Tag: organisations

[Academic Call]: AI and the Artificialities of Intelligence.

Dr Will VentersLeave a comment

I am really excited to be a co-chair of the following academic workshop at ESSEC & Université Paris Dauphine-PSL. Please join us if you can!

AI and the Artificialities of Intelligence: What matters in and for organizing?

Call for papers 14th Organizations, Artifacts & Practices (OAP) Workshop #OAP2024

When: June 6th and 7th 2024

Where: Paris (ESSEC & Université Paris Dauphine-PSL). Face-to-face event.

Co-chairs:

Ella Hafermalz (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)  François-Xavier de Vaujany (Université Paris Dauphine-PSL)    Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte (CNRS, LEM, IESEG, Univ. Lille)
Julien Malaurent (ESSEC)Will Venters (LSE)Youngjin Yoo (Case Western University)

This 14th OAP workshop jointly organized by Université Paris Dauphine-PSL (DRM), ESSEC and ESSEC Metalab will be an opportunity to come back to the issue of Artificial Intelligence and its relationship with the history, philosophy and politics of management and organization.

Artificial Intelligence now pervades discussions about the future of organizations and societies. AI is expected to bring deep changes in work practices and our ways of living. Utopian and dystopian narratives are abundant. However, AI is far from being a fleeting trend; rather, it constitutes a collection of techniques with a rich history dating back to the 1950s. AI serves as a broad framework deeply intertwined with ideals of rationalism and representationalism – much like the broader digital landscape it epitomizes. The aspiration in the realm of AI is that self-sufficient techniques will progressively and continuously enhance our comprehension of the world. By means of rules and the use of massive amounts of data, it is expected that learning capabilities make AI tools more and more likely to expose and elucidate the underlying realities of the processes they initially are designed to represent. Increasingly, AI transcends its role as a ‘unraveller’ of complexity in the present. It discloses our future, what will happen in the next seconds, days, month, years or centuries. It arguably encompasses the entirety of our potential futures.

As well as having a certain hold on our future(s), these powerful tools are impacting how we think. Our cognition and understanding of the world are dramatically extended, amplified, revolutionized, but also individualized, siloed, and cut off from traditional social processes of interaction and sensemaking. In this vein, the gap between our ways of acting (in an embodied way) and our ways of thinking, grows. The dualism at the heart of representationalism, although more and more visual, narrative and corporeal, become central and even foundational. Part of our cognition – and our social practice of gaining and sharing knowledge – is delegated to AI.

These artificialities of intelligence (in particular collective intelligence), will be at the heart of this 14th OAP workshop in Paris. Behind and beyond AI as a set of codes, norms, standards, and massive use of data, our intelligence is more and more artificialized. Our collective intelligence relies on a representationalist philosophy which starts from a problem (a request) submitted to Bard or Chat GPT, generative AI tools, offering then a relevant narrative likely to answer brilliantly and confidently. Co-problematization, inquiry, concerns, openness, in short, life, are not at all part of this equation. This artificial organizing process will be central in  our discussions.

In particular, we welcome abstracts likely to cover the following topics:

  • Artificialities of intelligence as organization and organizationality;
  • Historical perspectives on digitality and AI;
  • Historical perspectives on calculative techniques, cybernetics, AI and digitality in general, in relationship with management and organizationality;
  • Revisiting and problematizing traditional assumptions about knowledge sharing and communities of practice;
  • Ethnographies, collaborative ethnographies and auto-ethnographies about AI in organizations ;
  • Pragmatist inquiries about collective intelligence;
  • Critiques of cognitivism in organization studies and management, e.g., strategic management, accounting, marketing, logistics and MIS;
  • Explorations of the relationships between new managerial techniques and AI;
  • Temporal and spatial views about AI and artificialities of intelligence;
  • Phenomenological and post-phenomenological perspectives about AI in organizations;
  • Process perspectives on the artificiality of intelligence;
  • Critical views of AI and the artificialities of intelligence;
  • AI and the metamorphosis of scientific practices;
  • AI the dynamic of scientific communities and scientific paradigms;
  • AI and its political dimension in organizations.

Of course, our event will also be opened to more traditional OAP ontological discussions around the time, space, place and materiality of organizing in a digital era, e.g., papers discussing ontologies, sociomateriality, affordances, spacing, emplacement, atmosphere, events, becoming, practices, flows, moments, existentiality, verticality, instants in the context of our digital world.

Please note that OAP 2024 will include a pre-event, the Dauphine Philosophy Workshop also hosted by University Paris Dauphine-PSL on June 6th 2024 and entitled: “Beyond judgement and legitimation: reconceptualizing the ontology of institutional dynamics in MOS”.

Those interested in our pre-OAP event and our OAP workshop must submit an extended abstract of no more than 1,000 words to workshopoap@gmail.com. The abstract must outline the applicant’s proposed contribution to the workshop. The proposal must be in .doc/.docx/.rtf format and should contain the author’s/authors’ names as well as their institutional affiliations, email address(es), and postal address(es). Deadline for submissions will be February 3rd, 2024 (midnight CET).

