Digital Organisation and Society (DOS) research centre upcoming research seminar with Professor Israr Qureshi, Professor of Social Entrepreneurship and ICT for Development at Australian National University, who will be delivering a talk on Social Intermediation – Role of ICTs.

About

Israr Qureshi is a Professor at the Research School of Management, Australian National University (ANU). He is the Director of ASCEND (Australian Social Cohesion-Exploring New Directions) Grand Challenge Project. He is a member of ANU Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions and an associate editor at Business & Society and Information Systems Journal. He recently concluded his associate editorship at MIS Quarterly. He was a member (Civil Society Group) and observer (Technical Working Group) on the recently concluded Australian Sustainable Finance Initiative. His research projects focus on social value creation through alternative organizing, drawing from his extensive pro-bono experience of advising social enterprises and ventures. Israr’s work highlights the potential of ICTs for social transformation while emphasizing the need for inclusivity, sustainability, and participatory approaches in ICT4D interventions. He has extensively studied social intermediation and social entrepreneurship initiatives.

Speaker: Prof. Mikkel Flyverbom at Copenhagen Business School
Time: 2-4pm, Wednesday 2nd March
Venue: Shilling Lecture Theatre
Livestreaming link: Please contact DOSdirectors@rhul.ac.uk if you want to join this event.

Overlit: Digital architectures of visibility
(forthcoming in special section of Organization Theory, along with essays by Michael Power and Shoshana Zuboff)

Abstract

Despite the ubiquity of digital technologies, data-driven approaches and algorithms, organization theory so far only engages with these developments in limited ways. A deeper engagement with the organizational ramifications of a digital, datafied world is urgently needed and must start from mappings of the phenomenon and the development of better theoretical vocabularies that can guide future research. Complementing the essays by Zuboff and Power in this exchange, my essay suggests a research agenda based on how digital technologies, data and algorithms impact and shape our lives in and around organizations by making us visible in novel ways. I unpack the technological and operational underpinnings of this phenomenon in two steps. The first is a broad conceptualization of the overall shape of what I term ‘digital architectures’. The second is a more granular theorization of how data-driven, algorithmic approaches make the ‘management of visibilities’ a central concern for humans, organizations and societies, as well as some reflections on possible responses to these developments. Taken together, these discussions highlight how digital ubiquity calls for novel theoretical perspectives and research avenues for organization theory to explore.