His current research investigates consumer logistics and the digitalization of retailing and consumption.

Jannis Kallinikos is a Professor in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the impact of information and communication technologies on organizations and economic institutions. He has published widely in management, information systems and sociology journals and written several monographs including: The Consequences of Information: Institutional Implications of Technological Change, Edward Elgar, 2007, Governing Through Technology: Information Artefacts and Social Practice, Palgrave, 2011. He has, together with Paul Leonardi and Bonnie Nardi, co-edited Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World, Oxford University Press, 2012.

Antonios Kaniadakis is a Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London where he leads the IT Management Teaching Group within the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. The main bulk of his research explores the social shaping of digital innovation and the implications for organizations, marketplaces and technological infrastructures.

Hans Kjellberg is a Professor of Marketing, Director of the Centre for Market Studies and Head of the Department of Marketing and Strategy, at the Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden. He is interested in economic organizing, particularly the organizing of markets. Currently, he is engaged in an interdisciplinary research programme on the digitalization of consumption and a cross-country comparison of valuation and pricing of cancer drugs.

Liisa Kurunmäki is an Associate Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Research Associate in the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation. She has published numerous articles in accounting and related social science journals. Her current research focuses on calculative tools and calculative infrastructures in the public sector context, in particular “failure regimes” and associated metrics of quantification in healthcare and related settings.

François Lambotte is a Professor of Organisational Communication at École de Communication of Université catholique de Louvain. He is the Founder of UCLouvain Social Media Lab, a laboratory questioning the use of social media in a professional context.

Daniel Martinez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Accounting and Management Control at HEC Paris. His research examines how performance measurement is implicated in the management and regulation of NGOs, pension plans and cannabis markets. He has been published in Critical Perspectives on Accounting, European Accounting Review, and Accounting, Organizations and Society.

Afshin Mehrpouya is an Associate Professor of Accounting and Management Control Systems at HEC Paris. He trained as a medical doctor in Iran, also holds an MBA and PhD in management. His research is broadly on the role of accounting regimes and performance measurement in transnational governance. His current research projects focus on the production and consumption of rankings and genealogical analysis of the rise of transparency in global governance. Prior to starting his academic career, he had years of experience in the design of environmental and social rankings and ratings. He has advised a range of development and sustainability related initiatives such as Access to Medicine Index, Aid Transparency Index, Medicines Transparency Alliance, Access to Nutrition Index and Responsible Mining Index.

Yuval Milo is a Professor of Accounting and the Head of the Accounting Group in Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. His research focuses on accounting for social value and sociology of valuation. He published research papers in Contemporary Accounting Research, European Accounting Review and Journal of Management Studies.

Wanda J. Orlikowski is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She received her PhD from New York University. Her research examines digital reconfigurations, with a focus on the sociomateriality of digital work practices.

Tommaso Palermo is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics. His main research interests include the design and use of enterprise risk management and performance management systems, risk culture in financial sector organizations and risk regulation in new markets for contested commodities, such as recreational cannabis in Colorado.

Nikiforos S. Panourgias is an Associate Professor in Financial Market Information Systems at the School of Business of the University of Leicester. He has published in Information System Research, Organization Studies, Technological Forecasting and Social Change and Information and Organization in the areas of financial markets and technology, and digital innovation and creativity.

Dane Pflueger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Accounting and Management Control at HEC Paris. His research, focusing on the intersection between accounting and organizations, platforms and markets, is published in leading journals such as Accounting, Organizations and Society.

Michael Power is Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Fellow of the British Academy. Major works include The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (1997), Organized Uncertainty: Designing a World of Risk Management (2007) and Riskwork: Essays on the Organizational Life of Risk Management (2016).

Roser Pujadas is a Research Fellow in Information Systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), studying the organizational, managerial and social implications of digital interfaces, as part of the Interface Reasoning for Interacting Systems project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Previously, she completed her PhD at the LSE and held an LSE Fellow position at the Department of Management.

Jacob Reilley is a Research Associate and Doctoral candidate at the Department for Management Accounting and Control at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg. He holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Bielefeld. His research focuses on public sector organizations, regulatory reform and social studies of accounting.

Matteo Ronzani is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh School of Social and Political Science. His research focuses on the roles of visualizations and material artifacts in processes of organizing and on how metrics and indicators are implicated in the making of transnational governance.

Rita Samiolo is a Lecturer in Accounting and Financial Management at King’s Business School, King’s College London. She holds a PhD in Accounting from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research is in the area of social and institutional studies of accounting. She has a broad interest in the changing roles and rationales of accounting and economic calculation in different governance settings. She is particularly interested in examining economic calculation from the perspective of the history and sociology of science, unpacking the epistemic assumptions underlying costing and performance measurement approaches. She has worked on empirical topics such as the appraisal of large public sector projects and the rise of rankings in transnational governance.

Steven Sawyer is a Professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. His research builds on and advances the social informatics tradition through particular attention to the ways in which people organize to work together and use information and communication technologies.

Tobias Scheytt is a Professor and Head of the Department of Management Accounting and Control at Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg. His research is focused on strategic control with a special emphasis on the management of quality and risk in private as well as public sector organizations.

Susan V. Scott is an Associate Professor in the Information Systems & Innovation Group, Department of Management, at the London School of Economics & Political Science. She received her PhD from the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on digital innovation and the (re-)organization of work.

Pascale Trompette is a Sociologist, CNRS Senior Research Fellow at the PACTE Research Center at the University of Grenoble Alpes, France. Her research interest relates to market-based solutions for public and social concerns. Current projects concern the development of market-based solutions to poverty in developing countries, with a special interest on rural electrification in Africa.