Data and Organization Studies: Aesthetics, emotions, discourse and our everyday encounters with data

Abstract

Despite the growing “data imperative” and “fetishization of data” across organizational contexts, critical scholars have adhered to a set of normative understandings for how people experience and engage with data and datafication in and around organizations: namely, as numbers and statistics that are “captured”, interpreted, and operationalized. In reality, however, data and datafication are experienced within organizational life in a multiplicity of ways that often have very little to do with numbers and statistics. In this essay, we shift our attention to these less overt and less examined ways in which data and datafication shape organizational life—specifically, the aesthetic, emotional, and discursive aspects of our everyday encounters with it. By attending to the multiple, complex, and nuanced entanglements of data and organization, organizational scholars will be better equipped to navigate the increasingly fraught terrain between technocratic data worship and anti-science politics that characterize the current political moment. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a more politicized, historicized, and democratized data studies that can support movements for social, economic, and ecological justice.