Dec 4, 2024, 13:15 - 14:45 (Central European Time CET)
Jukka is a Senior Research Fellow at the Unit of Information and Knowledge Management at the Faculty of Business and Management at Tampere University. He is a computational method specialist who has joined investigations on the dynamics of large-scale business ecosystems, the aftermath of terror attacks in hybrid media, and professional social matching. Over the last few years, he has focused on developing a methodology for using digital trace data to investigate and theorize the role of communicative AIs in organizing on digital platforms.
The talk will discuss computational methodology for inductively structuring digital trace data for insights on communicative organizing, using the case organizational routines on Slack.
Computational methodology introduces opportunities to make use of digital trace data for communicative organizing research. This presentation has two parts, a review of an investigation on the the communicative materialization of organizational routines as relational assemblages identifiable and accomplished in digital team communication and a broader methodological reflection of the computational approach in organizational communication research.
Studies have investigated organizational routine dynamics and the material role of artifacts shaping them. However, scant attention has been given to the performative nature of routines as they are talked into being in day-to-day organizational communication. To extend the current understanding, we propose and demonstrate an empirical approach to investigate routines materializing in team communication using digital trace data, specifically, conversation logs from organizational collaboration software. We adopt a constitutive view of communication and propose that organizational routines can be studied using naturally occurring conversational data to explore networks of communicatively materialized entities in organizational interaction. To illustrate this proposition, we explored a dataset of over 76,000 Slack messages with a combination of computational text mining, network analysis, and qualitative inquiry to identify assemblages of routine artifacts materialized across the communication episodes. Our analysis identified two kinds of routines materialized in team communication: production routines and creative routines. These routines emerge around assemblages of central and peripheral artifacts, respectively. Correspondingly, we identified two types of communicatively materialized artifacts: artifacts that are causing, enabling, or constraining a routine (routine-making artifacts) and artifacts that are made or summoned by a routine (routine-made artifacts). This study contributes to the emerging theorizations of routines as communication and studies on organizational routines by showing that routines, particularly those with an established process such as journalistic production, can be identified through the elements that constitute them. We conclude with a critical discussion of methodological approaches to computationally analyze communication data guided by organization theories.
In addition to presenting the case of tracing organizational routines, Jukka will discuss developing thinking about computational methodology as a kind of ethnography in the context of organization research, specifically through the communicative constitution of organization lense. The ability to make use of the computational methodology insists on integrated teamwork among researchers coming from different disciplines. Jukka will present pragmatic observations on how to organize such research in a way that dilutes the disciplinary boundaries and allows for developing a shared research imagination at team level.
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