scholarly journals Behavioral Visibility: A new paradigm for organization studies in the age of digitization, digitalization, and datafication

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (12) ◽  
pp. 1601-1625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul M. Leonardi ◽  
Jeffrey W. Treem

The digitization, digitalization, and datafication of work and communication, coupled with social and technical infrastructures that enable connectivity, are making it increasingly easy for the behaviors of people, collectives, and technological devices to see and be seen. Such digital connectivity gives rise to the important phenomenon of behavioral visibility. We argue that studying the antecedents, processes, and consequences of behavioral visibility should be a central concern for scholars of organizing. We attempt to set the cornerstones for the study of behavioral visibility by considering the social and technological contexts that are enabling behavioral visibility, developing the concept of behavioral visibility by defining its various components, considering the conditions through which it is commonly produced, and outlining potential consequences of behavioral visibility in the form of three paradoxes. We conclude with some conjectures about the kinds of research questions, empirical foci, and methodological strategies that scholars will need to embrace in order to understand how behavioral visibility shapes and is shaped by the process of organizing as we catapult, swiftly, into an era where artificial intelligence, learning algorithms, and social tools are changing the way people work.

BUILDER ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 276 (7) ◽  
pp. 35-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mateusz Płoszaj-Mazurek

The built environment is considered responsible for at least 20-40% of greenhouse gases emission. The way we design may exert an impact on this percentage. A new paradigm, namely artificial intelligence, is arriving. More and more tasks are becoming automated via algorithms. How could this power be applied in order to strengthen our knowledge about the ways we design buildings? The author of the following paper presents a study in which carbon footprint yielded by a multifamily building is analysed. ML has been used to generate an extensive overview of the possible design solutions. This, in turn, made it possible to observe correlations between various parameters that resulted in a reduced carbon footprint.


AI & Society ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nello Cristianini ◽  
Teresa Scantamburlo ◽  
James Ladyman

AbstractSocial machines are systems formed by material and human elements interacting in a structured way. The use of digital platforms as mediators allows large numbers of humans to participate in such machines, which have interconnected AI and human components operating as a single system capable of highly sophisticated behaviour. Under certain conditions, such systems can be understood as autonomous goal-driven agents. Many popular online platforms can be regarded as instances of this class of agent. We argue that autonomous social machines provide a new paradigm for the design of intelligent systems, marking a new phase in AI. After describing the characteristics of goal-driven social machines, we discuss the consequences of their adoption, for the practice of artificial intelligence as well as for its regulation.


Author(s):  
Andrey Rezaev ◽  
Natalia Tregubova

At the turn of the 21st century, sociology as a science has become an object of criticism both from inside and outside the discipline. At the same time, the late-20th and early 21st centuries endorse an unprecedented splash of technological development, specifically the advancement of artificial intelligence technologies. The paper tries to show a relation between these two tendencies. For the authors, two questions are in the spotlight: (1) how have evaluations of the professional sociologists on what is happening to the discipline changed over the last 20 years? and (2) how could these evaluations be related to the research questions that the development of AI technologies brings to social sciences? In the first part of the paper, the authors examine and compare the participants' positions in the discussion about the future of sociology organized by the journal Contemporary Sociology in 2000. The second part of the paper examines two articles published in 2019 where it was proclaimed “the end of sociology.” The paper discusses why the debates about the crisis of sociology have shifted towards radical criticism during these years and how new arguments refine and supplement the previous discussions. In conclusion, the authors propose one way out of the crisis in sociology. They suggest the radical renewal of sociological science into a-typical and anti-disciplinary social analytics with the central orientation into “artificial sociality” inquiries.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eitan Grossman ◽  
Ira Noveck

AbstractLanguage change is a central concern for any linguistic theory. For one thing, it is often assumed that language change is explanatory, in that it provides a reasonable answer to what Haspelmath dubbed ‘Greenberg’s Problem’ in 2014: why are languages the way they are? A short version of the Greenbergian answer is: ‘Because they became that way through processes of language change.’ However, this sort of answer throws into focus the fact that language change is not only a potential explanation for language structures. Rather, it is a set of problems that itself calls for explanation. In fact, this could be called ‘Greenberg’s Second Question’: why do languages change the way they do? In this article, we explore some ways in which the field of experimental pragmatics might shed light on the second question, by providing a set of methods that could investigate existing hypotheses about language change by developing falsifiable predictions to be evaluated in experimental settings. Moreover, these hypotheses can provide new research questions and data for experimentalists to work on, beyond the rather restricted set of questions that experimental pragmatics has confronted to date.


