Recent interest in artificial intelligence technologies has led to much discussion about what the age of AI portends for how we live and work. And specifically for the present discussion, what it means for agency. In offering our contributions to these considerations, we build on approaches to treat AI not as a “thing” but as phenomena in-the-making. Such a framing orients us to doings, to practices, to enactments, and consequential outcomes. These considerations of AI-in-the-making are inspired by agential realism, a theory that calls attention to performativity and accountability. Based on these ideas, we propose a sociomaterial genealogical approach that we suggest is well-suited for the study of AI-in-the-making. In so doing, we provide qualitative scholars with a way of orienting their inquiries toward the performativity of ongoing AI reconfigurations and sociomaterial accountabilities.

While many organizational phenomena may be largely contained within the boundaries of a program, organization, or industry, many more overflow those boundaries and spill substantially across diverse groups, organizations, communities, forums, and initiatives whose activities interact collectively. It has become almost inevitable today that organizational actors, including workers, must align their local activities to conditions produced elsewhere, and researchers interested in studying these boundary-traversing activities in a grounded way must contend conceptually and practically with a considerable degree of sprawl across multiple geographic, temporal, material, cultural, and conceptual boundaries. In these conditions, researchers need to engage in sprawling fieldwork--interviewing, observing, and engaging within and across many bounded spaces. To address the opportunities and challenges of this approach to organizational research, this symposium will include four empirical presentations that explore and extend our understanding of what it means to study sprawling phenomena with sprawling fieldwork. Traversing Boundaries when Studying a Novel Phenomenon: Tales from Fieldwork on Technology Reemergen Author: Ryan L. Raffaelli; Harvard Business School The Gig Economy as a Sprawling Field Site Author: Lindsey Cameron; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania A Meandering Praxis: Wandering Fields and Stumbling Through Grapevines Author: Alan Zhang; MIT Sloan School of Management Navigating Ethnography’s Rough and Tumble Author: Mark de Rond; U. of Cambridge

As “the digital” becomes pervasive within organizations and industries, it is increasingly evident that how we live, work, connect, coordinate, and govern are being significantly changed by digitalization. Many of these digital transformations are highly visible and dramatic, involving a purposeful repositioning and restructuring of organizations and industries. But in addition to these direct and visible changes, we argue that processes of digitalization are also producing less visible transformations in core institutional values, norms, and rules, which are indirectly, yet more profoundly, reconfiguring how organizations and industries perform. Referencing findings from two different sectors, we posit that the corollary effects of waves of digitalization—what we conceptualize as the “digital undertow”—are generating a set of dynamics that are displacing institutional apparatuses from their positions of primacy and authority within industries. We further suggest that our conventional toolkits for studying organizational phenomena are not well equipped for examining such corollary effects of digitalization. In addressing this challenge, we consider how the relational and performative theorizing of strong sociomateriality provides a powerful analytic for investigating these effects and we highlight how it offers valuable insights into the institutional displacements arising in the digital undertow.

Digital transformation research shows how waves of digitalization produce strategic changes within and across firms, enabling new forms of value creation. We argue that different but no less important processes of digital transformation are generated by the undertow produced by these waves. Digital undertow, a corollary effect of waves of digitalization, profoundly influences how firms operate by transforming the industry standards that coordinate and regulate their core business activities. This is producing what we refer to as digital displacement, a process that is significantly challenging the capacity of standards to effectively manage industry operations in the digital age.

In an increasingly digital economy, a growing number of organizations are offering live services that deliver updated content and functionality continually during use. Producing live services requires managing ongoing algorithmic updates that occur unpredictably through the cloud from heterogeneous sources that are rarely aligned and prone to disrupt the service. These conditions present new challenges for coordination, which we examined in a 15-month field study of a precision agriculture company that delivers a live service providing analytics on real-time, global crop-imagery. We find that the work of producing this service enacts a regenerative form of coordination that leverages cloud-based, algorithmic updates to produce a consistent and continuous live service. We theorize these findings by explaining how the practices of regenerative coordination enable both ongoing improvements and rapid recovery from unpredictable disruptions, in conditions where the local cues, deliberation processes, and specified ends of traditional coordination are unavailable. Our study advances understanding of coordination in the digital era by articulating how cycles of continual regeneration constitute a dynamic capacity to effectively manage ongoing updates and emergent disruptions generated by cloud-based algorithms.

