Exploring the dark and unexpected sides of digitalization: Toward a critical agenda

Abstract

Digitalization has far-reaching implications for individuals, organizations, and society. While extant management and organization studies mainly focus on the positive aspects of this development, the dark and potentially unexpected sides of digitalization for organizations and organizing have received less scholarly attention. This special issue extends this emerging debate. Drawing on empirical material of platform corporations, social movements, and traditional corporations, eight articles illuminate the various negative implications of the digitalization of work and organization processes, particularly for workers, employees, and activists. In this introduction, we contextualize these valuable contributions that underline the dangers of the ubiquity and simultaneity of digitalization and begin to sketch out potential avenues toward a comprehensive critical agenda of digitalization in organization studies.

The Double Darkness of Digitalization: Shaping Digital-ready Legislation to Reshape the Conditions for Public-sector Digitalization

“…This literature has tended to focus on spectacular cases such as the firing of employees based on obscure algorithms (O’Neil 2017), how predictions generated on the basis of big data reproduce inequalities (Eubanks 2018), or how individuals are increasingly surveilled and controlled in the workplace (Head 2014). Such studies resonate with a call for more knowledge of the dark sides of digitalization in organizations (Trittin et al 2021).…”

Federal employees or rogue rangers: Sharing and resisting organizational authority through Twitter communication practices

“…Our research thus encourages more organizational scholars to investigate social media contexts not as a separate technological space (although it supposes its distinct affordances; see Treem and Leonardi, 2013), but rather as a continuity of what takes place in "real" organizations. As the Covid-19 pandemic revealed, social media is all the more relevant in the context of changing technology, and as organizational action is taken up and continued across actors and geographies the traditional markers of organizational membership and identity become less easily discernable (Hassard and Morris, 2021;Trittin-Ulbrich et al, 2021). As the very nature work and organization is shifting, so we must also shift our methods and theorizing.…”

Exploring the dark and bright sides of Internet democracy: Ethos-reversing and ethos-renewing digital transformation

“…The data-algorithmic enclosures forced upon activists, at the risk of being excluded from the digital commons (Andrejevic, 2012) undermine the use of Internet platforms and technologies for other types of activism than those that serve Silicon Valley's profit extraction purposes (Etter and Albu, 2021). To increase their advertising and other digital revenues, Silicon Valley's algorithms tend to reproduce historical, ethnic, and cultural biases (Trittin et al, 2021). Furthermore, when activists, politicians and populist leaders do manage to set up a countervailing Internet democracy campaign, they soon are negated by Silicon Valley's formidable lobbying, data, and technical powers (Srnicek, 2017;Vaidhyanathan, 2018).…”