By Means of Which: Media, Technology, Organization

Abstract

This chapter traces and interrogates media, technology, and organization in their foundational relations, their forms, and their constraining and loosening effects and affects. The folding of humans and technology works both ways: human bodies can, too, be apprehended prosthetically as extensions of technologies. The notion of media then applies to any object that conditions the structure of a certain situation and the specific possibilities of perceiving, acting, and thinking in it. If we begin with this understanding of technology and media as fundamental, conditional, and infrastructural, then how organization takes place is predicated upon such apparatuses. The task is then not one of finding better uses of desks, smartphones, presentation software, or high heels, for all of these have modes of subjectification scripted into them. Rather, it is remaining alive to the hesitations already provided: the glitches, accidents, misuses, and alternative projections, and to wander and wonder with them.

Control and Surveillance in Work Practice: Cultivating Paradox in ‘New’ Modes of Organizing

“…Control and surveillance are less intrusive and visible, and much more assimilated and incorporated into the objects of our everyday life – our computers, our phones, cars, buildings, streets, clothing, and so on. Our smartphones, our digital payment tools (more invisible than ever and more and more related to the idiosyncrasies of our biological body), our gestures in public spaces covered by unobtrusive cameras, feed a global infrastructure of surveillance and control that forms less an array of defined conditions than a medial a priori of organizing (Beyes, Holt, & Pias, 2019, p. 505).…”

From People to Objects: The digital transformation of fields

“…Beyond institutional theory, a cross-disciplinary and well-established research tradition links forces and patterns of formal organizing to objects, practices and roles of actors (see for example Bechky, 2003;Beyes et al, 2020;Bowker & Star, 1999;Bowker, Timmermans, Clarke, & Balka, 2016;Carlile, 2002;Ewenstein & Whyte, 2009;Gitelman, 2014;Knorr Cetina, 1999, 2001Lange, Lenglet, & Seyfert, 2016;Plesner & Husted, 2019;Star, 2010;Star & Griesemer, 1989;Yates, 1989). Objects shape the way actors understand themselves and their roles.…”

Seduced by Technology? How moral agency is mediated by the invisibility of everyday technologies

“…In the tradition of Heidegger's (1927Heidegger's ( /1962) notion of ready-to-hand, what we call invisibility has been argued to be key to the usability of technology (Ihde, 1990;Van Den Eede, 2011). Technologies themselves are becoming ever more invisible such that, ontologically speaking, they are not identifiable per se, rather it is the processes of technological mediation that organizes and around which organization takes place (Beyes et al, 2019). Indeed, the 'opacity, partiality and illegibility' of human and non-human subjects provide the conditions for engaging with technology (Amoore, 2020, p. 8).…”