Organizational accountability is considered critical to organizations’ sustained performance and survival. Prior research examines the structural and rhetorical responses that organizations use to manage accountability pressures from different constituents. With the emergence of social media, accountability pressures shift from the relatively clear and well-specified demands of identifiable stakeholders to the unclear and unspecified concerns of a pseudonymous crowd. This is further exacerbated by the public visibility of social media, materializing as a stream of online commentary for a distributed audience. In such conditions, the established structural and rhetorical responses of organizations become less effective for addressing accountability pressures. We conducted a multisite comparative study to examine how organizations in two service sectors (emergency response and hospitality) respond to accountability pressures manifesting as social media commentary on two platforms (Twitter and TripAdvisor). We find organizations responding online to social media commentary while also enacting changes to their practices that recalibrate risk, redeploy resources, and redefine service. These changes produce a diffractive reactivity that reconfigures the meanings, activities, relations, and outcomes of service work as well as the boundaries of organizational accountability. We synthesize these findings in a model of crowd-based accountability and discuss the contributions of this study to research on accountability and organizing in the social media era.

By examining variations in scale and techniques of expansion and contraction in Thucydides’ narrative, the essay identifies a mimetic principle in his writing—that the presentation of an episode in the work should normally be proportionate to its significance. Significance, however, is not measured by purely military factors. In fact, expansion is often an indicator of intense suffering, pathos. Among the techniques of expansion and compression discussed are allusions, superlatives, figures of speech (such as litotes), direct and indirect discourse, day-by-day narrative, enargeia (vividness) and thematic repetition (“reprise”). Many of these techniques, although not all, were also discussed among the ancient rhetoricians, who were alert to their emotional power.

As conditions of crisis disrupt established practices, existing ways of doing things are interrupted and called into question. The suspension of routine sociomaterial enactments produces openings for liminal innovation, a process entailing iterative experimentation and implementation that explores novel or alternative materializations of established work practices. We draw attention to three distinct tensions on the ground that arise in conditions of crisis — pragmatic, tactical, and existential — and show how these may be leveraged to produce liminal innovations in practice. While the process of liminal innovation can be challenging, it can also be generative, creating opportunities for the reconfiguration of digital work in conditions of crisis.

There has been a great deal of uncertainty and fear in recent years regarding how digital technologies might reshape how we work, organize, and live (Barley, Bechky, and Milliken 2017; see also Orlikowski and Iacono 2000). Our symposium was organized in response to this uncertainty and fear, providing a series of grounded, ethnographic studies on technologies which have been at the forefront of the popular and academic imagination (e.g. artificial intelligence, robotics, and algorithms). Collectively, the papers in this symposium aim to elaborate on questions such as the type of work that goes into developing these technologies, the kind of futures their developers have been imagining might proceed from these technologies, these technologies’ consequences for how we work and organize, and how we might deal with the consequences of these technologies. Knowing Art, Knowing Technology: Algorithmic Expertise and the Reconfiguration of Work? Presenter: Sarah Sachs; Columbia U. Augmenting or Automating? Hesitantly Breathing Life into the Promise of Artificial Intelligence Presenter: Kevin Woojin Lee; New York U. The Darker Side of Shadow Learning: The Fate of the Cohort and the Consumer Presenter: Matthew Beane; U. of California, Santa Barbara Authenticity and Materiality: Tackling Gendered Activities in Hobbyist Collectives Presenter: Rohini Jalan; U. of Oxford

This paper examines how and why innovations are reshaped as they become implemented and used in locales that are distant and distinct from those where the innovation was initially developed. Drawing on an in-depth field study of the innovation process that produced a mobile money system for Kenya, we contribute an understanding of the particular dynamics that arise when an innovation trajectory interacts with local trajectories that constitute the local conditions and practices of specific places. We identify four distinct patterns of trajectory dynamics-separation, coordination, diversification, and integration-each of which has different implications for the innovation, its implementation, and consequences on the ground. Developing a model of trajectory dynamics in innovation, we theorize the processes through which innovations are transformed over time as they interact with multiple local trajectories and the specific innovation outcomes that are generated as a result. Such theorizing reconceptualizes traditional notions of innovation diffusion by explicating how and why innovations change in multiple and unexpected ways as they move to particular places and engage with local conditions and practices.

The authors examine infrastructures of valuation by asking how the specific materializations of categories and ratings make a difference in practice. Drawing on the notion of apparatus, the authors explore how different valuation schemes entail specific inclusions and exclusions that have material consequences for the valuations that are produced. Focusing on agential realist conceptualizations of apparatus allows a shift in attention to a particular reading of performativity in which different valuation infrastructures perform different phenomena in the world. The authors focus on two specific valuation systems within hospitality – star ratings of the Automobile Association and regional rankings on TripAdvisor – and examine how these make boundaries, direct agencies of observation and condition the possibilities for action. The authors consider the conditions of possibility that are increasingly being produced through digital infrastructures and highlight the performative uncertainties that are generated as a result of their materializations in practice.

