Daskalaki, Maria, Zundel, Mike and Lenney, Peter (2012) Technology and process: towards cyborg identities in organization studies. In: 4th International Symposium on Process Organization Studies (PROS): Language and Communication @ Work: Discourse, Narrativity and Organizing; 21-23 Jun 2012, Kos, Greece. (Unpublished)

Abstract

Despite the interests of organizational scholars in issues of identity and technology, there has been only little consideration of the interrelations of both domains. By investigating intrinsic connections of domains of the social and material, technology, work and organization, prior accounts have gradually rendered human/technology boundaries fluid, yet they still largely operate with the base ingredients. In this paper, we investigate a processual reading of technology in which the nature of ‘technics’ is inherently fused with what it is to be ‘human’ (Stiegler 1994). We suggest that the consideration of technics as an originary movement urges us to integrate our understandings of identity and technology, posing new questions for organization studies. In order to capture the immensity of human-technology phenomena, we invoke the concept of the ‘cyborg’. Emanating from feminist technology studies, cyborgs fuse technics and humanness, bringing into critical relief the origins of actions and understandings of phenomena. By viewing identity and organizations as inherently technological, we argue that new insights arise when the search for an ‘ontological’ (organizational) identity is substituted by the analysis of differential reconfigurings of human and nonhuman, indeterminate agencies.

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