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date: 22 April 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter traces and interrogates media, technology, and organization in their foundational relations, their forms, and their constraining and loosening effects and affects. The folding of humans and technology works both ways: human bodies can, too, be apprehended prosthetically as extensions of technologies. The notion of media then applies to any object that conditions the structure of a certain situation and the specific possibilities of perceiving, acting, and thinking in it. If we begin with this understanding of technology and media as fundamental, conditional, and infrastructural, then how organization takes place is predicated upon such apparatuses. The task is then not one of finding better uses of desks, smartphones, presentation software, or high heels, for all of these have modes of subjectification scripted into them. Rather, it is remaining alive to the hesitations already provided: the glitches, accidents, misuses, and alternative projections, and to wander and wonder with them.

Keywords: organization, media, technology, media theory, organization studies, socio-materiality

Timon Beyes

Professor of Sociology of Organization and Culture, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany / Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Robin Holt

Professor, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Claus Pias

Professor of Media Theory and the History of Media, Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany

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