Jannis Kallinikos

LUISS Guido Carli, Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali | Luiss · Department of Business and Management

Social media stage online patterns of social interaction that differ remarkably from ordinary forms of acting, talking and relating. To unravel these differences, we review the literature on micro-sociology and social psychology and derive a shorthand version of socially-embedded forms of interaction. We use that version as a yardstick for reconstr...

The growing business expansion of social media platforms is changing their identity and transforming the practices of networking, data and content sharing with which social media have been commonly associated. We empirically investigate these shifts in the context of TripAdvisor and its evolution since its very establishment. We trace the mutations...

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...

Data and data management techniques increasingly permeate organizations and the contexts in which they are embedded. We conduct an empirical investigation of Last.fm, an online music discovery platform, with a view to unpacking the work of data and algorithms in the process of categorization. Drawing on Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues, we link the...

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...

Digital data have become the critical frontier where emerging economic practices and organizational forms confront the traditional economic order and its institutions. In Data Rules, Cristina Alaimo and Jannis Kallinikos establish a social science framework for analyzing the unprecedented social and economic restructuring brought about by data. W...

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...

"Digitale Transformation(en): Zur Verflechtung von Prozessen der langen Dauer und digitalem sozialen Wandel." Digitalisation oscillates between profound promises of transformation and a nebulous buzzword. The analysis of digital transformation processes leaves hardly any (analysis of) social phenomenon untouched. We argue for understanding digita...

Data are no longer simply a component of administrative and managerial work but a pervasive resource and medium through which organizations come to know and act upon the contingencies they confront. We theorize how the ongoing technological developments reinforce the traditional functions of data as instruments of management and control but also re...

Digitalisation oscillates between profound promises of transformation and a nebulous buzzword. The analysis of digital transformation processes leaves hardly any (analysis of) social phenomenon untouched. We argue for understanding digitalisation as a complex and heterogeneous process that cannot be rashly reduced to individual principles or unifor...

Digital Transformation(s) On the Entanglement of Long-Term Processes andDigital Social Change There is broad consensus in both academic and public discourse that the omnipresent transformation process subsumed under the term "digitalization" is one (if not the major) dominant driving force of social change in contemporary society. A broad range of...

Data and data management techniques increasingly permeate organizations and the contexts in which they are embedded. We conduct an empirical investigation of Last.fm, an online music discovery platform, with a view to unpacking the work of data and algorithms in the process of categorization. Drawing on Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues, we link the...

Programmatic advertising is a large scale, real-time bidding process, whereby ads are automatically assigned to available spaces across types of media and geographic regions upon an individual user's browser request. The large-scale automation of programmatic advertising requires the establishment of standards and the development of technologies to...

Programmatic advertising is a large scale, real-time bidding process, whereby ads are automatically assigned to available spaces across types of media and geographic regions upon an individual user’s browser request. The large-scale automation of programmatic advertising requires the establishment of standards and the development of technologies to...

Programmatic advertising is a large scale, real-time bidding process, whereby ads are automatically assigned to available spaces across types of media and geographic regions upon an individual user’s browser request. The large-scale automation of programmatic advertising requires the establishment of standards and the development of technologies to...

This is the text of our sub-theme for the 2019 EGOS colloquium in Edinburgh. We encourage submissions that address the core themes and questions of the call, broadly defined. For submission information follow: https://www.egosnet.org/

The methodology of any domain depends, first, on clarifying what types of object are being researched – indeed can exist – in that domain: that is, on clarifying the ontology of that domain. The ontology of social media might seem wholly unproblematic: social media sites are certainly infrastructures with considerable, even massive, presence in our...

The ongoing data revolution drives the establishment of a comprehensive cultural habitat that induces the framing of ordinary life is-sues in terms of data availability and the data permutations this encourages. These same developments are linked to the understanding of the process of knowledge creation as predominantly computational operations per...

In this paper we present preliminary evidence from a single case study of a demand-side platform operating in the programmatic advertising domain. Programmatic is the automated method of buying and selling ads in a large scale, distributed ecosystem that involves many actors (buyers, sellers and intermediaries). Our aim is to shed light on the proc...

