Staying with the trouble of data. The performative organizational effects of data as matters of care in educational organizations and leadership

TY - ABST

T1 - Staying with the trouble of data. The performative organizational effects of data as matters of care in educational organizations and leadership

AU - Juelskjær, Malou

AU - Staunæs, Dorthe

AU - Raffnsøe, Sverre

PY - 2019/5/23

Y1 - 2019/5/23

N2 - Abstract In the shape of numbers, graphs, interviews and other metric and non-metric representations, high tech big data and low tech small data permeate, build and (re)design the architecture of current educational organizations. Due to an all-embracing impact and use, data have not only begun to form the infrastructure of contemporary organizations, but are even re-ontologizing and re-politizing educational organizations as they have concomitantly begun reforming racialized-gendered subjectivities in educational contexts in radically new and precarious ways. When mapping the present ‘cyborganization’ of the organization of life in organizations, this paper contribution inspired by Puig de la Bellacasa shifts the focus from regarding data as Matters of Facts and even Matters of Concern (Latour 2004) to examining them as Matters of Care (Bellacasa 2017), creating new decentered organizational and ontological settings as they raise the ethically and politically demanding questions of how to respond adequately to new kinds of knowledge production and their impact in ways that care. To investigate the performative effects of datafication, the paper examines, experiments with and interventions in data leadership ethics formulated in the belly of educational organizations by leaders that “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2015) and try to construct a not yet existing shared “common ground” (Harvey 2018), as they focus on developing and supporting capabilities for school leadership that take care of their organizations and organizational surroundings, including their members, in ethically sound ways, rather than aiming to develop an ethics or a code of practice formulated in terms of general rules suitable for policing. Taking its point of departure in a large project on experimenting with data leadership/governance in two Danish municipalities and 16 schools (Juelskjær et al. 2018; Staunæs et al. 2018), this paper aims to make a contribution to how a close investigation and affirmative critique (Raffnsøe 2015) of this new regime of data governance may result in ethically sound data-literacy and develop a mapping of ways of going about precarious regimes of data as well as their subjectifying and racialised-gendered effects. The paper draws on an empirical archive that consists of hours of audio-recordings from four 2-days learning laboratories with principals and superintendents, 16 baseline interviews, 32 sparring conversations, 16 mappings of data landscapes, and 16 prototypes of data leadership. Furthermore, it draws on a repository of newspaper articles and online discussions concerning ‘use and abuse’ of data in education in the context of the Danish education system. The paper deploys a post-humanist (Barad 2007, 2010, 2014) framework meeting theories of biopolitics (Foucault 2008; Weheliye 2014) feminist, intersectional (Spillers et al. 2007; Wynther 2006) and decolonial literature (Mhembe 2003). Of course, attempts to map and monitor a territory by ‘datafying’ its inhabitants have a longer pre-history, present inter alia in the mappings of the New World and its ships with enslaved human cargo (Browne 2015), as well as in Bentham’s Panopticon (Foucault 1991), Taylor’s Scientific Management and ways of accounting (Rose 1991). Nevertheless, a threshold has been reached insofar as data are now produced and deployed by politicians, professionals, leaders and students themselves at all levels and for all kind of purposes such as evaluation, informed decision-making, development, initiation of activities and closing down of other initiatives in ever faster, more profound and increasing ways. Informed by the trend of governing through data (Ozga 2009) or governmentality by data, data are currently to an increasing extent produced to represent the effects of the organization and the