Organize

A pioneering systematic inquiry into—and mapping of—the field of media and organization
 

Media organize things into patterns and relations. As intermediaries among people and between people and worlds, media shape sociotechnical orders. At the same time, media are organized: while they condition different organizational forms and processes, they, too, are formed and can be re-formed. This intimate relation of media and organizing is timeless. Yet arguably, digital media technologies repose the question of organization—and thus of power and domination, control and surveillance, disruption and emancipation. Bringing together leading media thinkers and organization theorists, this book interrogates organization as an effect and condition of media. How can we understand the recursive relation between media and organization? How can we think, explore, critique, and perhaps alter the organizational bodies and scripts that shape contemporary life?

Organize will be of interest to scholars and students of new and old media, social organization, and technology. Moreover, the dialogical form of these essays provides a concise and path-breaking view on the recursive relation between technological media and social organization. The book therefore establishes and maps “media and organization” as a highly relevant field of inquiry, appealing to those with a critical interest in the technological conditioning of the social.

Timon Beyes is professor in sociology of organization and culture at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. 

Lisa Conrad is lecturer at the Institute for Sociology and Cultural Organisation, Leuphana University of Lüneburg.

Reinhold Martin is professor of architecture at Columbia University.

Geert Lovink is founder of the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. 

Ned Rossiter is professor of communication at Western Sydney University.