We conceive social media platforms as sociotechnical entities that variously shape user platform involvement and participation. Such shaping develops along three fundamental data operations that we subsume under the terms of encoding, aggregation, and computation. Encoding entails the engineering of user platform participation along narrow and stan...

Agency and institutions are essential concepts within institutional theory. In this Perspectives issue, we draw on a select group of Organization Studies articles to provide an overview of the topic of agency and institutions. We first consider different ways of defining agency and institutions and examine their implications for institutional theor...

The structure of social memory is in a process of significant change as social operations of forgetting and remembering are increasingly written in IT and mediated in digital media. Based on an in-depth case study about the digitalization of memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums), the paper demonstrates the emergence of a digital social...

Perspectives on the varied challenges posed by big data for health, science, law, commerce, and politics. Big data is ubiquitous but heterogeneous. Big data can be used to tally clicks and traffic on web pages, find patterns in stock trades, track consumer preferences, identify linguistic correlations in large corpuses of texts. This book examines...

The introduction outlines the problematic that has served as the basis for this special issue. Interaction weaves the fabric of social life in the form of events that are usually embedded in a series of particulars, variously referred to as contexts or situations. At the same time, actors, and the contexts in which they are embed-­ ded, are constit...

Big data and the mechanisms by which it is produced and disseminated introduce important changes in the ways information is generated and made relevant for organizations. Big data often represents miscellaneous records of the whereabouts of large and shifting online crowds. It is frequently agnostic, in the sense of being produced for generic purpo...

We elaborate on key issues of our paper New games, new rules: big data and the changing context of strategy as a means of addressing some of the concerns raised by the paper’s commentators. We initially deal with the issue of social data and the role it plays in the current data revolution. The massive involvement of lay publics as instrumented by...

This paper investigates a web-based, medical research network that relies on patient self-reporting to collect and analyze data on the health status of patients, mostly suffering from severe conditions. The network organizes patient participation in ways that break with the strong expert culture of medical research. Patient data entry is largely un...

In this paper, we extend the concept of technology beyond the conventional understanding of systems and artifacts as embodiments of particular functionalities that are variously enacted in local settings. Technological artifacts or systems epitomize operational couplings that extend beyond the human-­technology interface. Such couplings entail mult...

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...

A vivid public interest has recently arisen over the issue of ‘big data’ and its social and economic implications. Statesmen and politicians, economists, businessmen, management consultants, activists, scientists, even artists declare the timely nature and relevance of the phenomenon. Jannis Kallinikos critically examines the merits of the two word...

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...

Technological objects are devices crafted and used to serve particular purposes or functions. Traditionally, function (e.g., pierce, cut, contain) has been embodied on durable materials, worked up, and appropriately shaped or structured. Craftsmanship has developed around the mastery of specific materials such as wood, stone, clay, gold and iron, a...

The book is a collective meditation on the role of materiality in social affairs. The recent and growing interest in the concept of "materiality" certainly has diverse origins. Yet, it is closely associated with the diffusion of technological objects and artifacts through society and many have questioned how human choice and social practice are con...

Despite appearing to be straightforward, the concept of materiality turns out to be rather evasive and difficult to pin down. Similar to the horizon, the understanding of materiality seems to recede as we approach it. This chapter reviews the major divides in social thought and reprises the inherent tension that is, among other things, associated w...

The environment of information affluence and media convergence characteristic of our time is constructing a comprehensive living and knowing habitat that induces the framing of life issues in terms of data availability and the concomitant data permutations this encourages. It also promotes the understanding of knowledge as data assembled into meani...

The paper draws on Italo Calvino's acclaimed novel Invisible Cities to describe a few recurrent issues associated with the tasks of describing and modelling reality intrinsic to the use and development of IS. The analysis initially confronts the intrinsic ambiguity that haunts any effort to transform experiential knowledge to a formal representatio...

