Technology (NTNU) and adjunct professor at the University of Oslo. Drawing on an interdisciplinary perspective influenced by Science and Technology Studies, he is interested in the digital transformation in organizations of work and knowing, notably in healthcare and energy/oil. He has worked extensively with a theoretical lens of large-scale change projects informed by (information) infrastructure/digital platforms. His publications have appeared in MISQ, ISR, JAIS, Information and Organization, EJIS, The Information Society, Science, Technology & Human Values, and CSCW Journal.Elena Parmiggiani is postdoctoral researcher in Information Systems at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and holds a PhD in Information Technology from NTNU (2015).She is interested in studying the sociotechnical challenges of implementing, integrating, and maintaining digital platforms and information infrastructures, and in the methodological stakes of studying distributed and long-term arrangements. Her work is based on an interdisciplinary lens influenced by Science and Technology Studies. Empirically, she has focused on environmental monitoring and the oil industry. She has published primarily within Information Systems and CSCW.Abstract. All knowing is material. The challenge for Information Systems (IS) research is to specify how knowing is material by drawing on theoretical characterizations of the digital.Synthetic knowing is knowing informed by theorizing digital materiality. We focus on two defining qualities: liquefaction (unhinging digital representations from physical objects, qualities, or processes) and open-endedness (extendable and generative). The Internet of Things (IoT) is crucial because sensors are vehicles of liquefaction. Their expanding scope for real-time 'seeing', 'hearing', 'tasting', 'smelling', and 'touching' increasingly mimics phenomenologically perceived reality. Empirically, we present a longitudinal case study of IoT-rendered marine environmental monitoring by an oil and gas company operating in the politically contested Arctic. We characterize synthetic knowing into four concepts, the former three tied to liquefaction and the latter to openendedness: (i) the objects of knowing are algorithmic phenomena; (ii) the sensors increasingly conjure up phenomenological reality; (iii) knowing is scoped (configurable); and (iv) open knowing/data is politically charged.perspectives and cites examples of modest (e.g., the possibility to mute the microphone during a video-conference) and moderate (e.g., creating an electronic archive that is available to all users regardless of geography) entanglement of materiality in the knowing. When, as in our case, the role of materiality in knowing is constitutive rather than modest or moderate, this need for a conceptual supplement to practice-based knowing is significantly compounded.

Interconnected workplace information technologies (information infrastructures) are distributed across user and system types, agendas, locales, and temporal rhythms. The term infrastructuring describes the design of information infrastructure not as a bounded phase but as a continuous collaborative and inherently political process. From the perspective of ethnographers, however, this conceptualization presents the practical challenge of dealing with the political work involved in infrastructuring and in its study. In this paper, I discuss the challenges of infrastructuring activities for ethnographic research. Based on a self-revealing account of my threeyear ethnographic study of an oil company's project to design a platform for subsea environmental monitoring in the Arctic region, I discuss how my framing of infrastructuring was the result of my process of constructing the ethnographic field in my research. I combined four mechanisms to scale my ethnographic method to investigate infrastructuring across heterogeneous dimensions. Drawing on my practical experience, I discuss how my process of constructing the field let me discover richer possibilities for understanding the politics involved in the study of infrastructuring.

Abstract. Sociomateriality is gaining momentum and is by now characterized as a research stream in the information system field. Although some definitions emerged, there is still uncertainty about how to conceptually and analytically address sociomateriality. The debate ranges from understanding sociomateriality as just a fancy word for technology to treating it as a de-facto theory of the human-technology relationship. To bring the field forward, a common basic understanding of what sociomateriality entails is needed. In this paper we set out to contribute to such an understanding. We do this by conducting a systematic mapping study of emerging concepts and definitions in the current empirical body of literature on sociomateriality. Our analysis finds three key resulting facets: mutuality (what is a sociomaterial assemblage?), performativity (how does it perform?), and multidimensionality (When and where does it perform?). Our findings outline how sociomaterial studies analytically and methodologically address performativity spanning across time and space.

Abstract. Technologies for collaboration within the oil and gas industry, which are referred to as Integrated Operations, challenge traditional geographical, disciplinary, and organisational boundaries. Fuelled by the availability of sensor networks, faster data transfer technologies, shared data exchange formats, and collaborative work flows, Integrated Operations entail difficult transformations at the technological, social, and political levels. We describe and discuss the efforts of a Scandinavian oil and gas company to develop an information infrastructure for real-time subsea environmental monitoring. This accentuates the ongoing controversy among environmental concerns, fisheries, and the oil and gas industry. Theoretically leaning on infrastructuring and, methodologically, on the concept of infrastructural inversion, our analysis specifically targets the evolution of emergent infrastructures. We identify and discuss the increasing degree of entanglement of the infrastructuring process over time by empirically characterizing two concepts: (1) bootstrapping, which is particularly pronounced in the early stages of infrastructure evolution and involves exploring the local feasibility of subsea environmental monitoring methods and devices, and (2) enactment, which is increasingly present in the later stages of infrastructure evolution to weave environmental information into the agenda of heterogeneous oil and gas professionals.

The proliferation of distributed digital technologies in contemporary enterprise challenges the understanding of situated action. This paper revisits this notion in the era of Big Data and the Internet of Things. Drawing upon longitudinal studies within the offshore oil and gas industry, we empirically expand upon Knorr Cetina's "synthetic situation" to encompass data-intensive work where people are not co-located with the physical objects and phenomena around which work is organized. By highlighting the performative nature of synthetic situations in the Internet of Things-where phenomena are algorithmically enacted through digital technologies-we elaborate upon the original formulation of synthetic situations by demonstrating that (i) algorithmic phenomena constitute the phenomena under inquiry, rather than standing in for physical referents; (ii) noise is irreducible in algorithmic phenomena; (iii) synthetic situations are productive rather than reductive. Finally, we draw brief methodological implications by proposing to focus on the material enactment of data in practice.

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We know little about the marine environment, particularly in the inhospitable Arctic region. Whereas national authorities often rely on the construction of a solid knowledge base to allow human activity access to new areas, scientists point to the impossibility of building comprehensive knowledge of subsea ecosystems. This paper presents an ethnographic study of a Norwegian oil and gas company’s development of a knowledge infrastructure for measuring the long-term trend of the behaviour of the marine environment, i.e. a baseline to be used as a reference to calculate potential risks in a commercially relevant Arctic area. The company’s infrastructuring mechanisms involve selecting and configuring environmental sensing technologies, and tying them into the fabric of the company’s operational analysis routines. We identify and discuss how these mechanisms address and articulate temporal, spatial, and social tensions and how, in so doing, they mould new representations of environmental risk.

Digital transformation has been one of the most studied phenomena in information systems (IS) and organizational science literature. With novel digital technologies emerging at a growing pace, it is important to understand what we have learned in over three decades of research and what we still need to understand in order to harness the full potential of such digital tools. In this chapter, we present a brief overview of digital transformation and develop a conceptual framework which we use as a basis of discussing the extant literature. The conceptual framework is also used as a means of positioning the empirical chapters presented in the rest of this edited volume. Finally, we discuss the role of context in digital transformation and identify some differences that span industry, domain, size class, and country of operation.