Watchers, Watched, and Watching in the Digital Age: Reconceptualization of Information Technology Monitoring as Complex Action Nets

Despite increasing studies of information technology (IT) monitoring, our understanding of how IT-mediates relations between the watcher and watched remains limited in two areas. First, either traditional actor-centric frameworks assuming predefined watcher-watched relationships (e.g., panopticon or synopticon) are adopted or monitoring actors are removed to focus on data flows (e.g., dataveillance, assemblages, panspectron). Second, IT monitoring research predominantly assumes IT artifacts to be stable, bounded, designed objects, with prescribed uses which provides an oversimplified view of actor relationships. To redress these limitations, a conceptual framework of veillance applicable to a variety of possible IT or non-IT-mediated relationships between watcher and watched is developed. Using the framework, we conduct a conceptual review of the literature, identifying IT-enabled monitoring and transformations of actors, goals, mechanisms and foci and develop an action net model of IT veillance where IT artifacts are theorized as equivocal, distributable and open for diverse use, open to edits and contributions by unbounded sets of heterogenous actors characterized by diverse goals and capabilities. The action net of IT veillance is defined as a flexible decentralized interconnected web shaped by multidirectional watcher-watched relationships, enabling multiple dynamic goals and foci. Cumulative contributions by heterogenous participants organize and manipulate the net, having an impact through influencing dispositions, visibilities and the inclusion/exclusion of self and others. The model makes three important theoretical contributions to our understanding of IT monitoring of watchers and watched and their relationships. We discuss implications and avenues for future studies on IT veillance.

Governing Death: Organizing End-of-life Situations

This paper examines the organization of death. Through an ethnographic study, we examine how a geriatrics department guides the end of life. Drawing on Agamben, we show that organizations that are dedicated to life, but regularly confronted with death, develop dispositifs (mechanisms, technologies, practices and relationships) to turn biopolitics (power over life) into thanatopolitics (a regime of death). We also show how the inherently political meaning of life disrupts such government of death. The inclusion of political life in a regime of death disrupts organizational practices that find themselves facing fundamental questions of what makes a life worth living, who can decide not to prolong life, and based on which criteria.

Neo-Institutional Theory and Organization Studies: A Mid-Life Crisis?

We trace the development of neo-institutional theory in Organization Studies from a marginal topic to the dominant theory. We show how it has evolved from infancy, through adolescence and early adulthood to being a fully mature theory, which we think is now facing a mid-life crisis. Some of the features of this mid-life crisis include over-reach, myopia, tautology, pseudo-progress and re-inventing the wheel. To address these problems, we argue that institutional theorists should limit the range of the concept, sharpen their lens, avoid tautologies and problematize the concept. By doing this, we think institutional theorists could develop a narrower and more focused conception of institutions.

Organizations and Violence: The Child as Abject-Boundary in Ireland’s Industrial Schools

What role do organizations play in the enactment of large-scale violence against a specific group of people? In this paper, I depart from existing literature that focuses on violence within organizations, and instead emphasize the influence of external actors. Specifically, I examine the ways in which supporting organizations can first legitimate, and then actively maintain, violence against a group of vulnerable people. Drawing upon a unique, recently-published archive of data, these ideas are developed through an analysis of a case study in which large-scale violence was carried out on a vulnerable group: Ireland’s industrial school children. I draw on Kristeva’s notion of abjection to show how an excluded, distasteful ‘other’ is discursively co-constructed such that violence is seen as acceptable, and then actively maintained in the abject position as a boundary object that encompasses shared meanings across different organizations. Contributions include a framework for understanding the role of organizations in the perpetration of large-scale violence, which highlights how violence can be legitimated via the construction of subjects as abject boundary objects in extreme cases, and how this abject position can be maintained through inter-organizational dynamics comprising excessive rules and regulation, the suppression of care, and active policing. Finally, scholarship on boundary objects is extended by this paper’s interrogation of the ‘dark side’ of this inter-group phenomenon, an area that is rarely studied.

Powers of Romance

Problematic organizational relationships have recently been at the core of highly visible media coverage. Most analyses of sexual relations in organizations have been, however, simplistic and unidimensional, and have placed insufficient systematic emphasis on the role of governmentality in the social construction of organizational romance. In this article, we proceed in two theoretical steps. First, we elaborate a typology of organizational romance that covers different manifestations of this nuanced process. We think of these as organizational strategies of governmentality. Second, we elaborate and identify liminal cases that fall into the interstices of the four predominant ways of managing sexual relationships in organizations. We think of these as vases of liquid love and life that evade the border controls of regulation by governmentality. Finally, we relate these issues to debates about the nature of the civilizational process and suggest hypotheses for future research.

Theorizing and Researching the Dark Side of Organization

The paper offers an introduction to research that concerns itself with the ‘dark side’ of organization and attempts to bring theoretical resources from a range of disciplines to bear upon the problem. This stream of research has emerged most visibly since the 1990s, although its concerns can be found in much earlier research. Frustrations with the tendencies of mainstream work to overlook, ignore or suppress difficult ethical, political and ideological issues, which may well mean life or death to some people, has in recent years led to a research that self-identifies its concerns as being with the dark side. We structure our review around key contributions on the dark side of organizational behaviour, mainly in psychology but also including the concept of organizational misbehaviour; the sociology of the dark side, with particular reference to mistakes, misconduct and disaster; and a wider range of critical approaches to the dark side including Marxist, post-Marxist and postcolonial perspectives. We also undertake a review of methodologies for investigating dark side phenomena, and finally introduce the five papers that comprise this special issue.