Given the diversity and novelty of contemporary digital phenomena involving such technologies as AI, digital platforms, robotics, machine learning, and social media, it is increasingly important that we develop effective ways of studying these phenomena to better understand the organizational outcomes being produced in practice. Our symposium will bring together scholars who are working with non- traditional methodological approaches and analytical tools for studying materiality in organizing. They will share their experiences with different ways of studying digital phenomena, consider how these alternative methods differ from more traditional ways of studying technology in organizations, and discuss the value and research insights that are produced in the process. Building an Apparatus: Studying Digital Traces in Citizen Science Presenter: Carsten S. Osterlund; Syracuse U. Studying Medical Work as Sociomaterial Practices Presenter: Natalia Levina; New York U. Theorizing Routines as Multiple, Distributed and Sociomaterially-Enacted Phenomena Presenter: Luciana D'Adderio; U. of Edinburgh Enfolding Materiality into our Research by Attending to Genealogy in Practice Presenter: Susan Scott; London School of Economics and Political Science

This symposium brings together studies of situated use of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms and data in practices of knowledge work. Current debates on AI and work are often based on forecasting and speculations about its consequences for jobs, tasks and economy, assuming AI’s independence of human involvement. There is a need for empirically grounded insights that shed light on how data and algorithms are developed and actually used in practice and with what implications for organizations and professionals’ work. The four studies presented in this symposium will report ethnographic insights on how AI is constructed and become consequential in the settings as diverse as police, health, law and fashion. Collectively, these studies demonstrate how beliefs in AI’s objectivity and independence of human judgement may be ill-founded and how attention to the work with AI allows to reveal its socially constructed and organizationally embedded nature. Data, Algorithms, and Scale: The Case of Healthcare Quality Measurement Presenter: Kathleen Pine; Arizona State U. Presenter: Melissa Mazmanian; U. of California, Irvine Predictive Policing and the Paradox of Objectivity Presenter: Lauren Waardenburg; Vrije U. Amsterdam Presenter: Anastasia Sergeeva; Vrije U. Amsterdam Presenter: Marleen Huysman; Vrije U. Amsterdam Agency and Artificial Intelligence in the Upward Flow of Analysis in Organizations Presenter: Joao Cunha; - Learning through the Algorithm: Algorithmic Technologies and Learning in the Legal Profession Presenter: Stella Pachidi; U. of Cambridge Presenter: Alex Monaco Tschan; U. of Cambridge

What makes different kinds of books distinct from one another? How are these boundaries produced and what does this tell us about the work of book publishing in the digital era? Our research focuses on metadata in book publishing and in particular on how these shape the manifestation of print and digital books in practice. Using a genealogical approach we bring the book’s normally back-office “magic number” (ISBN) to the foreground. We find that the publisher supply chain apparatus was organized around this standard number and presumed the primary interface was the “book-as-container” (the physical book spine and cover). This misapprehension was made starkly public when book listings went online and began to “misfire.” By attending to the history and contemporary life of metadata in the book publishing industry, we account for both its constitutive conditions and contemporary entailments. In so doing, we call attention to the critical agential cuts made by metadata – how they mark out content, make distinctions, and draw boundaries that make a significant difference to what content gets displayed, discovered, distributed, sold, read, and paid for. These differences are deeply consequential, having important performative implications for the book industry.

Questions associated with the implications of new technologies at work have grown and led to new theorizing in multiple domains of inquiry in management. Technologies such as the Internet of Things, robots or analytics software for instance have the potential to transform radically how we work and require scholars of work and organizations to make sense of these transformations. Recent theoretical developments have started to explain our entangled and imbricated relationship with technological artefacts that draw on Science and Technology Studies and more mainstream management literature. This symposium is about taking stock of and extending theoretical concepts and ideas to clarify and elucidate the complicated relationship we have with algorithms, technology and software more generally. Each of the presenters will bring their perspective on materiality, material agency, affordances and algorithmic agency to discuss the overlaps in a) ontology, b) epistemology, c) and agential movements. Empirical data as well as theoretical concepts will be discussed to negotiate the differences and overlaps between ideas of entanglement, imbrication, affordances and agential movements with the aim of furthering the conceptualization of the relationships between technology at work and organizing, managing, and innovating.

How is value created in an online community OC over time? We explored this question through a longitudinal field study of an OC in the healthcare arena. We found that multiple kinds of value were produced and changed over time as different participants engaged with the OC and its evolving technology in various ways. To explain our findings, we theorize OC value as performed through the ongoing sociomaterial configuring of strategies, digital platforms, and stakeholder engagement. We develop a process perspective to explain these dynamics and identify multiple different kinds of value being created by an OC over time: financial, epistemic, ethical, service, reputational, and platform. Our research points to the importance of expanding the notion of OC users to encompass a broader understanding of stakeholders. It further suggests that creating OC value increasingly requires going beyond a dyadic relationship between the OC and the firm to encompassing a more complex relationship involving a wider ecosystem of stakeholders.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.2Working Conference on Information Systems and Organizations, IS&O 2016, held in Dublin, Ireland, in December 2016. The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed andselected from 75 submissions. The papers are organized in the followingtopical sections: doing process research; exploring affect and affordance; considering communication and performance; and examining knowledge and practice.