Abstract
Digital transformations have significant consequences for organizational attempts to shape their environments. Our focus is on how corporate political activity evolves in ways that require us to pay more attention to how information gets structured in digital spaces, and on how information ecosystems operate and shape strategic communication activities in organizational settings. We outline these digital transformations, offer a focus on corporate political activity as informational and develop a typology of datafied corporate political activity techniques to illustrate how the workings of digital spaces shape political issues more concretely. This serves to highlight the necessity of extending the focus of informational corporate political activity beyond the contents of overt and direct messages to include the more covert and subtle forms of influence made possible through the strategic structuring of information itself. This also contributes to our understanding of the political significance of corporate political activity, which is less about influencing political issues by composing appealing messages and distributing them to relevant audiences, and more about influencing political issues by organizing digital information and feeding algorithms. We suggest that such datastructures and algorithmic forms of sorting will become as important as message contents, and that datafied advocacy will become a central component of corporate political activity and other organizational activities.
Highlights
This article sets out an avenue of research for critical scholars of organization by uniting and operationalizing debates about the digitalization and datafication of social life with broader concerns about the political dominance of corporations in society
The centrality of digital information systems in social life means that processes of datafication and associated algorithmic operations shape cultural developments (Striphas, 2015), affect decisions about what we consider relevant in social settings (Gillespie, 2014) and even reconfigure how we ‘work and think’ (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013)
We propose that one way scholars of organization can attend to these technological and societal issues is through the study of how digital transformations create novel conditions for corporate political activity (CPA)
Summary
This article sets out an avenue of research for critical scholars of organization by uniting and operationalizing debates about the digitalization and datafication of social life with broader concerns about the political dominance of corporations in society. The line of inquiry that we set out addresses a shortcoming in our understanding of how corporate dominance of the political sphere is increasingly produced through information infrastructures, and enables organizational scholars to advance our understanding of societal changes associated with digitalization and datafication This contributes to the literature on informational CPA by conceptualizing and illustrating corporate advocacy efforts that depend on structuring information and thereby extends the existing focus on information contents such as frames (Hall and Deardorff, 2006; Livesey, 2002; Nyberg et al, 2013). We conclude with a discussion of the broader significance of datafied CPA and the implications for research in organization and management studies
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