This Special Issue is devoted to interpretive approaches to studying algorithmic assemblages constitutive of and by fields, ecosystems, and platforms and combining research from an organizational and information systems view about such organizing features and their dynamics. Information technologies have progressively enabled, even necessitated, a shift in the locus of value creation, capture, and resource orchestration and the processes they entail from within organizations to these more loosely coupled and emergently structured sociotechnical systems. The interpretive approach broadly stems from the relational turn in organization theory, but more proximately, considers assemblages and algorithmic organizing as views of these key constructs and their associated processes. To date, there has been less theory-building and empirical research connecting these more mezzo and macro constructs with the more micro-dynamics of these systems. In particular, it is not clear how algorithmic technologies enable the discursive and material interconnections of organizational ecosystems and facilitate the legitimacy dynamics of institutional fields. Nor is it clear the ways in which algorithmic technologies differentially circumscribe meaning across global fields and societies.
For example, blockchain communities contain organizational imaginaries around decentralized organization, and ongoing work is needed to examine how protocols are governed and established as new “rules of the game” and how community discourses around digital technologies shape institutional fields. Relatedly, the metaverse offers novel opportunities for commerce, government, and society within emerging ecosystems. Similarly, for AI technologies it is important to parse through the rhetoric and reality of how field level discourse influences organizational adoption and vice versa. As quantum computing threatens to disrupt our digital world, it is important to understand the broad material, social, and cultural ecosystem with the potential to reshape global business and geopolitics. To examine the institutional dynamics of technologically mediated organizing, it is necessary to methodologically zoom in and out with configurations to examine how realities are constructed based on shared meanings and interpretations.
To unpack these dynamics around technology-based and –mediated fields, ecosystems and platform we call for theory and research that relies on relational approaches coming from both organization theory and information systems. In those approaches, we see how theories of assemblages and algorithmic organizing, when combined with more traditional organizational views such as of routines and institutions, offer powerful new ways of thinking about these dynamics.
The objectives of this Special Issue are twofold. First, we wish to foster the development of cutting-edge research (theory and method) among scholars interested in organizational and institutional studies of the use and effects of data science and algorithms on decision-making. Second, we wish to continue building and strengthening the community of scholars engaged in that work, especially at the intersection of organization theory and information systems. In doing so, we reiterate Orlikowski and Barley’s call for synthesis of information systems and organizational studies scholars’ knowledge trajectories of technology change and institutional contexts. Since their call, there has been a growing convergence between these knowledge trajectories, culminating in studies of how actors remake institutional fields, change power relationships, and construct meanings about technology beyond institutionalized paths.
We can envision a variety of ways in which empirical papers can showcase the way in which interpretive algorithms affect assemblages, ecosystems, and fields. We stand on the shoulders of Barley & Orlikowski (2023:4) and their call for papers that navigate “futures far different from the pasts we have known” with “more in-depth empirical studies and less speculation and hype.”