Sub-theme 63: Thinking Infrastructures
Call for Papers
Infrastructures are powerful and ubiquitous organizing mechanisms that fundamentally structure social reality (Bowker &
Star, 1999). Whilst economic sociology, anthropology, human geography, science and technology studies, social informatics,
and a few disciplines within business schools, such as accounting, have appropriated the concept of infrastructure fruitfully,
to date organization theory has by and large ignored the concept.
The objective of this sub-theme is to explore
the notion of infrastructure as resource and tool in order to rethink organizations and processes of organizing. The sub-theme
Thinking Infrastructures focuses on various forms of infrastructure that structure knowledge, epistemic cultures
and intentionality of decision-makers: for example, informational infrastructures (Star & Ruhleder, 1996), numerical infrastructures
(Power, 2015), and knowledge infrastructures (Edwards, 2010) are infrastructures that pattern what and how we know the world;
they condition managerial and organizational cognition through defining what counts and how to count; what is perceived as
risk and what needs regulation; and what we perceive as objects and how we behave as subjects. In other words, Thinking
Infrastructures embody and enact a politics of truth that is based on making the invisible visible and “sorting out”
things (Bowker & Star, 1999).
The sub-theme suggests understanding infrastructures as more than technological
accomplishments; they are organizing devices made up of heterogeneous elements, constituting what Star and Ruhleder (1996)
described as ecologies: infrastructures draw together technologies, human behaviours and social relations, creating ecologies
in which the technological and the social are inextricably interlinked; simultaneously, infrastructures connect the local
with the global: for instance, classifications or accounting codes are relational in that they connect a local phenomenon
to a more abstract level that in-forms the local (Bowker et al., 2010). Infrastructures also fundamentally temporal concepts
that connect the immediate with the longer term, what Ribes and Finholt (2009) provocatively call the “long now”. Through
focusing on how people and technologies, words and things are dynamically being drawn together, this sub-theme fosters an
understanding of how invisible infrastructures pattern processes, organizations and institutions; how infrastructures afford
new ways of collaborating; how they disclose new worlds; and how they constitute new possibilities whilst always also representing
apparatuses of governmentality (Larkin, 2013).
The power and opaqueness of infrastructures points towards
epistemological and methodological challenges the sub-theme aims to address as well: Thinking Infrastructures invites
reflections on research strategies to cope with the invisibility of infrastructures as they operate “under the surface”, becoming
visible only upon breakdown (Star, 1999). They are also, and perhaps as a result, rather underdeveloped academic concepts,
with disciplinary interpretations that overlap and even conflict.
Hence this sub-theme welcomes papers reflecting
on (but are to limited to) some of the following issues:
- What concepts and definitions of infrastructure do we have at our disposal, and how do they relate to each other? How can they inform a precise analytical vocabulary without loosing the multiplicity of the phenomenon?
- How do infrastructures relate to other concepts that organization theorists have developed over the past decades? In how far could the concept of infrastructures provide an alternative foundation for ongoing debates in organization studies about agency and structure, global and local, social and technological, micro and macro, etc.?
- In how far do infrastructures allow studying new phenomena such as big data that are not (yet) on the agenda of organization theorists? What other research possibilities does the concept of infrastructure afford?
- What are the methodological tools and precautions that infrastructure research calls for? What methods are appropriate, which data gathering techniques are productive, which analytical strategies are critical?
- Infrastructures are deeply political: they connect and cut off, they make visible and they hide. This begs the critical inquiry into question the specific power effects of infrastructures, understood as apparatuses of governmentality. How do they work, what are their unintended consequences, and how is resistance organized?
- Last but not least, the ethicality of infrastructures: is there something like a “good infrastructure” (in the sense of the conference theme) or perhaps an infrastructure that makes ethically sound decisions and actions possible? If diversity and sustainability are important values for the “good organization”, which infrastructures contribute towards the conditions for diversity, sustainability and other values to occur?
The sub-theme would like to provide space
for conceptual and empirical papers, mobilizing different theoretical resources and empirical cases.
References
- Bowker, G.C., Baker, K., Millerand, F., & Ribes, D. (2010): “Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment.” In: J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup & M. Allen (eds.): International Handbook of Internet Research. New York: Springer, 97–117.
- Bowker, G., & Star, S. L. (1999): Sorting Things Out. Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
- Edwards, P.N. (2010): A Vast Machine. Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
- Larkin, B. (2013): “The politics and poetics of infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 327–343.
- Power, M. (2015): “How accounting begins: Object formation and the accretion of infrastructure.” Accounting, Organizations and Society, 47, 43–55.
- Ribes, D., & Finholt, T.A. (2009): ”The Long Now of Technology Infrastructure: Articulating Tensions in Development.” Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 10 (5), Special Issue, 375-398.
- Star, S.L. (1999): “The ethnography of infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist, 43 (3), 377–391.
- Star, S.L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996): ”Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces.” Information Systems Research, 7 (1), 111–134.