Center for Organizational Research (COR)

Dear COR Community,

Please join us for our next paper development workshop on Friday, May 24, featuring work of Professors Katie Pine and Melissa Mazmanian, “Organizing for Data: Crafting Data Elements in the ‘Data-Driven’  Organization.”

Discussants: Kim Fortun (Anthropology) and Gerardo Okhuysen (Merage)

May 24, 2019
12:00-1:30pm
SBSG 1321

Please RSVP to cor@uci.edu by May 15 to receive a paper to read ahead of the workshop. Lunch will be provided.

“Organizing for Data: Crafting Data Elements in the ‘Data-Driven’ Organization”

Organizations in a variety of sectors are adopting an array of techniques known broadly as “data driven” or “algorithmic management.” Digital workflow systems increase the availability of high-quality information available in real time. The promise of such systems lies in the representation of activities and work process that provide new forms of knowledge and enhanced decision making capacity. However, in order to achieve these goals, workflow system require stable, accurate, and uniform data. Creating and crafting such data rarely happen in everyday organizational processes. While recent literature has examined how the effects of such workflow systems on organizational functioning, little scholarly attention has been paid to how organizations must organize in order to become “data driven.” In other words, what is the work involved in “organizing for data” that organizations engage in? Emerging from a multi-sited ethnographic study of multiple hospitals and a meso-level healthcare policy organization, we find that organizations re-tooled existing work practices and implemented new forms of data work in order to create, manage, and deploy data for management, research, and accountability. Such practices are a precursor to becoming “data driven” and suggest that we cannot begin to understand scope of what it takes to become “data driven” without examining the practices that organizations must engage in prior to implementation of complex workflow systems. Further, we find that organizing for data is never complete. Even when it appears that a data lifecycle has reached an idealized state and has been made amenable to a comprehensive system, subjectivities remain. Data crafting requires situated judgement and decision making. However, these subjectivities are masked in service of creating ‘clean’ and  ‘objective’ measures that are legible to digital workflow systems.

A talk of interest to the COR community…

“Physical Collocation, Formal Work Relationships, and Work Related Interactions in Organizations”

SPEAKER:  Jonathon Cummings, Professor of Management and Organizations

UNIVERSITY: Duke University, The Fuqua School of Business
DATE:          May 3, 2019
TIME:           10:00 am – 11:30 am
WHERE:      SB1 5100

ABSTRACT:
This presentation focuses on how work-related interactions (‘who interacts with whom about work’) are shaped by two key elements of organizations: physical collocation and formal work relationships. Whereas physical collocation captures the extent to which employees are proximate to one another in physical space (e.g., sit next to each other), formal work relationships capture the extent to which employees depend on one another within the organizational structure (e.g., boss-subordinate or members of the same functional unit). Prior research has shown how physical collocation and formal work relationships each positively impact work-related interactions, but less is known about their joint impact. For example, compared to collocated employees who have a formal work relationship, non-collocated employees may experience a relative boost in work-related interactions because of increased awareness, socialization, and opportunity. In addition, prior research has focused on collocation within a dyad, but less is known about the role of third-parties who are also collocated with employees. For example, compared to an employee who is not collocated with her boss, an employee who is collocated with her boss may experience a relative decline in work-related interactions because of concerns about monitoring by her boss. Given that physical collocation is often confounded with formal work relationships in organizations, the research design took advantage of quasi-random variation in the office seating of employees after the relocation of a corporate headquarters to a new building. Survey data on work-related interactions were collected from 143 employees three months prior to the move (when members of the same functional unit sat next to each other) and three months after the move (when employees were randomly assigned to seats within zones of the office, thus members of different functional units sat next to each other). The findings suggest that collocation among employees was generally good for work-related interactions, especially for those employees who did not have formal work relationships. However, the collocation of a boss with an employee was generally bad for work-related interactions with other employees, especially when they did not have a formal work relationship. Implications for the intersection of organization design, social networks, and collaborative technology are discussed.

A talk of interest to the COR community…

THE FUTURE (IM)PERFECT: IMAGINARIES AND SENSEMAKING IN THE CONTEXT OF GEOENGINEERING

Professor Klaus Weber, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Date: Friday, April 26, 2019

Time: 10:30am -12:00noon

Venue: SB1 5200 (Porter Colloquia Room & Executive Terrace)

Speaker Bio: Klaus Weber is a Professor of Management & Organizations. He is also affiliated with the Department of Sociology, the Buffett Institute for Global Studies and the Northwestern Institute for Sustainability and Energy. His research is grounded in cultural and institutional analysis, with substantive interests in the intersection between social movements, organizations and markets; economic globalization; and environmental sustainability. Klaus’ research has been published in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Organization Science, Organization  Studies, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal and Harvard Business Review. His work has won best paper awards at the American Sociological Association, Administrative Science Quarterly, and the SYNTEC Conseil en Management. He was a senior editor at Organization Science and has guest edited volumes for Organization Studies and Organization Science. At Kellogg, Klaus teaches MBA courses on environmental sustainability and on power in organizations; and doctoral seminars on cultural and text analysis, organization theory and research methods. Professor Weber received his PhD from the University of Michigan and joined the Kellogg faculty in 2003.

A talk of interest to the COR community…

Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor

BLOCKCHAIN NARRATIVES, PROPERTY AND CITIZENSHIP IN POST-SOVIET EASTERN EUROPE
Date: March 19, 2019
Time: 3:30 – 5:00pm
Location: Social Sciences Plaza B (SSPB), Room #1222
To RSVP: bit.ly/2Eh9aT8

Digital technologies for property and identity management are increasingly viewed as central in building transparent and inclusive societies in many parts of the world. Blockchain technologies have emerged as one alternative to empower distributed public record systems and land registries. Several recent applications of these emerging technologies involve post -socialist societies of Eastern Europe – offering interesting perspectives into evolving narratives and practices of property and citizenship. Blockchain has been touted in development and financial industry circles as a key enabler of property formalization – with sparse evidence to support such claims so far. Facilitating novel public-private partnerships in public administration projects, blockchain technologies also raise new concerns about data ownership and commoditization, and introduce risky financial practices. The presentation examines blockchain-related public administration initiatives in two post-Soviet states, Estonia and Georgia. It explores the imaginaries of new types of participatory collectivities and connective spaces that render governments accountable, and make legible the ambiguous post-socialist expanse of ‘recombinant’ property forms. The East European experience highlights the embeddedness of such digital infrastructures in local histories and epistemological struggles, as people strive to manage the environments of chronic uncertainty through inventive practices of ‘toiling ingenuity’ (Guyer 2016).

DR. DAIVI RODIMA-TAYLOR is research associate and lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. Her research focuses on fiduciary culture and financial inclusion, informal economies, migration and diaspora, land tenure, and post-conflict and post-authoritarian transitions. She has been leading Boston University’s interdisciplinary Pardee Center Task Force on migrant remittances and post-conflict development, leads the African Studies Center’s Diaspora Studies Initiative, and co-chairs Land Mortgage Working Group with prof. Parker Shipton. Daivi has conducted longitudinal ethnographic research in Africa, taught anthropology and development studies, and published in academic and policy-oriented journals. Her undergraduate degree is from Tartu University, Estonia, and doctorate from Brandeis University.

For inquiries, contact: Jenny Fan, imtfi@uci.edu