Workshop: Thinking Infrastructures
Rationale
Thinking Infrastructures envelops two meanings that inspire this workshop. On the one hand, Thinking Infrastructures points towards the various infrastructures: the informational, numerical and social infrastructures to name just a few, that constitute and condition empirical phenomena such as big data, risk and regulation policies, high-frequency trading, micro-finance etc. These infrastructures link together people and things, span boundaries, afford new ways of collaborating, disclose new worlds, and generate new desires. In doing so they structure the intentionality of decision-makers, constitute new organizational possibilities, and represent an apparatus of governmentality, among much else besides. On the other hand, Thinking Infrastructures alludes to the challenges of studying invisible infrastructures: they are conceptually unruly and empirically evasive. Quite literally, they operate “under the surface”, becoming visible upon breakdown. They are also, and perhaps as a result, rather underdeveloped academic concepts, with disciplinary interpretations that overlap and even conflict. Hence, this workshop invites investigations of at least two varieties: enquiries into infrastructures themselves--their construction, dereliction, transformation, breakdown, or significance--and enquiries into the theoretical nature of infrastructures and means of approaching and investigating them
Program:
Thursday October 1
12.30-12.45: Welcome and introduction
12.45-13.45: Michael Power, Department of Accounting, London School of Economics: Organizations and audit tails
13.45-14.00: Break
14.00-15.00: Juan-Pablo Pardo Guerra, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics: Infrastructures and the obduracy of invisible bureaucracies
15.00-15.15: Break
15.15-16.15: Neil Pollock, Edinburgh University Business School: From Market Devices to Market Infrastructures
16.15-16.30: Break
16.30-17.30: Tarleton Gillespie, Department of Communication, Cornell University: On platforms broad and deep
Friday October 2
9.00-10.00: Ignacio Farías, Munich Center for Technology in Society and the Faculty of Architecture of the TU München: A right to infrastructuring?
10.00-10.15: Break
10.15-11.15: Louise Amoore, Department of Geography, Durham University: Cloud Infrastructures: Computation and the Form of Data
11.15-11.30: Break
11.30-12.30: Andreas Folkers, Institute of Sociology, Goethe-UniversitätFrankfurt: Securing Infrastructural Operations in Finance - Business Continuity Management, Circulatory Capitalism and Disruptive Democracy
12.30-13.00: Summary and conclusions
Participation is free but sign up here.
For more information about the workshop please contact Martin Kornberger: mko.ioa@cbs.dk or the CBS Public-Private Platform: publicprivateplatform@cbs.dk
The workshop is organized by Mikkel Flyverbom (Department of Intercultural Communication and Management), Martin Kornberger, José Ossandón, Trine Pallesen (all Department for Organization), Ann-Christina Lange (Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy), Dane Pflueger & Jan Mouritsen (Department of Operations Management)
We would like to acknowledge the support of the CBS Public Private Platform, the Department of Organization, Department of Operations Management and the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management.