This book examines the way schizophrenia is shaped by its social context: how life is lived with this madness in different settings, and what it is about those settings that alters the course of the illness, its outcome, and even the structure of its symptoms. Until recently, schizophrenia was perhaps our best example—our poster child—for the “bio-bio-bio” model of psychiatric illness: genetic cause, brain alteration, pharmacologic treatment. We now have direct epidemiological evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others, and more likely to recover in some social settings than in others. Something about the social world gets under the skin. This book presents twelve case studies written by psychiatric anthropologists that help to illustrate some of the variability in the social experience of schizophrenia and that illustrate the main hypotheses about the different experience of schizophrenia in the west and outside the west--and in particular, why schizophrenia seems to have a more benign course and outcome in India. We argue that above all it is the experience of “social defeat” that increases the risk and burden of schizophrenia, and that opportunities for social defeat are more abundant in the modern west. There is a new role for anthropology in the science of schizophrenia. Psychiatric science has learned—epidemiologically, empirically, quantitatively—that our social world makes a difference. But the highly structured, specific-variable analytic methods of standard psychiatric science cannot tell us what it is about culture that has that impact. The careful observation enabled by rich ethnography allows us to see in more detail what kinds of social and cultural features may make a difference to a life lived with schizophrenia. And if we understand culture’s impact more deeply, we believe that we may improve the way we reach out to help those who struggle with our most troubling madness.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Stanislava Varadinova

The attention sustainability and its impact of social status in the class are current issues concerning the field of education are the reasons for delay in assimilating the learning material and early school dropout. Behind both of those problems stand psychological causes such as low attention sustainability, poor communication skills and lack of positive environment. The presented article aims to prove that sustainability of attention directly influences the social status of students in the class, and hence their overall development and the way they feel in the group. Making efforts to increase students’ attention sustainability could lead to an increase in the social status of the student and hence the creation of a favorable and positive environment for the overall development of the individual.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-293
Author(s):  
Codrin-Leonard Herţanu

AbstractOur contemporary world is on the verge of crucial changes of an unparalleled pace. The ‘technological changeover’ is the new paradigm caused by the unprecedented evolution of the disruptive technologies. The present world has the tendency to evolve at least exponential, therefore future educational environment is fairly different than its present layout. An entire array of nowadays studies widely recognizes that the progress of the disruptive technologies will pose a meaningful impact over the educational system evolution. Among the most spectacular technologies with disruptive features we should encounter Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain Technology, Cloud Computing, and the like. In an era of technological disruption the education is seen as the new currency. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, for instance, the education system could track how people learn from kindergarten to retirement. Besides, the technology domain will move the centre of gravity from the institutional area to that of the education’s beneficiaries, as we might expect that they will recruit and employ the needed teacher staff, not the institutions. Moreover, the education’s recipients will be the main creators of tomorrow’s professions and within their community the overarching events will happen and the main decisions will be taken in the educational domain.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 58-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Syed Junaid ◽  
Asad Saeed ◽  
Zeili Yang ◽  
Thomas Micic ◽  
Rajesh Botchu

The advances in deep learning algorithms, exponential computing power, and availability of digital patient data like never before have led to the wave of interest and investment in artificial intelligence in health care. No radiology conference is complete without a substantial dedication to AI. Many radiology departments are keen to get involved but are unsure of where and how to begin. This short article provides a simple road map to aid departments to get involved with the technology, demystify key concepts, and pique an interest in the field. We have broken down the journey into seven steps; problem, team, data, kit, neural network, validation, and governance.


Author(s):  
Alexander M. Sharipov

On the activity of the International Ilyin Committee (IIC) on preparation and celebration of 130-th Anniversary of I.A.Ilyin, the great scientist and patriot of Russia.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 79-94
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Fellmann

In this paper I claim that the metaphysical concept of culture has come to an end. Among the European authors Georg Simmel is the foremost who has deconstructed the myth of culture as a substantial totality beyond relations or prior to them. Two tenets of research have prepared the end of all-inclusive culture: First, Simmel’s formal access that considers society as the modality of interactions and relations between individuals, thus overcoming the social evolutionism of Auguste Comte; second, his critical exegesis of idealistic philosophy of history, thus leaving behind the Hegelian tradition. Although Simmel adheres in some statements to the out-dated idea of morphological unity, his sociological and epistemological thinking paved the way for the concept of social identity as a network of series connected loosely by contiguity. This type of connection is confirmed by the present feeling of life as individual self-invention according to changing situations.


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