organizational subjectivities, as well as to affect organizations and organizational subjectivities by this kind of representation. Data do more than they show (Staunæs et al. 2018). Data and datafication produce decisive effects despite the fact that users and producers of data often question their status as an unmediated or even adequate representation of reality. Situated in a US-context, Norman Denzin (2013) has formulated this paradox in the following manner: “Data Died a Long Time Ago,” however, Data Are Alive and Well”. The effects of data and increasing datafication forcefully affect the ontology of educational organizations. Instead of simply reconfirming what is actually the case - the factual (Ryle 1966, p. 112), a certain ‘whatness’ or what is at hand (Heidegger 1976; 179, § 43c; 1980) or the actual (Deleuze 1996) - the impact of datafication somewhat paradoxically proves to have the capacity to re-enforce another very real aspect of the world: the plane of the virtual or the coming into being of a force (virtus) that acts in and through the present as it continually modifies the given and forces it to reshape (Raffnsøe 2013: 249; Massumi 2002). As becomes apparent in the empirical material studied, educational organizations and their members are constantly affected and challenged data as an expression of the virtual as a force that effects and is felt through its effects; and educational leaders carrying responsibility for developing data governance and leadership are constantly affected and challenged by data to develop forms of data governance and leadership that respond adequately and in ethically sound ways to data as well as to their anticipated effects as forces that act in and through the present. At the same time, the ontology of organizational subjectivities is modified as they are opened, objectified, registered, identified, sorted out, quantified, accumulated, splintered, measured, valued, compared, re-assembled, monitored, predicted, explored, potentialised in ever new manners. Some data may be about some aspects of individual and organizational bodies, competences, performances and lacks, while some data may be about other parts. Thereby these heterogeneous data-assemblages (Lupton 2016, 2018) are not just reflecting, but diffracting (splintering and ‘cutting-together-apart’ (Barad 2007, 2014) organizational subjectivities in unforeseen ways. Some dataset may bring in categorical lines and makes (parts of) data-subjectivities enter frameworks of race and gender, while others (perhaps on the surface) seems to ignore the very same social categories (Browne 2015; Mills 2007). Rather than presenting ‘just another’ negative critique of these forms of data governance, this paper contributes with a critique beyond criticism that reaches out to measure implications of the virtual, the dispositions, and the anticipations to carry the hope of ‘something better’ (Raffnsøe 2013, 2015). As the pervasiveness of data is not likely to go away, we look for ways of thinking-with and challenging the current situation. We take inspiration from Haraways’ (environmental/chthulucene) call to ‘stay with the trouble’. A call to neither ignore nor to give in/up but rather to search for ways of ‘making-with’ (sympoiesis) those already complex entanglements – entanglements in this case of data, organization, leadership, subjectivities (in and across times and spaces), in order to find ways of ‘building more livable futures’ (Haraway 2016). In addition, the paper contributes with ‘thinking technologies’ (Haraway & Gane 2006) useful for new forms of methodologies of governance/management/leadership that take into account the precariousness of how data comes to matter and have performative effects. Data governance and the ways subjectivities are splintered and re-assembled demands a leadership methodology involving an ethico-politico ‘data-literacy’ that ‘stays with the trouble of data-governance and through careful experiments that try to cope with the performative effects of the very same. While knowledge about documentation, measurement and representation is still needed, current forms of ‘data-literate’ governance must also imply ways of knowing and sensing the performative effects of processes of documentation, measurement and representation as well as decisions to not document, measure and represent. This experimentation needs to take into account historical and racialized-gendered traces of searching, mapping, measuring and naming bodies, competences and performances (Browne 2015; Noble 2018; Wynther 2006) but also of historical and racialized patterns of ignoring and “mistaking the maps from the territories” (Wynther 2006). References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and Hauntological Relations. