Social theory and empirical research suggest that big data do not simply represent work, organizational entities and processes but their presence in an organizational setting prompts attempts to manage and even manipulate representations of work.

Location - Horton Lecture Theatre Two

Abstract:

Alaimo and Kallinikos (2017) identify encoding with how the design of user interfaces standardizes behavior into certain types of data, whereas Cunha and Carugati (2018) call post-factum operations by which work becomes digitally represented as transfiguration work. We extend this stream of research by analyzing how organizational members adapt to the anticipated uses of data generated from their activities. We conduct a multi-level case study of a learning analytics system used to monitor student and staff online activities as a part of business school operations. Drawing upon the theory of reactivity, we find evidence of prefiguration work, that is, preemptive actions taken by employees in anticipation that their activities will produce data for various purposes in the organization. Prefiguration, encoding and transfiguration work are constituents of a new kind of metawork we call con-figuration work – inconspicuous ‘work on work’ embedded into primary tasks and organizational practices to ensure that activities are appropriately represented through data. The research extends our knowledge of data-in-practice by showing how the use of a seemingly unproblematic digital asset becomes entangled with organizing: con-figuration work is additional work that organizational members need to do in addition to their regular duties, which also results in the re-configuration of those work practices to fit data generative processes.

Bio:

Dr. Aleksi Aaltonen is an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems. He joins the Fox School from Warwick Business School, United Kingdom.

A management scholar and successful entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in digital innovation, Aaltonen studies innovation and new forms of organizing made possible by big data and digital platforms.

His current projects employ computational, quantitative, and qualitative methods to explore audience information systems, online learning and software development platforms, and the governance of Wikipedia. He has earned publications in top academic journals such as Management Science, MIS Quarterly, and Organization Studies.

Dr. Marta Stelmaszak Rosa is an LSE Fellow in Management (Information Systems) at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Initiative for the Digital Economy at Exeter (INDEX) at University of Exeter Business School. She combines qualitative and quantitative methods in the study of social data, analytics, and data infrastructures. Her research has been presented at the Academy of Management Specialized Conference Big Data and Managing in a Digital Economy 2018, European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) 2018 and European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium 2019.