Join us on Thursday, January 23th, from 14-16 hrs (German time) for the third RUSTLab lecture of this winter term. Stefanie Büchner will present her work on “Who cares about data? Data Care Arrangements as Accomplishments in Everyday Organisational Practice”.
The increasing datafication of social life has led to a growing body of research on data work, which focuses on new data practices like self-tracking, new professions like data analysts or new occupational roles. In these new types of data work, people develop strong affective relations to data, and caring for data and sufficient data quality is key. However, this attention to ‘spectacular’ data work leads to a significant oversight: Much of the data work in everyday organisational practice is done by workers ‘somehow’, in addition to and alongside their existing tasks. To better understand mundane data work, we should explore why and how people in organisations care for data. Based on two case studies, Juliane Jarke and Stefanie Büchner introduced the concept of data care arrangements. Data care arrangements are configured through the ascription of values to (specific) data sets and the work of generating, maintaining, and repairing data. This data care work is not necessarily homogeneous in organised settings but can become stabilised in data care arrangements. Thus, the notion of data care arrangements underlines that data in everyday organisational practice are not an object of care per se but that reliable data care is a delicate accomplishment.
Stefanie Büchner studies processes of datafication and digitalisation in and between organisations using a comparative and qualitative perspective. Her research fields are public organisations, ranging from hospitals to social services and schools to “classical” administrations. After studying sociology at Bielefeld University, Stefanie received a PhD from University of Potsdam and worked as a postdoc at Bielefeld University and Leibniz University Hannover. Stefanie was a visiting fellow at UC Irvine with Geoffrey Bowker and at the Department for Digitalization at Copenhagen Business School. As a Freigeist-Fellow, she studies changes between organisations, technology and professions in case-based organisations (Project “Digital Cases”, VolkswagenStiftung). Since the summer of 2023, she has been a full professor for Digital Societies at the Sociology Department of Leibniz University Hannover.
Location: on campus (MB 4/165) and Zoom
Zoom Link
PW: RUSTlab
You will find additional resources and information on this term’s guiding theme Fabrication here on our website.