This paper offers to extend existing discussions about the socio-material production of organizational space through the concept of topology. It does so by: (1) connecting the concept of topology to existing approaches to spatial organization that emphasize its socio-material and open-ended emergence; (2) theorizing organizational space as being in constant deformation across different topological shapes; and (3) exploring this in an empirical example that juxtaposes a management meeting with its interruption. The empirical material is collected through the method of shadowing managers at a Danish school. Theoretically, the paper argues that the shaping of space is contingent upon dis/continuities between (non)human agencies. The topological deformation of space testifies to the continuous but under-acknowledged work provided by (non)human agencies to both achieve and challenge the stability of organizational space. It further situates the boundary between inside and outside as a transient condition. This renders spatial matters such as scale and size situational achievements. Topology thus implies that we cannot in advance scale organization into micro and macro spatialities, and further, foregrounds the inherent dis/organization of space.
We develop the concept of ‘aesthetic practices’ to capture the work needed for population data to be disseminated via government data portals. Specifically, we look at the Census Hub of the European Statistical System and the Danish Ministry of Education’s Data Warehouse. These portals form part of open government data initiatives, which we understand as governing technologies. We argue that to function as such, aesthetic practices are required so that data produced at dispersed sites can be brought into relation and projected as populations in forms such as bar charts, heat maps and tables. Two examples of aesthetic practices are analysed based on ethnographic studies we have conducted on the production of data for the Hub and Warehouse: metadata and data cleaning. Metadata enables data to come into relation by containing and accounting for (some of) the differences between data. Data cleaning deals with the indeterminacies and absences of data and involves algorithms to determine what values data can obtain so they can be brought into relation. We attend to how both aesthetic practices involve normative decisions that make absent what exceeds them: embodied knowledge that cannot or has not been documented as well as data that cannot meet the forms required of data portals. While these aesthetic practices are necessary to sustain data portals as ‘sites of projection,’ we also bring critical attention to their performative effects for knowing, enacting and governing populations.
Organization is increasingly entwined with databased governance infrastructures. Developing the idea of ‘infrastructure as partial connection’ with inspiration from Marilyn Strathern and Science and Technology Studies, this article proposes that database infrastructures are intrinsic to processes of organizing intra- and inter-organizational relations. Seeing infrastructure as partial connection brings our attention to the ontological experimentation with knowing organizations through work of establishing and cutting relations. We illustrate this claim through a multi-sited ethnographic study of ‘The Data Warehouse’. ‘The Data Warehouse’ is an important infrastructural component in the current reorganization of Danish educational governance which makes schools’ performance public and comparable. We suggest that ‘The Data Warehouse’ materializes different, but overlapping, infrastructural experiments with governing education at different organizational sites enacting a governmental hierarchy. Each site can be seen as belonging to the same governance infrastructure but also as constituting ‘centres’ in its own right. ‘The Data Warehouse’ participates in the always-unfinished business of organizational world making and is made to (partially) relate to different organizational concerns and practices. This argument has implications for how we analyze the organizational effects of pervasive databased governance infrastructures and invites exploring their multiple organizing effects.
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