Aleksi AaltonenTemple University | TU · Fox
Aleksi Aaltonen
PhD, M.Soc.Sc.
I study data-based innovation and organizing using quantitative and qualitative methods.
About
40
Publications
29,376
Reads
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1,168
Citations
Introduction
I am an Assistant Professor at the Fox School of Business at Temple University, where I study data-based innovation and organizing using quantitative and qualitative methods. In 2012, I cofounded an activity tracking app Moves. Apple chose Moves as the Best App of 2013 in the Fitness Revolution category, and the company was acquired by Facebook in April 2014.
My research has been published in top academic journals and I blog about academic knowledge production in Medium.
Additional affiliations
July 2018 - present
September 2014 - June 2018
December 2013 - September 2014
Education
October 2006 - January 2012
January 2000 - May 2005
Publications
Publications (40)
Digital artifacts are embedded in wider and constantly shifting ecosystems such that they become increasingly editable, interactive, reprogrammable, and distributable. This state of flux and constant transfiguration renders the value and utility of these artifacts contingent on shifting webs of functional relations with other artifacts across speci...
Contemporary digital ecosystems produce vast amounts of data every day. The data are often no more than microscopic log entries generated by the elements of an information infrastructure or system. Although such records may represent a variety of things outside the system, their powers go beyond the capacity to carry semantic content. In this artic...
This article investigates a form of governance that makes online social production possible. Drawing on the concepts of capability and routine, we develop a dynamic, process-oriented view that departs from past research focused on static comparative analysis. We theorize that online social production systems develop a collective governance capabili...
Open content production platforms typically allow users to gradually create content and react to previous contributions. Using detailed edit-level data across a large number of Wikipedia articles, we investigate how past edits shape current editing activity. We find that cumulative past contributions, embodied by the current article length, lead to...
This paper studies the process by which data are generated, managed, and assembled into tradable objects we call data commodities. We link the making of such objects to the open and editable nature of digital data and to the emerging big data industry in which they are diffused items of exchange, repurposing, and aggregation. We empirically investi...
Firms increasingly harness data that are created as by-products of information systems usage to evaluate and manage employees. However, such “trace data” can be a double-edged sword. The data can provide a whole new visibility into work practices but also, make work less transparent if the employees start to change their behavior to shape the data....
Data are the building blocks of the ongoing digital revolution, yet there are still many unresolved questions regarding their role in the study of information systems (IS), management and innovation. As data become increasingly pervasive elements of socioeconomic life, we ask whether IS needs to expand the ways in which it conceptualizes data and t...
Research on platform owners' entry into complementary markets points in divergent directions. One strand of the literature reports a squeeze on post-entry complementor profits due to increased competition, while another strand observes positive effects as increased customer attention and innovation benefit the complementary market as a whole. In th...
Gender bias, a systemic and unfair difference in how men and women are treated in a given domain, is widely studied across different academic fields. Yet, there are barely any studies of the phenomenon in the field of academic information systems (IS), which is surprising especially in the light of the proliferation of such studies in the Science,...
Gender bias, a systemic and unfair difference in how men and women are treated in a given domain, is widely studied across different academic fields. Yet, there are barely any studies of the phenomenon in the field of academic information systems (IS), which is surprising especially in the light of the proliferation of such studies in the Science,...
Gender bias is a systemic, unfair difference in the way men and women are treated in a particular domain. We conduct a thematic review of 82 papers out of 7,260 total papers found in the IS Basket of 8 journals that centre on themes related to gender, identifying extant domains of contribution and qualifying gaps in gender bias research. The papers...
Value creation is currently intertwined with the data produced and circulated in various settings across the expanding digital economy. We analyze some of the characteristics of digital data and outline the main steps of what we conceive as the data value chain. The analysis highlights the importance of transformation processes data undergo during...
The progressive digitalization and datafication of work shape the ways in which managing, governing and accountability are carried out in professional organisations today. While the work under the themes of algorithmic management, algorithmic governance, surveillance capitalism, or data capitalism focuses on the changes in broader societal structur...
This paper discusses the central role of audience measurement in fabricating the sellable asset in the media industry, that is, the advertising audience. I will argue that the taken-for-granted assumptions regarding the nature of information implied, for instance, by statistical modelling are inadequate to understand how technological information s...