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240-268. doi:DOI:10.366/E1754850010000813. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting Diffraction. Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168-187. Bellacasa, M. P. d. l. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculatives Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Browne, S. (2015). Dark Matters. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Denzin, N. (2013). The Death of Data. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 353-356. DOI: 10.1177/1532708613487882 Deleuze, G. (1996). L’actuel et le Virtuel. In: Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet (eds.) Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 177–185 Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics. London: Palgrave. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. & Gane, N. (2006). "When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to be Done?" Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(7-8), 135-157. DOI: 10.1177/0263276406069228 Harvey, Robert (2017). Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Heidegger, M. (1976). Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit. Bern: Francke Verlag. Heidegger, M. (1979). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Heidegger, Martin (1980). Die Zeit des Weltbildes. In: Martin Heidegger: Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann: 69–104.Juelskjær, Malou; Bjerg, Helle; Olesen, Kristian Gylling; Staunæs, Dorthe (2018). Datas hvordan: Kapabilitet til etisk data-literacy. Arbejdspapir no. 2: 1-22. Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Conern Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225-248. Lupton, D. (2016). The quantified Self. Harvard: MIT Press. Lupton, D. (2018). How do data come to matter? Living and becoming with personal data. Big data and Society, 5(2). Doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718786314. Massumi, Brian (2002). Parables for the virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Mhembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40. Mills, C. (2007). White Ignorance. In S. Sullican & N. Tuana (Eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. New York: SUNY Press. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press. Ozga, J. (2009). Governing education through data in England: From regulation to selfevaluation. Journal of Education Policy, 24(2), 149-162. DOI: 10.1080/0305006032000162020 Raffnsøe, S. (2015). What is critique? The Critical State of Critique in the Age of Criticism. Outlines, 18(1), 28-60. Rose, N. (1991). Governing by numbers: Figuring out democracy. Accounting, Organizations and Society 16(7), 673-692. DOI: 10.1016/0361-3682(91)90019-B Spillers, H. J., & al., e. (2007). "Whatcha Gonna Do?: Revisiting 'Mama's Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book'; A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan.". Women Studies Quarterly, 35(1-2), 299-309. Staunæs, D., Bjerg, H., Juelskjær, M., & Olesen, K. G. (2018). Datas hvad: Data gor mere end de viser. Data-literacy. Ledelse af elevers læring og trivsel. Aarhus Universitet og Københavns Professionshøjskole, Herlev Kommune og Tårnby Kommune, A.P. Møller Fonden. København. Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas Viscus. Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Wynther, S. (2006). On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Re-imprisoned Ourselves in our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project. In L. R. Gordon & J. A. Gordon (Eds.), Not Only the Master's Tools: African- American Studies in Theory and Practice (pp. 107-169). Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

