Sub-Plenary 2-3

Organizational Securitization in the Present Sense of Crisis: Nation States, Private Corporations, and Digital Infrastructures of Surveillance

 

Friday, July 4, 2025, 16:00–17:30 EEST

Room:  Pierce–Amphitheater


Organizers / Chairs:
Damian O’Doherty, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom
Elena Raviola, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Ursula Plesner, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Panelists:
Louise Amoore, University of Durham, United Kingdom
Mikkel Flyverbom, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Sanja Milivojevic, University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Daniel Neyland, University of Bristol, United Kingdom
 

This sub-plenary explores the rise of organizational securitization amid a global sense of disorder. We investigate three key issues for organization studies:

  1. The increasingly intricate state-corporate-tech relationships forming the infrastructure of surveillance and control.

  2. The organizational nature of global digital infrastructures in surveillance and border control, rendering new social objects and subjects visible while excluding others.

  3. The interplay of digital work, surveillance, and security in performing subjectivities and identities and shaping as new agents of control emerge outside traditional state authority.

Borders, once facilitating neoliberal flows of mobility and consumption, have become focal points of anxiety. They are increasingly seen as vulnerable to foreign bodies, trafficking, migration, and disease. This has catalyzed a global solidification of borders and intensified discourses around national identity, war, and pandemics. Security has thus become a political imperative, giving rise to a new global condition of “securitization”. Populist and nationalist movements exploit this state of exception, framing societal threats through discursive and institutional practices. The concept of securitization is useful here, drawing on international relations and Foucault’s later work, helping to unpack how threats are constructed, normalized, and institutionalized. Research shows it is not a linear cause-effect relationship, but a complex entanglement of discourses, technologies, financial systems, and institutional actors – all mutually shaping and reshaping each other.
 
Crucially, securitization is not confined by borders; it necessitates transnational coordination and fosters new interdependencies between nation-states. It is intricately related to global digital infrastructures and operates through performative and often opaque practices, where ‘deep state’ mechanisms are intertwined with private companies’ operations, giving rise to suspicions of conspiracy and corruption. This sub-plenary invites deeper inquiry into the organizational and digital dimensions of securitization – how it is assembled, sustained, and challenged – and the tensions it provokes within and across nations.
 
This sub-plenary aims at opening a new space for an organizational analysis of securitization, capturing the contingent, material, and processual dimensions of complex inter-organizational and inter-national arrangements and the public-private apparatus of surveillance practices and digital work. Organization scholars might find many points of entrance into this discussion, from institutionalists’ insights on plural logics and trans-national governance to Foucault’s work on governmentality and critical contributions from science and technology studies on the performativity of algorithms. Finally, the question of democratic accountability is a major concern and will be raised in our conversation. The privatization of security functions, often embedded in global capitalist structures, risks sidelining oversight and eroding public trust. Theories from Marxism, critical management, Foucault, and Agamben help us interrogate the underlying political economies and modern contradictions of these developments.
 
The sub-plenary connects to the broader colloquium theme by offering an analysis that accounts not only for institutional endurance and technological advancement but also for the creativity, resistance, and ethical ambiguity involved in organizing securitization. Our interdisciplinary panel bridges organization studies, sociology, political geography, and science and technology studies, promoting dialogue across disciplinary boundaries.
 

Biographies

Louise Amoore is Professor of Political Geography at the University of Durham, United Kingdom. Her research focuses on aspects of geopolitics, technology and security. She is particularly interested in how contemporary forms of data and algorithmic analysis are changing the pursuit of state security and the idea of society. Louise is appointed to the UK independent body responsible for the ethics of biometric and data-driven technologies. She is Co-Editor of the Journal Progress in Human Geography. Louise’s Her work will inspire the sub-plenary by problematizing the relation between biometric technologies, borders, and security.
 
Mikkel Flyverbom is Professor of Communication and Digital Transformations at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He brings expertise on how data-driven, algorithmic operations shape knowledge production, communication and governance and calls for further organizational explorations of global digital architectures. Mikkel’s contribution will explore the way digital technologies and data are organized by public and private actors, and how transparency ideals and practices unfold in organizational and other social settings.
 
Sanja Milivojevic is an Associate Professor in Digital Futures at the Bristol Digital Futures Institute and School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, United Kingdom. She will talk about the interaction of borders and mobility (border control, human trafficking), crime and technology. Sanja’s works broadly on digital futures, AI, robotics, gender and victimisation, and human rights.
 
Daniel Neyland is Professor of digital futures at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. He is a sociologist whose expertise lies in actor-network theory and science and technology studies. Daniels presentation will explore how we can get up close to study the ’everyday life’ of an algorithm as these are deployed in security and surveillance systems found in airports, train stations and the borders of the nation state.
 
Damian O’Doherty is Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. An ethnographer of organization, his work on the “loungification of society” explored airports as politically charged, semi-public spaces at national borders.
 
Ursula Plesner is an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. With her yearlong empirical studies of digitalization in public sector organizations, she explores the changing nature of work in the face of technological developments, ambitious digitalization agendas and political pressure. Ursula is also a member of the Digital Nordic Borders (DiNoBord) project.
 
Elena Raviola is the Söderberg Professor in Design Management at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Specializing in the intersection of institutional theory and science and technology studies, she leads the Nordic research project DiNoBord on digital border infrastructures.