The paper questions the situated understanding of technology. It claims that technologies embody layered and time ridden solutions that cannot be unraveled and studied at the human/technology interface. The involvement of technology in social practice necessitates mediation on the nature of artifacts and the ways they connect to one another to enab...

The media industry is undergoing comprehensive change due to the shifting audience and consumption patterns fostered by the diffusion of the Internet. This article describes how these changes shape established practices of video production and redefine the cultural categories of video and broadcasting. Drawing on an empirical case study of the prac...

Contemporary living is embedded in dense information envi-ronments in which a growing number of contingencies, problems or situations are increasingly framed in terms of data availability and the technologically based operations of algorithmic reasoning and statistical data crunching by means of which data are assembled to meaningful structures and...

Contemporary living is embedded in dense information envi-ronments in which a growing number of contingencies, problems or situations are increasingly framed in terms of data availability and the technologically based operations of algorithmic reasoning and statistical data crunching by means of which data are assembled to meaningful structures and...

We train students as retrospective observers who specialize in evidence-based post hoc analysis. Building on action research and a cry for relevance, we witness the emergence of engaged scholarship and focus on the present and ongoing affairs. However, the future appears to be virtually neglected in the IS management curricula and organizational st...

Contemporary technologies of computing and communication massively intervene upon the primary process of reality perception thus redefining the cognitive and communicative profile of daily living. An important consequence is the constitution of human experience by the standardized and often unobtrusive procedures of assembling reality that current...

Information gets increasingly involved in the planning of organizational operations, and the design and control of the patterns through which work and expertise are exercised. Due to the dynamic nature of digital information, such involvement takes on ceaselessly shifting forms and becomes a driver of organizational restructuring and change. In all...

Governing Through Technology describes the vital importance which digital information, in all its breeds and formats, acquires in restructuring organizations and other domains of social life in which expert work is carried out. Information produced and disseminated by an interlocking ecology of computer-based systems and artifacts currently provide...

In the preceding chapter I have been at pains to demonstrate to some degree of detail the manner in which the deepening involvement of information technologies in the workplace profoundly affects the nature of work and how it is exercised. The analysis has shown a wide range of tasks and operations that have traditionally been entangled in a consid...

A widespread belief across the social sciences construes the influence technology has on institutions and organizations as being heavily contingent on the characteristics of the social practices with which it gets entangled and the specific make-up of the contexts within which such entanglement occurs. Wittingly or unwittingly, this position is pre...

In this chapter, I pursue in some detail the exploration of some of the behavioural implications of ERP packages. It would seem fairly reasonable to conjecture that the elaborate depiction of organizational relations that these packages mediate frames the perception of relevant events and the modes whereby duties are carried out. Broadly speaking,...

Information is the cognitive currency of the age. Diffused across the social fabric by a wide and growing range of information systems and artefacts, information is variously involved in the making and monitoring of such diverse institutions such as formal organizations, professions, markets, mass media or politics. Such a state of affairs bespeaks...

From the range of loosely connected ideas we pursue in our intellectual life, occasionally some may converge into a common cause. Suddenly or progressively, works that appeared unconnected disclose an underlying pattern. Such is this volume, made up of a few previously published pieces that span a range of topics. The affinities these writings shar...

Observations of everyday encounters with information systems or technologies suggest that humans frequently use them in ways not envisaged by their designers or developers. Use, as the saying goes, cannot be arrested by design. No matter what or how designers embody functions in artefacts, the context of life is such that new uses emerge out of the...

The idea that computer-based technology profoundly affects the constitution of contemporary work along cognitive lines must be attributed to Zuboff (1988). She was the first to suggest in a systematic and comprehensive fashion that the diffusion and organizational embeddedness of computer technology tends to transform the physical and social nature...

Large-scale, off-the-shelf information packages have become commonplace in organizations over the past two decades. The comprehensive character of these packages certainly marks a distinctive stage in the history of computer-based information technology’s involvement in organizations. The need for bringing some sort of uniformity to the disparate e...

The entry reviews Shoshana Zuboff’s acclaimed work In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, originally published in 1988 against the backdrop of the considerable technological changes that have occurred over the last two decades. The core themes of the book dealing with the impact of information technology on the workplace are...

