From Performativity to Performances: Reconsidering Platforms’ Production of the Future of Work, Organizing, and Society
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11673Keywords:
platform, performance, performativity, technology, work, determinismAbstract
This essay takes as its starting point Gernot Grabher and Jonas König's (2020) piece, "Disruption, Embedded. A Polanyian Framing of the Platform Economy," and suggests focusing on how digital platforms are realized on the ground. We propose that the people experiencing platformization have a strong influence over the futures that platforms can evoke. To illuminate this interplay between people and platforms, we offer a taxonomy of three ways that people intervene in how platforms produce the future: innovation, articulation, and opposition. In doing so, we build on Grabher and König’s essay to enrich the analytical and predictive power of their framework. Moreover, we provide the beginnings of a theoretical framework of our own - namely, a sociology of people’s performances and their role in future-making - which we believe can contribute to ongoing discussions on the future of work and organizing.
References
Arendt, H. (1958). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken.
Barley, S.R. (1986). Technology as an Occasion for Structuring: Evidence from Observations of CT Scanners and the Social Order of Radiology Departments. Administrative Science Quarterly, 31(1), 78–108. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392767
Barley, S.R. (2019). Working Institutions. In T. Reay, T. B. Zilber, A. Langley, H. Tsoukas (Eds.), Institutions and Organizations: A Process View (pp. 12–32). New York: Oxford University Press.
Barley, S.R., Bechky, B.A., & Milliken, F.J. (2017). The Changing Nature of Work: Careers, Identities, and Work Lives in the 21st Century. Academy of Management Discoveries, 3(2), 111–115. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2017.0034
Barley, S.R., & Kunda, G. (2001). Bringing Work Back in. Organization Science, 12(1), 76–95. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.12.1.76.10122
Beane, M. (2019). Shadow Learning: Building Robotic Surgical Skill When Approved Means Fail. Administrative Science Quarterly, 64(1), 87–123. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0001839217751692
Bechky, B.A. (2011). Making Organizational Theory Work: Institutions, Occupations, and Negotiated Orders. Organization Science, 22(5), 1157–1167. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1100.0603
Beckert, J. (2016). Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
Beunza, D. (2019). Taking the Floor: Models, Morals, and Management in a Wall Street Trading Room. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.
Beunza, D., & Stark, D. (2004). Tools of the Trade: The Socio-Technology of Arbitrage in a Wall Street Trading Room. Industrial and Corporate Change, 13(2), 369–400. https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/dth015
Bijker, W.E., Hughes, T.P., & Pinch, T. (Eds.). (2012). The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, P. (2000). Méditations pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil.
Buolamwini, J., & Gebru, T. (2018). Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, (pp. 77–91). Available at http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf
Callon, M. (2007). What Does It Mean to Say That Economics Is Performative? In D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, & L. Siu (Eds.), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (pp. 311–357). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Collins, H. (2018). Artifictional Intelligence: Against Humanity’s Surrender to Computers. Hoboken: Wiley.
Elish, M., & Watkins, E.A. (2020). Repairing Innovation: A Study of Integrating AI in Clinical Care. Data and Society. https://datasociety.net/library/repairing-innovation/
Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What Is Agency? American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023. https://doi.org/10.1086/231294
Esposito, E., Stark, D., & Squazzoni, F. (2020). Society after COVID-19: An Editorial Note. Sociologica, 14(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11015
Gillespie, T. (2010). The Politics of “Platforms”. New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1461444809342738
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.
Goffman, E. (1983). The Interaction Order: American Sociological Association, 1982 Presidential Address. American Sociological Review, 48(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095141
Grabher, G., & König, J. (2020). Disruption, Embedded. A Polanyian Framing of the Platform Economy. Sociologica, 14(1), 95–118. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/10443
Gray, M.L., & Suri, S. (2019). Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. New York: Harcourt.
Hallett, T., Shulman, D., & Fine, G.A. (2009). Peopling Organizations: The Promise of Classic Symbolic Interactionism for an Inhabited Institutionalism. In P. Adler (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies: Classical Foundations (pp. 486–510). New York: Oxford University Press.
Hallett, T., & Ventresca, M.J. (2006). Inhabited Institutions: Social Interactions and Organizational Forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theory and Society, 35(2), 213–236. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-006-9003-z
Hochschild, A.R. (2016). Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press.
Hodson, R. (2001). Dignity at Work. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Irani, L.C., & Silberman, M.S. (2013). Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk. In W. E. Mackay, S. Brewster, & S. Bødker (Eds.), CHI ’13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 611–620). New York: ACM.
