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How are public libraries being remade in the digital era? Cultural institutions are increasingly expected to encompass 'digital' and prior research on digitalization in other sectors suggests that this will structure ways of organizing. Using longitudinal qualitative data, we explore how digital practices are creating significant changes in public libraries — not just shifting processes and services, but also critically, the very notion of what a public library is. We theorize our findings using agential realism which focuses us on performative outcomes. We consider how digitalization led to multiple shifts in the library's processes and services, generating direct changes in library work practices manifesting as intended and unintended consequences. We then extend our analysis to include the indirect corollary effects of library digitalization, examining how these dynamics are challenging core norms and values of the library. We find that digital transformation is displacing the central purpose of public libraries, with far reaching implications for the vital role that this cultural institution serves in sustaining communities. These findings shed a sobering light on the likely performative outcomes of digitalization for other cultural institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key challenge for enacting digital responsibility is that it entails orchestrating, creating, and distributing duties and obligations among diverse and loosely connected stakeholders of different stature. One of the criticisms leveled at Big Tech is that they are adept at reframing their duties and obligations, either through wilful blindness or in ways that reinforce their platform status, reproducing path dependencies. In this study, we attempt to understand the above by using a processual approach, wherein we analyse a longitudinal qualitative dataset gathered from thirty-eight earnings conference calls. We focus our grounded analysis on a major Big Tech company, Meta, examining how respondents position the firm's responsibilities in relation to key developments, such as the launch of regulatory regimes, advances in privacy preserving technologies, and salient major events like litigation, elections and the pandemic. We consider whether Meta's framing and reframing of their narrative about privacy provides insight into digital responsibilities. We conclude by asking whether Meta is setting up a path dependency by embedding AI as a 'technical solution' to regulatory pressure or offering enterprising opportunities for data responsibility through path creation, in other words will this be privacy taking or privacy making? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This symposium examines the myriad consequences wrought by digital transformations in organizations and industries: intended, unintended, and corollary. As categorized by Scott and Orlikowski (2022), intended consequences generated through technological change are usually visible and anticipated; unintended consequences are similarly visible and direct, but unanticipated; and less visible, indirect corollary effects occur when digitalization challenges institutional values, norms, and rules in industries, potentially displacing them. Papers in this symposium address research questions related to knowledge production, workers' mobility in labor markets, and change management, all with respect to how digitalization transforms organizations and industries. By exploring these questions in research contexts such as Wikipedia, digital labor markets, information services, and agencies that maintain public infrastructure, this symposium advances research on how digitalization transforms industries in not only a direct, but also indirect, pathways. By grappling with different kinds of "changes occurring at some temporal and spatial remove from the main events" (Orlikowski & Scott, 2023, 2), the four papers in this symposium provide the opportunity to clarify and build on conceptual differences among different types of technological changes and their outcomes using examples of industries being digitalized. Anticipating the future of Wikipedia's regime of knowing in the GenAI era Author: Shani Evenstein Sigalov; Tel Aviv U. Author: Lior Zalmanson; Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv U. Author: Stella Pachidi; U. of Cambridge Examining Workers' Mobility in Online Labor Markets Author: Hatim A. Rahman; Northwestern Kellogg School of Management Anticipatory Control in the Digital Transformation of Water Infrastructure Author: Virginia Leavell; Cambridge Judge Business School Software as subterfuge for subordination: Unintended consequences of digitalization in a library Author: Jennifer Lauren Nelson; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how and why accountability is performed online on social media websites and online review sites such as the travel site TripAdvisor. Evidence shows that online travel reviews have material effects on business and management, and can influence profit and loss. Practices of detachment and objectification are described as an integral part of knowledge production within TripAdvisor, where the knowledge produced is viewed as technical in nature and unbiased. The dynamic rearticulations that collectively produce TripAdvisor's online rankings as experienced by particular hotels are considered. The reconfiguration of relations of accountability in the travel sector via the enactment of online verification through social media is also discussed.

Accountability is considered to be critical to organizations' sustained performance and survival. Prior research has examined the structural and rhetorical response strategies that organizations use to manage accountability pressures from different stakeholders. With the advent of social media, where a dispersed, heterogenous, and pseudonymous "crowd" is able to express and disseminate their concerns about organizations and its workers, the structural and rhetorical response strategies used by organizations become less effective. How do organizations respond to accountability pressures from social media commentary and with what consequences for organizing? Adopting a performative approach, we conducted a multi-sited comparative study to examine this research question. Specifically, we investigated how organizations in two distinct service domains (emergency response and hospitality) responded to accountability pressures manifesting as social media commentary on two different platforms (Twitter and TripAdvisor). We find that organizations respond by actively engaging online with social media commentary, but end up enacting changes to their practices on the ground. Such changes shift ways of working by recalibrating risk, redeploying resources, and redefining service. Together, these practice changes reposition the core meanings, relations, activities, and outcomes of service work and reconfigure the boundaries of organizational accountability. Organizations, thus, become increasingly unclear about what they are held accountable for and uncertain about how, when, and to whom they are accountable. We synthesize these findings in a process model of crowd-based accountability and discuss the contributions of this study to research on accountability and organizing in the social media era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes different kinds of books distinct from one another? How are these boundaries produced and what does this tell us about the work of book publishing in the digital era? Our research focuses on metadata in book publishing and in particular on how these shape the manifestation of print and digital books in practice. Using a genealogical approach we bring the book's normally back-office "magic number" (ISBN) to the foreground. We find that the publisher supply chain apparatus was organized around this standard number and presumed the primary interface was the "book-as-container" (the physical book spine and cover). This misapprehension was made starkly public when book listings went online and began to "misfire." By attending to the history and contemporary life of metadata in the book publishing industry, we account for both its constitutive conditions and contemporary entailments. In so doing, we call attention to the critical agential cuts made by metadata - how they mark out content, make distinctions, and draw boundaries that make a significant difference to what content gets displayed, discovered, distributed, sold, read, and paid for. These differences are deeply consequential, having important performative implications for the book industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]