Authors will be notified of the committee’s decision by February 28th, 2024.

Please note that OAP 2024 will take place only onsite this year.

There are no fees associated with attending this workshop.

Organizing committee: Hélène Bussy-Socrate (PSB), François-Xavier de Vaujany (Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, DRM), Albane Grandazzi (GEM), Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte (CNRS, LEM, IESEG, Univ. Lille), Sébastien Lorenzini (Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, DRM) and Julien Mallaurent (ESSEC).

REFERENCES

Aspray, W. (1994). The history of computing within the history of information technology. History and Technology, an International Journal, 11(1), 7-19.

Berente, N., Gu, B., Recker, J., & Santhanam, R. (2021). Managing artificial intelligence. MIS quarterly, 45(3).

Chia, R. (1995). From modern to postmodern organizational analysis. Organization studies, 16(4), 579-604.

Chia, R. (2002). Essai: Time, duration and simultaneity: Rethinking process and change in organizational analysis. Organization Studies, 23(6), 863-868.

Clemson, B. (1991). Cybernetics: A new management tool (Vol. 4). CRC Press.

de Vaujany, F. X., & Mitev, N. (2017). The post-Macy paradox, information management and organising: Good intentions and a road to hell?. Culture and Organization, 23(5), 379-407.

de Vaujany, FX. (2022). Apocalypse managériale, Paris : Les Belles Lettres.

Introna, L. D., & Introna, L. D. (1997). Management: and manus. Management, Information and Power: A narrative of the involved manager, 82-117.

Nascimento, A. M., da Cunha, M. A. V. C., de Souza Meirelles, F., Scornavacca Jr, E., & De Melo, V. V. (2018). A Literature Analysis of Research on Artificial Intelligence in Management Information System (MIS). In AMCIS.

Öztürk, D. (2021). What Does Artificial Intelligence Mean for Organizations? A Systematic Review of Organization Studies Research and a Way Forward. The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Governance, Economics and Finance, Volume I, 265-289.

Pickering, A. (2002). Cybernetics and the mangle: Ashby, Beer and Pask. Social studies of science, 32(3), 413-437.

Lorino, P. (2018). Pragmatism and organization studies. Oxford University Press.

Simpson, B., & Revsbæk, L. (Eds.). (2022). Doing Process Research in Organizations: Noticing Differently. Oxford University Press.

Thompson, N. A., & Byrne, O. (2022). Imagining futures: Theorizing the practical knowledge of future-making. Organization Studies, 43(2), 247-268.

Vesa, M., & Tienari, J. (2022). Artificial intelligence and rationalized unaccountability: Ideology of the elites?. Organization, 29(6), 1133-1145.

Wagner, G., Lukyanenko, R., & Paré, G. (2022). Artificial intelligence and the conduct of literature reviews. Journal of Information Technology, 37(2), 209-226.

Yates, J. (1993). Control through communication: The rise of system in American management (Vol. 6). JHU Press.

Cloud computing can change organisations – whether they like it or not

Dr Will VentersLeave a comment

Even for organisations who avoid the adoption of cloud computing, its impact can be felt, and they too can face significant challenges from the adoption of cloud outside their perceived citadel. This is perhaps most obviously demonstrated with the case of Sukey.org.

In January 2011 the streets of London echoed to the sound of students campaigning against the imposition of tuition fees. Tens of thousands poured into the streets to make their voices heard, and the police, desperate to avoid the vandalism and violence of a protest in November the year before, attempted to use a “kettling” technique.

Kettling involves the police confining the demonstrators into a small area such as a square. Once trapped the police simply wait – keeping the demonstrators until they are tired and hungry and just want to go home. The police’s ability to kettle students thus involves their coordinating themselves to encircle the demonstrators – for which they rely on sophisticated (and expensive) communications infrastructure involving radios, control-centres and helicopters (within their organisational firewall).

But at this protest some of the students had installed a smartphone application called “Sukey” created by integrating (mashing-up) a number of cloud based services (Economist 2011) (See sidebar to understand the name).

Sukey.org used social media to allow those on the ground to report the movements of protesters and police through twitter and social networks. These reports were then catalogued on a Google-map – accessible by protesters using their smartphones. The application (build quickly by a small number of students) harnessed cloud computing and the mobile phone infrastructure to provide the protesters with a sophisticated information infrastructure similar to that of the police. This system was believed to limit the ability of the police to kettle the protesters – as they quickly moved through side-streets to avoid the police cordons.

This example shows how the police force was challenged, and their abilities constrained by a small group harnessing the “cloud” despite the police’s investment in information and communications technology. This shows that the availability of cloud computing deterministically altered what it is to police, despite the fact that the police had not changed their own infrastructure. It shows how organisations boundaries can become blurred as a consequence of outside action exploiting cloud.