This paper analyses a new type of business operations that mediate the production and consumption of music. Online environment has largely abolished constraints on the variety of music that can be economically distributed, but, at the same time, it reveals another problem. How do people learn what music items do they want to listen to? In the music...
Contemporary digital ecosystems produce vast amounts of data every day. The data are often no more than microscopic log entries generated by the elements of an information infrastructure or system. Although such records may represent a variety of things outside the system, their powers go beyond the capacity to carry semantic content. In this artic...
Without the ‘spillover effects’ of open content production, the growth in Wikipedia editing activity between 2002 and 2010 would have been halved. That is the central finding of research by Aleksi Aaltonen and Stephan Seiler, which analyses editing data by Wikipedia users to show how content creation by individuals encourages others to contribute t...
Using detailed edit-level data over eight years across a large number of articles on Wikipedia, we find evidence for a positive spillover effect in editing activity. Cumulative past contributions, embodied by the current article length, lead to significantly more editing activity, while controlling for a host of factors such as popularity of the to...
This paper presents an inquiry into the governance of internet-mediated social production. By social production we understand an emergent set of production practices based on social sharing among a large number of widely distributed and loosely connected contributors. While such practices are not completely new, our interest is specifically on thei...
Intuition and gut feelings are out of fashion – successful business leaders measure and base their decisions on how things really are. Evangelised by companies such as Google, metrics-driven decisions are becoming increasingly common in all kinds of organizations today. Dualistic – either metrics or intuition – thinking largely reflects academic an...
The evolution of Wikipedia betrays an increasing reliance on policies and guidelines, signalling certain stabilisation in the knowledge making processes underlying the encyclopaedia. We interpret such a state of affairs as reflecting the need to provide a few principles and guidelines of coordination, in a context that has otherwise been marked by...
In this paper we propose a theoretical framework to understand the evolving governance of internet-mediated social production. Specifically, we focus on the emergence of a collective capability that integrates knowledge relevant to large-scale production and coordination. Focusing on one of the most popular websites and reference tools, Wikipedia,...
In this paper we propose a theoretical framework to understand the governance of internet-mediated social production. Focusing on one of the most popular websites and reference tools, Wikipedia, we undertake an exploratory theoretical analysis to clarify the structure and mechanisms driving the endogenous change of a large-scale social production s...
How does a new medium create its audience? This study takes the business model of commercial media as its starting point and identifies industrial audience measurement as a constitutive operation in creating the sellable asset of advertising- funded companies. The study employs a qualitative case study design to analyse how a mobile virtual network...
Digital objects are marked by a limited set of variable yet generic attributes such as editability, interactivity, openness and distributedness. As digital objects diffuse throughout the institutional fabric, these attributes and the information-based operations and procedures out of which they are sustained install themselves at the heart of socia...
This paper presents an exploratory study into the use of real-time communication (RTC) systems to support distributed work. Motivated by the authors' dissatisfaction with theories assuming individually rational actors, the paper suggests the idea of informated presence to capture phenomena emerging from employees' increasingly computer-mediated eng...
Artikkelini tarkastelee erilaisten teemojen, tapahtumien ja tavoitteiden kietou- tumista yhteen Ilmatieteen laitoksen ja Merentutkimuslaitoksen yhteiseksi toimitalohankkeeksi Helsingin yliopiston Kumpulan kampuksella. Toimija- verkkoteoriaan perustuva tutkimusotteeni käyttää apunaan toiminnan kohteen käsitettä useisiin eri organisaatioihin hajautun...
It is easy to imagine a society without mobile phones or genetically modified food, but what about one without roads, buildings and bridges? It is impossible to conceive of a modern society devoid of the basic material infrastructure. Contrary to the rapid evolution of high technology appliances, the built environment tends to be relatively persist...
Questions
Questions (3)
The dataset is an incomplete and potentially biased representation of academic journal and conference publishing just like any other known dataset that attempts to fulfil a similar mission. Herrmannova and Knoth (2016) describe both aspects that can be relied upon and those that need to be used with care, but is there specific, operational ways to improve the quality of Microsoft Academic Graph data?
I am looking for seminal contributions that describe the most important approaches to data-driven marketing or "interactive marketing.
While academic networking services may provide other benefits, I am interested in here if there is any evidence of increased citations to your work as a result of maintaining your profile and uploading your publications to these services.
