Ali Aslan Gümüsay, Mia Raynard, Oana Albu, Michael Etter and Thomas Roulet
Digital technologies, and the affordances they provide, can shape institutional processes in significant ways. In the last decade, social media and other digital platforms have…
Abstract
Digital technologies, and the affordances they provide, can shape institutional processes in significant ways. In the last decade, social media and other digital platforms have redefined civic engagement by enabling new ways of connecting, collaborating, and mobilizing. In this article, we examine how technological affordances can both enable and hinder institutional processes through visibilization – which we define as the enactment of technological features to foreground and give voice to particular perspectives and discourses while silencing others. We study such dynamics by examining #SchauHin, an activist campaign initiated in Germany to shine a spotlight on experiences of daily racism. Our findings show how actors and counter-actors differentially leveraged the technological features of two digital platforms to shape the campaign. Our study has implications for understanding the role of digital technologies in institutional processes as well as the interplay between affordances and visibility in efforts to deinstitutionalize discriminatory practices and institutions.
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This chapter addresses research on worker skill, technology, and control over the labor process by focusing on routine immaterial labor or knowledge work. Based on participant…
Abstract
This chapter addresses research on worker skill, technology, and control over the labor process by focusing on routine immaterial labor or knowledge work. Based on participant observation conducted among analytics workers at a digital publishing network, I find that analytics workers appear paradoxically autonomous and empowered by management while being bound by ever-evolving, calculative cloud-based information and communication technologies (ICTs). Workers appear free to “be creative,” while ever-evolving ICTs exert unpredictable control over work. Based on this finding, I argue that sociology’s tendency to take organizational boundaries and technological stability for granted hampers analyses of contemporary forms of work. Thus, sociologists of work must extend outward – beyond communities of practice, labor markets, and the state – to include the ever-evolving, infrastructural, socio-technical networks in which work and organizations are embedded. Additionally, research on the experience of immaterial labor suggests that ICTs afford pleasurably immersive experiences that bind workers to organizations and their fields. Complicating this emerging body of research, I find workers acutely frustrated by these unpredictable, ever-evolving, cloud-based ICTs.
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Cristiano Codagnone, Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews
This chapter offers a re-description of knowledge organization in light of genre and activity theory. Knowledge organization needs a new description in order to account for those…
Abstract
Purpose
This chapter offers a re-description of knowledge organization in light of genre and activity theory. Knowledge organization needs a new description in order to account for those activities and practices constituting and causing concrete knowledge organization activity. Genre and activity theory is put forward as a framework for situating such a re-description.
Findings
By means of genre and activity theory, the chapters argues that understanding the genre and activity systems, in which every form of knowledge organization is embedded, makes us capable of seeing how knowledge organization, as a genre, both can be a tool and an object in genred human activities.
Originality/value
In contrast to much research into knowledge organization, this chapter does not emphasize techniques, standards, or rules to be the sole object of study. Instead, an emphasis is put on the genre and activity systems informing and shaping concrete forms of knowledge organization activity. With this, we are able to understand how knowledge organization activity also contributes to construct genre and activity systems and not only aid them.
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To outline the current trajectories in digital social research and to highlight the roles of qualitative research in those trajectories.
Abstract
Purpose
To outline the current trajectories in digital social research and to highlight the roles of qualitative research in those trajectories.
Design/methodology/approach
A secondary analysis of the primary literature.
Findings
Qualitative research has shifted over time in relation to rapidly changing digital phenomena, but arguably finds itself in ‘crisis’ when faced with algorithms and ubiquitous digital data. However, there are many highly significant qualitative approaches that are being pursued and have the potential to contextualize, situate and critique narratives and practices of data.
Originality/value
To situate current debates around methods within longer trajectories of digital social research, recognizing their conceptual, disciplinary and empirical commitments.
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The purpose of the chapter is to argue for a twofold understanding of knowledge organization: the organization of knowledge as a form of communicative action in digital culture…
Abstract
The purpose of the chapter is to argue for a twofold understanding of knowledge organization: the organization of knowledge as a form of communicative action in digital culture and the organization of knowledge as an analytical means to address features of digital culture.
The approach taken is an interpretative text-based form of argumentation.
The chapter suggests that by putting forward such a twofold understanding of knowledge organization, new directions are given as to how to situate and understand the activity and practice of the organization of knowledge in digital culture.
By offering the twofold understanding of the organization of knowledge, a tool of reflection is provided when users and the public at large try to make sense of, for example, data, archives, search engines, or algorithms.
The originality of the chapter is its demonstration of how to conceive of knowledge organization as a form of communicative action and as an analytical means for understanding issues in digital culture.