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This paper aims to contribute to recent debates about financial knowledge by opening the black box of its algorithmization to understand how information systems can address the major challenges related to interactions between algorithmic trading and financial markets.

The paper analyses financial algorithms in three steps. First, the authors introduce the phenomenon of flash crash; second, the authors conduct an epistemological analysis of algorithmization and identify three epistemological regimes – epistemic, operational and authority – which differ in terms of how they deal with financial information. Third, the authors demonstrate that a flash crash emerges when there is a disconnection between these three regimes.

The authors open the black box of financial algorithms to understand why flash crashes occur and how information technology research can address the problem. A flash crash is a very rapid and deep fall in security prices in a very short time due to an algorithmic misunderstanding of the market. Thus, the authors investigate the problem and propose an interdisciplinary approach to clarify the scope of algorithmization of financial markets.

To manage the misalignment of information and potential disconnection between the three regimes, the authors suggest that information technology can embrace the complexity of the algorithmization of financial knowledge by diversifying its implementation through the development of a multi-sensorial platform. The authors propose sonification as a new mechanism for capturing and understanding financial information. This approach is then presented as a new research area that can contribute to the way financial innovations interact with information technology.

This study focuses on ad hoc policy advisory committees that bring together experts and stakeholders to propose public policies on the basis of consensus. These kinds of committees are often considered to be a typical governance mechanism of the social democratic model of regulation and policy-making known from the Nordic countries. We challenge this view by comparing the Norwegian system of committee governance with those of Germany and the European Union and point out the central role of coordination and consensus in all three systems. Relying on existing and original research, and contrary to the assumption of a distinct Nordic regime, we find significant similarities between the three committee governance systems when it comes to organisational features, the kind of expertise produced and the committees' governance functions. Most remarkable is the prevalence of hybrid, tripartite committees that draw together interest groups, civil servants and researchers in all three systems. We show that these kinds of ad hoc advisory committees tend to generate a kind of coordinated, negotiated expertise where notions of validity and objectivity are connected not only to cognitive quality but also to the breadth of viewpoints that are integrated. Moreover, the Nordic committee system of Norway stands out with only few distinctive qualities, and it is not obvious how the notion of ‘social democracy’ helps illuminating these features. To help shed light on the striking resemblances we find across systems, we develop a notion of consensus-oriented political and epistemological systems, which may be a useful complement to the notion of Nordic social democracy.

During the last 10 years, there have been several calls for a postmodern epistemology in organization studies (e.g. Hassard, 1994; Kilduff & Mehra, 1997). While most organization studies researchers would probably not think of themselves as postmodernists, one response to these calls is that the callers are preaching to the already converted. That is, the implicit norms that govern what are considered desirable scholarly contributions in organization studies today already bear the stamp of a postmodern epistemology. It is an epistemology that has not been consciously adopted by most organization studies scholars, but nevertheless has left its imprint on their work. The purpose of this chapter is to develop that argument, focusing first on three scholarly norms that are prominent in contemporary organization studies. These three scholarly norms are: (1) the positive valuation of the attribute “insight”; (2) the use and positive valuation of broad-scope theoretical constructs; and (3) the positive valuation of multiple schools of thought. I will discuss each of these norms in turn and argue that each is consistent with, and supported by, underlying currents of thought in postmodernist epistemology. I will identify the elements of postmodernist epistemology that I believe support each norm and then critically appraise the norm in light of reservations I have about postmodernist thought. While the three norms identified above certainly do not cover the entire range of scholarly “best practices” in organization studies today, I believe they are sufficient to illustrate the link between everyday scholarly practice in the discipline and postmodernist views of knowledge.

Law on the screen goes beyond film. It takes us to the domains of mind and culture, power and politics, technology and rhetoric, and the changing contours and norms of professional practice, craft, and pedagogy. Law on the screen is a multidisciplinary affair. It embraces empirical/descriptive, political/normative, and jurisprudential/theoretical dimensions of scholarship. By codifying what we know and how we know it, culture and technology mimic the regulatory force of law. But just as law is shaped and informed by technology and culture so, too, are technology and culture shaped and informed in turn by law's power to regulate. Code is a two-way street. Who gets to design the code, how, and with what effect? That is the political question par excellence of our day.

In In Re Widening of Beekman Street, a nineteenth century legal case in New York State which involved questions of who owned the bodies of the dead – whether it was the state, the church who owned the land where they were buried or the relatives of the deceased – we see an interesting legal aporia. Claims of ownership were complicated by the idea that the dead perhaps owned themselves, having once been full legal subjects. In this and other legal cases in US law (with similar results in the UK as well) a kind of compromise is reached where, as the body decays, the question of its self-ownership becomes increasingly settled in favour of other parties. Yet, even in such cases, the body and its sense of personhood lingers to haunt, as it were, the certainties of law about who precisely owns whom The uncertainties that are made manifest among the dead have their equivalents among the living as well; the presence of slavery at the time meant that in some cases even living persons did not own themselves. In this mix of overlapping forms of self and other ownership then, we see an anxiety in the law, one that it must settle definitively even as the very terms of legal personhood resist the very closure that the law seeks.

Based on the work of leading French and emerging French social scientists, this paper attempts to reactivate the field of Consumer Culture Theory throughout the proposal of alternative notional tools.

This paper takes a conceptual orientation that is based on the selection and organization of concepts, methodologies, and insights borrowed from French philosophers and social scientists.

The paper first points out the various French thought styles. Next, it highlights key intellectual ideas in French intellectual tradition that have arisen over the last 30 years and promote their implications for possible future researches on consumption and for a better political activism which would give more voice to consumption studies.

The paper attempts to categorize with a semiotic methodology, the panorama of French thought styles and proposes new concepts and angles to refound the analysis of consumption. Based on the questioning on common categories of CCT, it proposes original ideas, methods, and concepts borrowed from the French tradition to break up conventional and ethnocentric approaches by considering consumption beyond the sheer notion of culture.

The purpose of this paper is to set the groundwork for a new methodological movement. The author claims that methodological strategies must take as their object the laws with found sexual identity, or rather should be “fucking with” law by creatively confronting, occupying and agitating limiting ethical frameworks that control access to the field. The movement is ethnographic, since it finds research ethics and “straight” academic space to be where these rules are the most harmful in limiting access to the field, for female researchers, in particular.

The approach (but also to some extent the target) is on Deleuzian and post-Deleuzian’s philosophy, whose theoretical leaps have sought to shift and cause slippage in laws of sexual identity. However, when these laws are tested by researchers proposing to access the field, specifically ethnographically and autoethnographically, it is clear they have not “slipped” at all. This is clear through the questions raised by ethics committees. Fucking law, therefore, becomes a methodological movement intimately connecting ethical agendas and sex as an encounter in the field.

The author claims that the methodological movement of “fucking” law captures, or at least attempts to capture, the slipperiness of the body, the encounter, the research project and sex itself. The movement, “fucking law”, is essential in agitating and occupying the limiting institutional research agendas and their ethical frameworks.

The implications of “fucking law” will be necessarily unpredictable, but the main practical and connected social implication is questioning as to why more women are not practically questioning arguably one of the biggest questions: the ethics of sexuality. Fucking law argues for the questioning of these laws with bodies, and experimenting with philosophies which underpin and create institutional ethical rules.

This is the first work of its kind by a female autoethnographer challenging the ethics of sexuality, arising from a participatory field project. It also evaluates and confronts the ethics of the field as a whole: from the researcher herself, to her academic environment and sexual life, to the field itself and the writing up of the project.