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 claims that technology and institutions both epitomize the construction of artificial orders through which a primary reality is shaped to something other than it is by logical operations that share essential affinities. Drawing on this, we work our way to showing how technology operates as governing regime and how tasks and operations th...

In this paper, we consider whether and to what extent digital technologies enable people to accomplish expressive activities of personal or social value by examining customization and extension of software artifacts. We approach our topic within the context of mul-tiplayer online games that provide a rather radical departure from the studies of org...

Every computational device must allow for some form of interaction with its user. Human–computer interaction is the discipline that studies how people interact with computational devices and the implications that the design of the human–machine interface has for this interaction. The discipline also investigates wider communal and social implicatio...

La pensée critique occidentale accuse au sujet de la technologie un profond scepticisme. Elle nous en impose la vision d’une pratique déshu- manisante qu’elle tient probablement en héritage du mouvement roman- tique européen, et peut-être plus précisément allemand1. Ce courant décrit la technologie comme froide, indifférente aux attentes proprement...

Information results from observing and recording (and making) facts whose value is a function of the novelty they convey. Despite its frequent association with knowledge, information is not concerned with lasting truths or statements that have enduring value but with transient facts that recount details of a world in a perpetual move. Information c...

This chapter claims technology to be a principal mode of regulation in formal organizations alongside social structure and culture. Such a claim breaks with the conventional neo-institutional outlook that considers technology outside the object of institutional analysis of organizations. The distinctive regulative logic of computational technology...

The paper seeks to lay open the computational logic by which reality is rendered as information. Computation is claimed to involve a drift away from the palpable and extendible character of things, a trend that both continues and breaks with the prevailing strategies of technological mediation in industrialism and modernity. Computation entails the...

Widespread as they are, the attitudes of trivilization (negation) and euphoria (and hype) tend to overlook subtle and often surreptitious shifts in our modes of framing, perceiving and acting upon reality that the new technologies of information and communication and the internet are beginning to bring about. The inspection of these massive records...

This article first reviews some widespread claims that associate ICTs with patterns of interaction, work, and communication that are said to be conducive to the structural arrangement of the network. In so doing, it seeks to lay bare and occasionally question a few key assumptions on which these claims are predicated. It endeavours to develop an al...

A widespread understanding across the social sciences construes the impact or influence which technology has on institutions and organisations as being heavily contingent on the local practices and the specific characteristics of the contexts in which the technology is applied. Such an understanding is, wittingly or unwittingly, premised on a stron...

The present chapter reports the investigation of Money Claim OnLine (MCOL), a web-based service for issuing money claims and resolving fixed money disputes introduced in the judiciary of England and Wales in February 2002. The service has been widely and rapidly adopted and represents a good example of how ICT-based systems and artefacts can be dep...

In this paper we examine the changing conditions of video production and distribution, consequent upon the deepening digitization of media organizations and the expanding internet ecosystem engulfing their operations. Video content may have whatever aesthetic or cognitive value but in the forming internet ecology the distribution of video, as of ot...

This paper focuses on the construct of interoperability of web-based information systems, commonly known as ‘mashups’. The construct is applied using as a case study a global content provider and its RSS and API content delivery platform. The aim is to find out the technical and social settings that emerge when supplying content in standardized for...

This paper focuses on the construct of interoperability of web-based information applications, commonly known as ‘mashups’, reporting a case study of a global content provider and its RSS and API content delivery platform. We have sought to identify the technical and social settings that take form when supplying content in standardized form over th...

'In his comprehensive and systematic investigation into the saturation of the modern world by information and its technologies, Jannis Kallinikos offers us new ways of thinking about the social and institutional consequences of this development. Drawing on an impressively wide range of perspectives from information theory, social science and admini...

A central element of the modern institutional landscape as it has certainly been, bureaucracy came none the less to be historically bound up with a host of uneasy undertones. An aura of negative predispositions has engulfed bureaucratic regulation, despite the crucial and inescapable implication of bureaucracy in modern life and its contribution to...