Reading :: Data Rules

 Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy

By Cristina Alaimo, Jannis Kallinikos

This book is open access, so you can just click through and download the PDF. I recommend that you do so! Although I’ll write just a short review today, I found the book well worth reading and I intend to revisit it as I think through data.

Specifically, the authors are interested in how data have become central to contemporary life, economy, and society. Drawing on social cognition and communication, they “examine the social and economic transformations associated with the unprecedented diffusion and increasing socioeconomic relevance of data” (p.1). They argue that through the digital revolution, life has undergone “datafication” (p.1) — something that spoke loudly to me as I thought about how I obsess over the sleep scores and training readiness scores that my Garmin watch serves up to me. Such data are not just technical, they perform “semiotic, epistemic, and communication functions” in economy and society (p.5). And thus “data making and data use constitute essential areas of social inquiry, distinct from contemporary data science and the framing of data in predominantly technical terms” (p.9). In particular, studying transformations from this perspective can give us new insights into organizations:

These transformations signal a change of paradigmatic import associated with the decentering of organizations. The notion of firms (and formal organizations more broadly) as centered systems makes sense when these systems can keep an external world at arm’s length and obtain a relative operational independence from it. This partition into an internal set of contingencies that could be paid heed to and managed on a continuous basis and an external world that is attended to only periodically is increasingly undone by the machinery of digital data, their dispersion, heterogeneity, uncertain origin, and steady reproduction and renewal/ (p.12)

The authors tackle this argument in two parts. In “Foundations,” they explore the epistemic foundations of data (revisiting Schmant-Besserat’s work with the origins of writing) and examining the digital data revolution, the data life cycle, and surveillance. In “Social and economic transformations,” they examine how digital data work to decenter organizations, pushing us instead toward platforms and ecosystems. Along the way, they consider how digital platforms impact the market economy. They conclude by persuasively calling for a social science of data.

If you’re interested in data, markets, organizations, or social science more broadly, definitely pick it up. I intend to revisit it as I continue thinking about all of these.