The review is conducted by Paavo Ritala from LUT University, Co-Editor-in-Chief at R&D Management.
Cristina Alaimo and Jannis Kallinikos reflect on the book review:
💬 “This review successfully captures the central concerns of the book and highlights its core message. With a fresh and conversational style, the review does a great job in stressing the idea that without data there would be no organization, management, or administration. Changes in data format and use bring changes in organizing such as the ones we are witnessing with platform ecosystems. We love how the review underlines the open character of the book, its originality and its reflections on a ‘social science of data’” as a distinct research program.”
The book:
📕 Lays out the history of data in organizations and societies starting from the clay tokens, to early accounting principles, and all the way to ultramodern automated data collection, aggregation, and interpretation
📕 Demonstrates how organizations and organizing have become “decentred” due to and via data, and how new platform-based business models and ecosystems depend on data and data objects
📕 Provides a complementary set of organizing instructions in addition to design rules and market rules that we are more familiar to
📕 Highlights the data perspective as the missing piece from our understanding of the organization of platforms and ecosystems.
According to the book, digital data are:
🔖 nonneutral, always tied to social and engineering conditions, and path-dependent on their context
🔖 content-agnostic and homogenizing
🔖 underlying and mediating a major portion of our daily lives be it private, public, or corporate
🔖 behind many of our institutions and brings stability and change
🔖 not (almost never) objective, perfect, or accurate, but rather, subject to various conditions, institutions, and “predilections”.
👉 As data are being made, they are decoupled from the original reality they represent and transformed to something more abstract and standardized.
👉 There are rarely one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to data.
Future research avenues inspired by the book:
📚 Strategy, innovation, and marketing scholars have different focus areas that can benefit from a more foundational understanding of data
📚 Research on algorithms, analytics, and AI in organizations is a natural entry point to all things data, and should also take into account organizational and social implications of data
📚 The “social science of data” is emerging as an area of research, promising to extend the understanding of data as having a central role for individuals, organizations, and societies.
Book review: https://lnkd.in/dejqg5Z3