Call for Abstracts: “Bringing STS and the sociologies of work and organization together: A joint perspective for understanding digitalization?” (STS Graz 2023, May 8-10), deadline January 30th 2023

 

B.13 Bringing STS and the sociologies of work and organization together: A joint perspective for understanding digitalization?

Digital technologies, work, and organizations are tremendously interwoven and co-constructed. Whereas digitalization has become a ‘hot topic’ in the field of STS and sociology of work or sociology of organization in recent discussions, these discussions often tend to be separate from each other. For understanding the multiple sociotechnical phenomena associated with digitalization in a fruitful way, a common debate would be beneficial for both STS and the sociologies of work and organization.

In this panel, we want to invite scholars from STS, sociology of work and sociology of organization, to shed light on the digitalization of work in organizations with a joint perspective. We perceive the emerging research on the phenomenon of digitalization of work and organizations as an opportunity and necessity to bring STS on the one hand and sociology of work and sociology of organization on the other hand closer together. Therefore, we want to encourage a recursively nourishing debate between researchers working in those scientific communities. Contributions for this panel could reach from STS research, concerned with digitalization of work and organizations to papers from the sociologies of work or organization using or integrating concepts from STS to scrutinize the digitalization of work in organizations. We also especially welcome scholars curious in exploring this intersection with their submissions. Of course, contributions can be work-in-progress discussing current obstacles and challenges of combining STS and the sociologies of work and organization in one or another way. Consequently we invite researchers with theoretical, conceptual and empirical papers scrutinizing sociotechnical phenomena such as and not limited to:

Our panel will include presentations of the papers as well as a concluding discussion on the question of how to combine STS and sociology of work or sociology of organization, and on common challenges and goals. More pointedly we aim at discussing the question, if the digitalization of work and organizations might be a joint venture for the STS as well as the sociology of work/sociology of organization communities. Taking the idea of connecting different research communities working on digitalization seriously, we plan to foster these discussions by organizing an online-get-together for the authors in advance of the conference. This should allow us to reflect together on our own disciplines and where our research is situated as well as getting to know each other’s research interests.”