Conference Track Themes
Track 1: The Digital Organization and Digital Organizing
Søren H. Jensen, Copenhagen Business School
In the age of big data and algorithmic management, the nature of organizing is changing. What is a digital organization? How do algorithms and big data affect organizing? How does digitalization affect leadership and management in organizations? How do the roles and responsibilities of humans and machines evolve in the digital organization? How do organizations transition to becoming digital? What are the challenges associated with these transitions, and what potential issues do they create? How do digital organizations compete? How do you consult in the digital organization? How do researchers and practitioners develop and share knowledge about digital organizing?
Track 2: Platforms, Ecosystems, Computational Social Science, and Big Data
Sabine Brunswicker, Purdue University
How do digital platform strategies impact the direction and the intensity of industry innovation? How do platform strategies affect competitive outcomes? How do multi-sided markets and network effects affect competition and innovation? How do innovation and competition interact in platform-based ecosystems? How do digital ecosystems differ from traditional supply-chains, or other networks of organizations? Are platform companies gathering too much power? How is this power exercised? To which extent might platform regulation solve competition issues, or, conversely, create different issues? Other welcome topics include crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and design of the platform architecture (and not just technical design but also design of information and Big Data shared with platform participants), computational social science that deal with Big Data and individuals in crowds and communities, AI and decision making in collective environments, the role of Big Data visualization and decision making.
Track 3: The Future of Managing People, Work, and Well-Being in the Digital Economy
Sandra Fisher, Clarkson University; Janet Marler, University at Albany - SUNY
This track theme is broadly focused on the implications of digitalization/Big Data on the nature, design, and future of managing people in organizations, work, careers, organizational and individual well-being, and employment relations. How is the digital economy shaping the way people work and organize (distance work, gig work, virtual teams, etc.), including the influence of information technology on how work, jobs and careers are designed and organized? What are the outcomes for individual well-being, diversity and inclusion, health, and work-life balance in the digital economy? What competencies are required by different employee groups to handle digitalization and Big Data? What are the influences, consequences, or contingencies of eHRM, digital HRM and HR Analytics on organizations, human capital, and employee attitudes and wellbeing? From the Big Data perspective, to what extent and how is Big Data being used in the management of people in organizations? What factors are associated with the decision to deploy Big Data in the management of people? What are the outcomes of the use of Big Data in the management of people in organizations? What are the ethical issues related to the use of Big Data in the employment relationship, and how are researchers and practitioners addressing those issues?
Track 4: Data Governance & Data Markets
Aija Leiponen, Cornell University
With nonexistent intellectual property rights and the legal and regulatory frameworks in flux, data commercialization is currently governed contractually and via organizational arrangements. As with other digital commodities, data business models tend to be complex and non-obvious. How can new or evolving business models facilitate data commercialization? When is data licensing feasible and when does data need to be embedded in other digital services? How do firms compete with data, i.e. can data provide differentiation in complex digital service arrangements? Will advances in computer science scale and enable open data markets or is data governance in the Internet of Things confined to limited data pools or data-sharing consortia? How will such pools or consortia be structured to enable networked data?
Track 5: Culture and Big Data in Digital Humanities
Candace Jones, University of Edinburgh
Increasingly, Humanities are using big data to understand narratives and plots, asking questions such as what makes a work successful. Digital Humanities use such methods as algorithmic analysis of text / videos, advanced visualization techniques, 3-D mapping of texts, and digitization of non-English and non-Latin-alphabet sources. This track welcomes contributions at the intersection of big data and humanities as well as the use of Digital Humanities tools to analyze business and management content, communications, and behavior. It tackles such questions as: What new insights can be gained from corporate discourse analysis? How do companies’ behaviors as manifested in a broader range of communications differ from official press / financial disclosure releases? What new insights can be gained from better visualization of, for example, board interlocks, strategic alliances, or patent co-citations?
Track 6: Governing the Corporation in the Age of Big Data
Karen Schnatterly, University of Missouri
Big data can connect firms more closely with all stakeholders, but how can companies use it? A digital platform can facilitate shareholders and other stakeholders communicating with directors and the firm—but do directors and the firm want this? Does this present an improvement in governance? In transparency? Will this increase social movements’ influence on the corporation? Will this allow stakeholders to coordinate action with respect to the corporation more easily and successfully? To the extent that big data increases transparency and communication, there can be benefits. There can also be a dark side. Some firms and stakeholders are already exploring this area. What can we learn from them?