AB - Abstract In the shape of numbers, graphs, interviews and other metric and non-metric representations, high tech big data and low tech small data permeate, build and (re)design the architecture of current educational organizations. Due to an all-embracing impact and use, data have not only begun to form the infrastructure of contemporary organizations, but are even re-ontologizing and re-politizing educational organizations as they have concomitantly begun reforming racialized-gendered subjectivities in educational contexts in radically new and precarious ways. When mapping the present ‘cyborganization’ of the organization of life in organizations, this paper contribution inspired by Puig de la Bellacasa shifts the focus from regarding data as Matters of Facts and even Matters of Concern (Latour 2004) to examining them as Matters of Care (Bellacasa 2017), creating new decentered organizational and ontological settings as they raise the ethically and politically demanding questions of how to respond adequately to new kinds of knowledge production and their impact in ways that care. To investigate the performative effects of datafication, the paper examines, experiments with and interventions in data leadership ethics formulated in the belly of educational organizations by leaders that “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2015) and try to construct a not yet existing shared “common ground” (Harvey 2018), as they focus on developing and supporting capabilities for school leadership that take care of their organizations and organizational surroundings, including their members, in ethically sound ways, rather than aiming to develop an ethics or a code of practice formulated in terms of general rules suitable for policing. Taking its point of departure in a large project on experimenting with data leadership/governance in two Danish municipalities and 16 schools (Juelskjær et al. 2018; Staunæs et al. 2018), this paper aims to make a contribution to how a close investigation and affirmative critique (Raffnsøe 2015) of this new regime of data governance may result in ethically sound data-literacy and develop a mapping of ways of going about precarious regimes of data as well as their subjectifying and racialised-gendered effects. The paper draws on an empirical archive that consists of hours of audio-recordings from four 2-days learning laboratories with principals and superintendents, 16 baseline interviews, 32 sparring conversations, 16 mappings of data landscapes, and 16 prototypes of data leadership. Furthermore, it draws on a repository of newspaper articles and online discussions concerning ‘use and abuse’ of data in education in the context of the Danish education system. The paper deploys a post-humanist (Barad 2007, 2010, 2014) framework meeting theories of biopolitics (Foucault 2008; Weheliye 2014) feminist, intersectional (Spillers et al. 2007; Wynther 2006) and decolonial literature (Mhembe 2003). Of course, attempts to map and monitor a territory by ‘datafying’ its inhabitants have a longer pre-history, present inter alia in the mappings of the New World and its ships with enslaved human cargo (Browne 2015), as well as in Bentham’s Panopticon (Foucault 1991), Taylor’s Scientific Management and ways of accounting (Rose 1991). Nevertheless, a threshold has been reached insofar as data are now produced and deployed by politicians, professionals, leaders and students themselves at all levels and for all kind of purposes such as evaluation, informed decision-making, development, initiation of activities and closing down of other initiatives in ever faster, more profound and increasing ways. Informed by the trend of governing through data (Ozga 2009) or governmentality by data, data are currently to an increasing extent produced to represent the effects of the organization and the organizational subjectivities, as well as to affect organizations and organizational subjectivities by this kind of representation. Data do more than they show (Staunæs et al. 2018). Data and datafication produce decisive effects despite the fact that users and producers of data often question their status as an unmediated or even adequate representation of reality. Situated in a US-context, Norman Denzin (2013) has formulated this paradox in the following manner: “Data Died a Long Time Ago,” however, Data Are Alive and Well”. The effects of data and increasing datafication forcefully affect the ontology of educational organizations. Instead of simply reconfirming what is actually the case - the factual (Ryle 1966, p. 112), a certain ‘whatness’ or what is at hand (Heidegger 1976; 179, § 43c; 1980) or the actual (Deleuze 1996) - the impact of datafication somewhat paradoxically proves to have the capacity to re-enforce another very real aspect of the world: the plane of the virtual or the coming into being of a force (virtus) that acts in and through the present as it continually modifies the given and forces it to reshape (Raffnsøe 2013: 249; Massumi 2002). As becomes apparent in the empirical material studied, educational organizations and their members are constantly affected and challenged data as an expression of the virtual as a force that effects and is felt through its effects; and educational leaders carrying responsibility for developing data governance and leadership are constantly affected and challenged by data to develop forms of data governance and leadership that respond adequately and in ethically sound ways to data as well as to their anticipated effects as forces that act in and through the present. At the same time, the ontology of organizational subjectivities is modified as they are opened, objectified, registered, identified, sorted out, quantified, accumulated, splintered, measured, valued, compared, re-assembled, monitored, predicted, explored, potentialised in ever new manners. Some data may be about some aspects of individual and organizational bodies, competences, performances and lacks, while some data may be about other parts. Thereby these heterogeneous data-assemblages (Lupton 2016, 2018) are not just reflecting, but diffracting (splintering and ‘cutting-together-apart’ (Barad 2007, 2014) organizational subjectivities in unforeseen ways. Some dataset may bring in