Confronting Digital Futures (Asynchronous Session)
Friendly Villagers and Digital Migrants : How Many Connections Does a Project Manager Need? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Williams
The answer is: “it depends”. Research published by Woolcock & Narayan (2000) on the topic of social capital concluded that both bonding and bridging ties are required to improve relations within and among other organizational entities such as community groups and firms. This paper seeks to combine that concept with the theory of Structural Holes (Burt, 2000) to determine how contemporary project teams operating in hyper-connected environments can best leverage their networks to fill gaps in expertise. Project teams can become introspective ‘Patriotic Gangs’ and adopt ‘satisficing’ solutions when the project team does not have adequate diversity, exposure, expertise or time to problem-solve effectively. Current research is shared that explores the relevance of and utility of peer networks to contemporary project teams to determine if they are operating as Friendly Villagers or Digital Migrants, and what might the optimal balance be.
The Future of the Higher Education Sector in Australia : From the Lens of a Skeptic View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Charu Hurria
COVID-19 has resulted in disruption of higher education sector in Australia. This study offers a conceptual paper looking at how the education system has evolved over the years and reached where it is now. COVID-19 has disrupted the traditional forms of teaching and learning and fast tracked the online teaching and learning models. This paper explores the challenges faced by the higher education section during the COVID times, the strategies adopted by universities/colleges to cope and survive as an industry. The paper also explores the future of the higher education sector and the role digitalisation may play in post- COVID times.
Looking for a Silver Lining in Online Social Intervention: The Case of Child Welfare Policy Workers in Times of COVID-19
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Javiera Garcia Meneses, Ivan Chanez Cortes, Paulina Montoya Ceballos
The emergence of COVID-19 has globally transformed the ways in which labor is organized, and child welfare policy work in Chile has been no exception. Nowadays, child welfare policy workers have to juggle between the burnout generated by teleworking; the online interventions in a context of scarce technological resources; and the concern for virtually safeguarding the well-being of children in situations of violence and abuse, tasks that were previously supported by a presential-affective-corporal bond (Rojas, 2018). This paper considers how these professionals have experienced this labor reorganization, and which have been the effects of this in these workers' subjective construction. We conducted a Digital Ethnography (Pink et al., 2016) with eight workers from different Accredited Collaborating Organizations of the Chilean National Child Service. Through textual-affective analysis (Cromby, 2012) we found that the use of technologies in social intervention has affected workers in different ways. On one hand, because of the difficulty of separating work and private life, these workers feel that their lives have been taken away from them and that they have been consumed by work. This has turned them into non-human robotic bodies (Chen, 2012), extensions of the technologies they work with. On the other hand, certain opportunities have also emerged within COVID-19 crisis. In effect, the use of technologies has allowed workers to know the everyday life of families with whom they work, which was not possible in face-to-face intervention spaces. All this has strengthened their emotional relationship with children and families, making possible online interventions.
To Artify or not to Artify?: Competing Institutional Logics and Digitalization in High-fashion Companies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Iva Petkova
This paper advances the use of artification and its constituent field-level processes of de-artification and re-artification as analytical tools in the framework of institutional theory to better understand how field-level logics of incumbents in creative fields are affected by new institutional realities of digitalizing practice and legitimation of foreign logics from outsider realms of e-commerce. Based on a qualitative study of strategic, positional, and technical executives in five European high-fashion companies and backed by a multi-year ethnography with one of the largest e-commerce companies, this paper shows how the response of fashion incumbents to digitalizing practice has been to swerve between competing institutional logics of de- and re-artification. These logics reflect divergent beliefs by executives on the continued existence of logics of artification in the midst of unprecedented institutional change.
