Governing social practice

Abstract

This paper claims that technology and institutions both epitomize the construction of artificial orders through which a primary reality is shaped to something other than it is by logical operations that share essential affinities. Drawing on this, we work our way to showing how technology operates as governing regime and how tasks and operations that are carried out by the human enactment of expert rules and procedures can considerably be embodied onto technological sequences with which human experts have limited and severely structured interaction. These ideas are illustrated by reference to cultural memory organizations (e.g. libraries, archives, museums) and the ways the deepening infiltration of their operations by computing technologies redefines their goals and the skills, practices and arrangements through which these goals have traditionally been pursued.

Computing the everyday: Social media as data platforms

“…The data thus procured are variously deployed to sustain online sociality and to trade the outcome of user engagement (more data) to advertisers, data analytics companies and other platform stakeholders. Our aim is to produce a portrait of social media that contemplates the technological underpinnings of these platforms and links technology to institutions (Kallinikos, Hasselbladh and Marton 2013). Social media platforms, we claim, are ultimately data-based organizations that extract value and make profit from the social everyday they themselves engineer.…”

Conceptualising Benefits of User-Centred Design for Digital Library Services

“…Voros, 2003). Studies on libraries' ability to meet the requirements of the future society have warned that the traditional approaches to strategy and management may become disconnected from the rapid societal and technical change (Batt, 2015;Kallinikos, Hasselbladh, & Marton, 2013). The concepts of time can help managers to better frame and make sense of organisational change (Wiebe, 2011).…”

Trading Discipline for Agility? Questioning the Unfaithful Appropriation of Agile Software Development Practices

“…Some have argued that technologies structure social relationships within organizations and therefore complement, and occasionally compete with institutional modes of governance [60]. For instance, disciplinary power acts in a largely unobtrusive manner as it regulates movements and establishes calculated distributions [58].…”