Towards Understanding Academia and Digitalisation in Their Relationship of Strong Relationality

• In Event: Social Constructions of Data and the Implications of Data Representation

Abstract

I start reformulating the conception of strong relationality in the kind of ontological manner that can open new insights into the relationship between academia and digitalisation, and enable novel research questions about them. The ontological analysis is not meant to be operating only at the abstract philosophical level. On the contrary, the goal is to approach them in their particularity and concreteness in order to make space for creative changes of perspective into the key matters.
I base my discussion on sociomateriality, which, as theoretically vibrant approach, has aroused growing interest among scholars of several fields. In a kind of manifesto text for sociomateriality, Orlikowski specifies the need for a new viewpoint in this way: “[…] these insights (of organization studies – SP) are limited in large part because the field has traditionally overlooked the ways in which organizing is bound up with the material forms and spaces through which humans act and interact” (Orlikowski 2007, 1435).
Though I accept sociomateriality’s basic angle, I actually think that sociomateriality in the explicated, well-known formulation does not fulfil its true radical potential. I will argue that reconceptualisation of ‘sociomateriality’ in the light of A. N. Whitehead’s processual ontology (Whitehead 1978) can better catch the essential goal of the approach and also reject certain criticism often aimed at the Orlikowskian conception of sociomateriality. Implications of this reconceptualisation for research on the relationships between academia and digitalisation are elaborated in a preliminary way.

Author

• Seppo Poutanen, University of Turku, Turku School of Economics