Abstract
Despite the growing “data imperative” and “fetishization of data” across organizational contexts, critical scholars have adhered to a set of normative understandings for how people experience and engage with data and datafication in and around organizations: namely, as numbers and statistics that are “captured”, interpreted, and operationalized. In reality, however, data and datafication are experienced within organizational life in a multiplicity of ways that often have very little to do with numbers and statistics. In this essay, we shift our attention to these less overt and less examined ways in which data and datafication shape organizational life—specifically, the aesthetic, emotional, and discursive aspects of our everyday encounters with it. By attending to the multiple, complex, and nuanced entanglements of data and organization, organizational scholars will be better equipped to navigate the increasingly fraught terrain between technocratic data worship and anti-science politics that characterize the current political moment. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a more politicized, historicized, and democratized data studies that can support movements for social, economic, and ecological justice.
Highlights
Our history is like the ravings of a lunatic
For Ricaurte (2019), this epistemology of big data is premised on three key assumptions: “(1) data reflect reality; (2) data analysis generates the most valuable and accurate knowledge; and (3) the results of data processing can be used to make better decisions about the world” (p. 351). Such epistemological assumptions are at the core of our faith in numbers and social quantification (Porter, 1996)—increasingly to the point that it contributes to organizational ignorance (Schwarzkopf, 2019)—as well as the construction of elite identities (Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003), the legitimization of expert knowledges (Zald & Lounsbury 2010), and the construction of categories that help us make sense of organizational reality (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2020). That these discourses play a significant role in subjectivity/identity and subjectification within organizations shaped by datafication
What we aim to emphasize, here, is how data and datafication are experienced in a multiplicity of ways that often have very little to do with actual numbers and statistics, as well as the interpretation and operationalization of these numbers and statistics
Summary
Our history is like the ravings of a lunatic. The third season of the HBO series Westworld takes place in a dystopian future organized by data. The main antagonist of the season, Engerraund Serac, has created a quantum computing system that uses large data sets, analytics, and predictive technologies to manipulate, steer, and govern the entirety of human affairs. For Serac—a man whose hometown (a future Paris, France) was destroyed by nuclear war when he was a child—data brings order and beauty to a chaotic world that, left to its own devices, resembles “the ravings of a lunatic.”. Throughout the season’s eight-episode story arc, the characters of Westworld engage with questions around free will and choice, what makes us human, the ethics of predictive technologies, and what the most extreme imaginings of a society organized by data might look like
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