Whistleblowers or Offenders? A Judicial Approach to Whistleblowing – The LuxLeaks Case

The aim of this article is to study the role of judges and their impact on the retaliation processes initiated by organisations against whistleblowers. More specifically, we question the normative logics used by judges to validate or invalidate such processes. To this end, we cross-check and analyse judicial data from the LuxLeaks case (2010–2018). Our results firstly enable us to establish a relationship between, on the one hand, the interpretative power of judges and their profile and, on the other, the attitude that judges may have at the end of the retaliation process towards whistleblowers, that is, retaliatory actors or protective actors. Our results also explain the normative dynamics that permeate the judicial retaliation process. They show that judges can challenge existing legal norms, clarify and operationalise others, and create new norms regulating ethical behaviour in organisations.

What Are the Boundaries to the Expansion of Digital Labour Platforms? Understanding Uberization through a Cognitive Sustainability Lens

While digital labour platforms are booming, their ability to constitute a sustainable alternative to the managerial firm and to salaried work is questionable. To date, this debate has been approached mainly from legal or political angles, and the organizational sustainability of such platforms remains underexplored. We respond to calls to study more specifically the cognitive capabilities of platforms by mobilizing knowledge-based theories of the firm. We contribute to the literature in three ways: (1) we introduce the concept of ‘cognitive sustainability’, which we define as the capacity to ensure the integration, conservation and creation of knowledge; (2) we develop a set of propositions aimed at identifying the activities that platforms are most likely to carry out in a cognitively sustainable way; (3) we argue for the possibility of an increased hybridization of digital labour platforms to perform complex activities. Mobilizing knowledge-based theories of the firm to explore new objects such as platforms and taking such hybridization processes into account adds to this body of literature by extending its application domain and taking a more dynamic perspective.

License to Heal: Understanding a Healthcare Platform Organization as a Multi-Level Surveillant Assemblage

Platform organizations bring renewed attention to power disparities and risks in the rise of surveillance capitalism. However, such critical accounts provide a partial understanding of the complexity of surveillance phenomena in such shifting socio-technical and digital environments. The findings from a netnographic investigation of a healthcare platform organization, PatientsLikeMe, unravel how platforms become the locus where multi-level flows of surveillance converge, thereby constituting what we identify as a surveillant assemblage. We develop a comprehensive approach for understanding how platforms constitute a dynamic crossroads of micro-, meso- and macro-surveillance phenomena within and beyond the online communities they create. This study highlights this surveillant assemblage’s emerging practices and potentially empowering outcomes that enable multi-stakeholder involvement in big data and knowledge generation in healthcare. Broader implications of multi-level surveillance in and through platforms are discussed.

Unleashing the Potential of Crowd Work: The Need for a Post-Taylorism Crowdsourcing Model

Paid crowdsourcing connects task requesters to a globalized, skilled workforce that is available 24/7. In doing so, this new labor model promises not only to complete work faster and more efficiently than any previous approach but also to harness the best of our collective capacities. Nevertheless, for almost a decade now, crowdsourcing has been limited to addressing rather straightforward and simple tasks. Large-scale innovation, creativity, and wicked problem-solving are still largely out of the crowd’s reach. In this opinion paper, we argue that existing crowdsourcing practices bear significant resemblance to the management paradigm of Taylorism. Although criticized and often abandoned by modern organizations, Taylorism principles are prevalent in many crowdsourcing platforms, which employ practices such as the forceful decomposition of all tasks regardless of their knowledge nature and the disallowing of worker interactions, which diminish worker motivation and performance. We argue that a shift toward post-Taylorism is necessary to enable the crowd address at scale the complex problems that form the backbone of today’s knowledge economy. Drawing from recent literature, we highlight four design rules that can help make this shift, namely, endorsing social crowd networks, encouraging teamwork, scaffolding ownership of one’s work within the crowd, and leveraging algorithm-guided worker self-coordination.

Institutional Work: A Review and Framework based on Semantic and Thematic Analysis

Institutional work as a concept has evolved and diffused beyond roots in management and organizational studies since it was first defined by Lawrence and Suddaby (2006). A diverse literature and recent criticism call for an extensive review of the field. We conducted a systematic review of 452 peer-reviewed articles in 185 different journals published from March 2006 to December 2019. Semantic analysis revealed changes in topics over time, the rise of institutional maintenance, and a focus on individuals and agency. Using thematic analysis, we inductively categorized the claimed contributions to institutional work as theory combining, actors, contexts, institutional work types, representations, and methodology. The findings led us to develop an integrative conceptual framework for future institutional work study built around setting, motivations, types, and outcomes. We visualized the discourse around institutional work, growth of key themes from early theorizing, and an original process model.

Book Review – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Surveillance capitalists like Google and Amazon will do whatever they can to corner supply routes to data about us and our actions. In Zuboff’s lengthy book The age of surveillance capitalism, we learn about the strategic and often underhand means by which these data are captured, and the ‘instrumentarian’ ideology that provides the logic for this enterprise. Zuboff shows that the aim of advertisers and ‘people analytics’ advocates is to use our personal data to determine our behavior. At stake is free will and our ‘right to the future tense’. In this book review, I reflect on Zuboff ’s analysis of how Big Tech, as Big Other, is controlling our lives. I first highlight the prescience of the book’s arguments. I then compare aspects of the book with earlier tomes that were critical of new technology, to argue that taking a deterministic view of peoples’ relationship with technology may inadvertently support the hyped narrative that data analytics and algorithms are all-powerful.

A Relational Theory of Organization Creation About Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture by Tim Ingold (2013)

In his book Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Tim Ingold describes human action after having studied the four fields mentioned in the title. The anthropologist recommends that researchers live with the group of people being studied. He criticizes the hylemorphic approach of human action, according to which human beings are seen to impose a preconceived form from their mind onto matter, or the material. Instead, he proposes a theory of life in society based on so-called lines of correspondence. Drawing on the cases of a prehistoric human being, a medieval craftsperson and an artist, he sees these to be experiencing, with other beings and with objects, lines of correspondence defined by attention and transformation and which are developed in a process.

Reward Crowdfunding: Who to Attract at the Beginning of the Campaign? An Analysis in Terms of Revealed Networks of Preferences

This research study combines the theoretical teachings of revealed preferences, signal theory and weak tie theory to better understand the dynamics at work at the beginning of a campaign and to explain its success. By identifying the revealed preferences of early backers through their common past contributions, we characterize as strong or weak the nature of the complex preference ties between them. We build networks of the contributions made by the individuals identified as early backers to 9,425 campaigns run on the Ulule platform between July 2010 and September 2014. The results of this study underline the importance of the presence of strong preference ties between early backers and other platform users for the success of campaigns. They also corroborate the theory of the strength of weak ties. Later in the campaign, the intervention of backers with less specific preferences, in the position of intermediaries, positively influences the future outcome by accelerating the fundraising speed at the beginning of the campaign.