Cloud as a mediating technology of organization

This chapter explores the cultural productivity of the ontological elusiveness of clouds. Vaporous entities without a clear material or formal existence, clouds carry great freights of significance. Few phenomena are quite so packed with meaning. Despite their reputation as flighty and insubstantial, clouds have carried a wide range of discourses, practices, arts, and media for a very long time. The term ‘cloud’ has earned its place as a keyword in digital culture because of its widespread recent use for server-based online data storage, but the nearly instant and universal acceptance of this term today has a much longer legacy, which this chapter traces.

Typeface as a mediating technology of organization

Type was moulded from metals, before becoming immaterial. This chapter acknowledges this mediating transformation toward digital modulation, whilst holding on to the persistent sense of type having a face, an aesthetic form whose organizing affects permeate human understanding. The chapter isolates indicative typefaces—Doves Press, Baskerville, Universalschrift—showing how their design harboured expectations about how to organize meaning, expectations that were themselves already organized. The chapter ends with those who cast themselves in critique of these organized conditions—Mallarmé and Schwitters.

High Heels as a mediating technology of organization

Increasingly contested as compulsory items of workers’ dress codes, high heels continue to code power and success. But as an aesthetic ideal high heeled shoes raise questions about commodification as well as social and economic control. As items of glamour they signal and sometimes replace affluence and independence. As objects of fetish high heeled shoes stand in as a reassuring spectacle. As markers of success they contribute to a model of female achievement that requires a transformation. But as prostheses the artifice and transformability of high heels allows for playfulness and re-appropriation, and for disruption wherever they insert incongruity into the otherwise fluid processes of (organized) life.

Smartphone as a mediating technology of organization

This chapter considers the smartphone as organizational force. Its effects are to blur the boundaries between work and home; to involve different constituent actors and forms of power (bypassing traditional organizational gatekeepers); and to raise new forms of service and exclusion. The smartphone is a small device that impacts large-scale organizing. A site of interaction between the individual and organizing, it raises questions of power, trust, transparency, work–life balance, self-monitoring, surveillance, and self-expression. It is associated with the rise of new, less-regulated forms of work and social movements. Organizational scholars need to further unpack its implications for organizations and organizing.

Mind Tracker as a mediating technology of organization

This chapter dwells on the mind tracker as a particular technology of organization. After introducing the concept of self-tracking and the historical development of wearable technologies, it discusses the rise of self-tracking communities focused on using wearable technologies to ‘enhance’ the mental and physical capacities of their members. Subsequently, the concept of the mind tracker is analysed. Mind trackers have worked along a bodily trajectory, looking to combine awareness of the inner workings of the brain with outward features such as facial expression in order to then recognize certain affective states. Mind trackers claim to provide information on one’s state of mind, sleep pattern, emotional spectrum, and the strength of emotions. In doing so, their producers declare that the devices can assist in improving focus, reduce stress, and increase attentiveness. They can, however, bear serious consequences in the context of privacy, transparency, and coercion, particularly in the organizational context.

Executive Dashboard as a mediating technology of organization

This chapter interrogates the executive dashboard as a contemporary example of the deployment of computation in management. Conceptualizing the dashboard as an interface, it explores how it reconfigures human–machine relations and their respective intelligences. The dashboard separates the executive manager and the computational system, as much as it augments both in their capacities for decision and control. Human decision making emerges as a residuality and an exception to computational processes, while decision making is also distributed within and delegated to the technical system. The dashboarding of human–machine intelligences produces a smartness characterizing contemporary computation, management, and organization.

Clock as a mediating technology of organization

The clock has long been a social technology, or a way of authorizing a singular source to propel collective activity. This chapter explores whether this social function continues in quite the same way in the wake of digital technology. It investigates the particular role of the clock in the workplace—how a predictable relationship to time accrued value for The Organization as an institutional form. The chapter traces the history of the clock, from factories to the contemporary digital workplace, asking how new technologies have changed the status of the clock as a way of organizing labour and productivity.

Bitcoin as a mediating technology of organization

This chapter explores how Bitcoin promotes itself as an open, democratic, decentralized, and collaborative community that can bypass untrustworthy financial institutions. Whilst notions of trust in traditional forms of institutions, such as banks, have been affected by the 2008–9 financial crisis, the push towards alternative monetary systems by cryptocurrency communities seems to offer the perfect promise of decentralization and transparency. Yet, following Luhmann’s articulation of system trust, the complex functioning of Bitcoin calls for rethinking how trust in the system is understood both in relation to the trust posed in the neutrality of algorithmic action and governance, but also in others, such as the ‘wisdom of the crowd’.

Dating App as a mediating technology of organization

Coupling media theories on hook-up and dating apps with theoretical works on cultural technique, this chapter shows that placing dating apps not in the discourse of love but instead in the cultural history of flirtation allows us to explore the ways in which dating apps use uncertainty as an organizational logic with specific properties and implications. This allows us to regard dating apps as part of fundamental questions of the organization of life itself under neoliberalism and the productive tensions between control and uncertainty.

By Means of Which: Media, Technology, Organization

This chapter traces and interrogates media, technology, and organization in their foundational relations, their forms, and their constraining and loosening effects and affects. The folding of humans and technology works both ways: human bodies can, too, be apprehended prosthetically as extensions of technologies. The notion of media then applies to any object that conditions the structure of a certain situation and the specific possibilities of perceiving, acting, and thinking in it. If we begin with this understanding of technology and media as fundamental, conditional, and infrastructural, then how organization takes place is predicated upon such apparatuses. The task is then not one of finding better uses of desks, smartphones, presentation software, or high heels, for all of these have modes of subjectification scripted into them. Rather, it is remaining alive to the hesitations already provided: the glitches, accidents, misuses, and alternative projections, and to wander and wonder with them.