Jackson, S.J. (2014). Rethinking Repair. In T. Gillespie, P.J. Boczkowski, & K.A. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (pp. 221–239). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Kellogg, K.C., Valentine, M.A., & Christin, A. (2020). Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control. Academy of Management Annals, 14(1), 366–410. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2018.0174
Knorr Cetina, K., & Bruegger, U. (2002). Global Microstructures: The Virtual societies of Financial Markets. American Journal of Sociology, 107(4), 905–950. https://doi.org/10.1086/341045
Lamont, M. (2018). Addressing Recognition Gaps: Destigmatization and the Reduction of Inequality. American Sociological Review, 83(3), 419–444. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0003122418773775
Lebovitz, S., Lee, K.W., Watkins, E.A., Bechky, B., & Kellogg, K.C. (2020). Artificially Intelligent Futures: Technology, the Changing Nature of Work, and Organizing. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2020(1). https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2020.19930symposium
Lee, K.W. (2020). Augmenting or Automating? Breathing Life into the Uncertain Promise of Artificial Intelligence. Working Paper.
Lee, K.W., & Bechky, B.A. (2020). Anachronization: Loss through Changing Work, Organizations, and Institutions. Working Paper.
MacKenzie, D., & Millo, Y. (2003). Constructing a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange. American Journal of Sociology, 109(1), 107–145. https://doi.org/10.1086/374404
Merton, R.K. (1948). The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. The Antioch Review, 8(2), 193–210. https://doi.org/10.2307/4609267
Milkman, R. (2017). A New Political Generation: Millennials and the Post-2008 Wave of Protest. American Sociological Review, 82(1), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0003122416681031
Muniesa, F. (2014). The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn. London: Routledge.
Noble, S.U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.
Orlikowski, W.J., & Iacono, C.S. (2000). The Truth Is Not Out There: An Enacted View of the Digital Economy. In E. Brynjolfsson & B. Kahin (Eds.), Understanding the Digital Economy: Data, Tools, and Research (pp. 352–380). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Oudshoorn, N.E., & Pinch, T. (2003). How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Phillips, D. (2020). An Open Letter to Young Scholars on the COVID-19 Crisis. Columbia Business School Ideas at Work. https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/articles/ideas-work/open-letter-young-scholars-covid-19-crisis.
Qadri, R. (2020). Algorithmized But Not Atomized? How Digital Platforms Engender New Forms of Worker Solidarity in Jakarta. In A. Markham, J. Powles, T. Walsh, A.L. Washington (Eds.), AIES ’20: Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (p. 144). New York: ACM.
Rosenblat, A., & Stark, L. (2016). Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers. International Journal of Communication, 10, 3758–3784. Available at https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2016-10/apo-nid202756.pdf
Sachs, S.E. (2020). The Algorithm at Work? Explanation and Repair in the Enactment of Similarity in Art Data. Information, Communication, & Society, 23(11), 1689–1705. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1612933
Shestakofsky, B. (2017). Working Algorithms: Software Automation and the Future of Work. Work and Occupations, 44(4), 376–423. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0730888417726119
Simpson, I.H. (1989). The Sociology of Work: Where Have the Workers Gone?. Social Forces, 67(3), 563–581. https://doi.org/10.2307/2579528
Star, S.L., & Strauss, A. (1999). Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 8(1-2), 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008651105359
Stark, D. (2009). The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Stark, D. (2017). For What It’s Worth. In C. Cloutier, J.-P. Gond, & B. Leca (Eds.) Justification, Evaluation and Critique in the Study of Organizations. Contributions from French Pragmatist Sociology (pp. 383–397). Bingley: Emerald.
Stark, D. (Ed.). (2020). The Performance Complex: Competition and Competitions in Social Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tavory, I., & Eliasoph, N. (2013). Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation. American Journal of Sociology, 118(4), 908–942. https://doi.org/10.1086/668646
Tavory, I., & Fine, G.A. (2020). Disruption and the Theory of the Interaction Order. Theory and Society, 49, 365–385. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09384-3
Tocqueville, A.D. (1835). Democracy in America. New York: Penguin.
Vallas, S.P., & Christin, A. (2018). Work and Identity in an Era of Precarious Employment: How Workers Respond to “Personal Branding” Discourse. Work and Occupations, 45(1), 3–37. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0730888417735662
Watkins, E.A. (2020a). Took a Pic and Got Declined, Vexed and Perplexed: Facial Recognition in Algorithmic Management. In M. Bietz & A. Wiggins (Eds.) CSCW ’20: Conference Companion Publication of the 2020 on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 177–182). New York: ACM https://doi.org/10.1145/3406865.3418383
Watkins, E.A. (2020b). Facial Recognition and the Fairness Heuristic: Interactional Perceptions of Equity, Transparency, and Justice. Working Paper.
Weber, M. (1904). Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 20, 1–54.
Whittaker, M. [@mer__edith] (2020). The folk tradecraft of workers observing and assessing opaque algorithmic management systems then modifying their behavior in response is both heartbreaking and impressive “people’s research.” [Tweet]. Twitter, 1 September. https://twitter.com/mer__edith/status/1300878248059056134.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Kevin Woojin Lee, Elizabeth Anne Watkins
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