categorical lines and makes (parts of) data-subjectivities enter frameworks of race and gender, while others (perhaps on the surface) seems to ignore the very same social categories (Browne 2015; Mills 2007). Rather than presenting ‘just another’ negative critique of these forms of data governance, this paper contributes with a critique beyond criticism that reaches out to measure implications of the virtual, the dispositions, and the anticipations to carry the hope of ‘something better’ (Raffnsøe 2013, 2015). As the pervasiveness of data is not likely to go away, we look for ways of thinking-with and challenging the current situation. We take inspiration from Haraways’ (environmental/chthulucene) call to ‘stay with the trouble’. A call to neither ignore nor to give in/up but rather to search for ways of ‘making-with’ (sympoiesis) those already complex entanglements – entanglements in this case of data, organization, leadership, subjectivities (in and across times and spaces), in order to find ways of ‘building more livable futures’ (Haraway 2016). In addition, the paper contributes with ‘thinking technologies’ (Haraway & Gane 2006) useful for new forms of methodologies of governance/management/leadership that take into account the precariousness of how data comes to matter and have performative effects. Data governance and the ways subjectivities are splintered and re-assembled demands a leadership methodology involving an ethico-politico ‘data-literacy’ that ‘stays with the trouble of data-governance and through careful experiments that try to cope with the performative effects of the very same. While knowledge about documentation, measurement and representation is still needed, current forms of ‘data-literate’ governance must also imply ways of knowing and sensing the performative effects of processes of documentation, measurement and representation as well as decisions to not document, measure and represent. This experimentation needs to take into account historical and racialized-gendered traces of searching, mapping, measuring and naming bodies, competences and performances (Browne 2015; Noble 2018; Wynther 2006) but also of historical and racialized patterns of ignoring and “mistaking the maps from the territories” (Wynther 2006). References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and Hauntological Relations. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240-268. doi:DOI:10.366/E1754850010000813. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting Diffraction. Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168-187. Bellacasa, M. P. d. l. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculatives Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Browne, S. (2015). Dark Matters. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Denzin, N. (2013). The Death of Data. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 353-356. DOI: 10.1177/1532708613487882 Deleuze, G. (1996). L’actuel et le Virtuel. In: Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet (eds.) Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 177–185 Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics. London: Palgrave. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. & Gane, N. (2006). "When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to be Done?" Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(7-8), 135-157. DOI: 10.1177/0263276406069228 Harvey, Robert (2017). Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Heidegger, M. (1976). Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit. Bern: Francke Verlag. Heidegger, M. (1979). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Heidegger, Martin (1980). Die Zeit des Weltbildes. In: Martin Heidegger: Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann: 69–104.Juelskjær, Malou; Bjerg, Helle; Olesen, Kristian Gylling; Staunæs, Dorthe (2018). Datas hvordan: Kapabilitet til etisk data-literacy. Arbejdspapir no. 2: 1-22. Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Conern Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225-248. Lupton, D. (2016). The quantified Self. Harvard: MIT Press. Lupton, D. (2018). How do data come to matter? Living and becoming with personal data. Big data and Society, 5(2). Doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718786314. Massumi, Brian (2002). Parables for the virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Mhembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40. Mills, C. (2007). White Ignorance. In S. Sullican & N. Tuana (Eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. New York: SUNY Press. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press. Ozga, J. (2009). Governing education through data in England: From regulation to selfevaluation. Journal of Education Policy, 24(2), 149-162. DOI: 10.1080/0305006032000162020 Raffnsøe, S. (2015). What is critique? The Critical State of Critique in the Age of Criticism. Outlines, 18(1), 28-60. Rose, N. (1991). Governing by numbers: Figuring out democracy. Accounting, Organizations and Society 16(7), 673-692. DOI: 10.1016/0361-3682(91)90019-B Spillers, H. J., & al., e. (2007). "Whatcha Gonna Do?: Revisiting 'Mama's Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book'; A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan.". Women Studies Quarterly, 35(1-2), 299-309. Staunæs, D., Bjerg, H., Juelskjær, M., & Olesen, K. G. (2018). Datas hvad: Data gor mere end de viser. Data-literacy. Ledelse af elevers læring og trivsel. Aarhus Universitet og Københavns Professionshøjskole, Herlev Kommune og Tårnby Kommune, A.P. Møller Fonden. København. Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas Viscus. Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Wynther, S. (2006). On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Re-imprisoned Ourselves in our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project. In L. R. Gordon & J. A. Gordon (Eds.), Not Only the Master's Tools: African- American Studies in Theory and Practice (pp. 107-169). Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

M3 - Konferenceabstrakt til konference

T2 - 14TH ORGANIZATION STUDIES WORKSHOP: TECHNOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION

Y2 - 23 May 2019 through 25 May 2019

ER -