Task Force: Digital Organizing at HIIG

The task force Digital Organizing is a group of researchers who study the implications of digital practices for the processes of organizing.

Active

Berlin

In doing so, we work in an exploratory and flexible manner with external researchers, policymakers, and business professionals across multiple projects and disciplines. Specifically, we aim to conduct and foster research on digital organizing, establish a network of organizing experts, and promote knowledge transfer and exchange. To facilitate regular dialogue across groups of researchers and experts, we organize panels and workshops and give talks about the phenomena of digital organizing. Digital organizing combines phenomena as diverse as AI-powered organizational decision-making and real-time, global activist networking to organize climate action. Thereby, our conceptual work seeks to identify the commonalities and differences between these phenomena, theorizing how digital technologies have transformed processes of organizing. We note two sets of affordances of “the digital”: datafication and connectivity, which impact integration and distribution as the core processes of all organizing. We specifically explain how the digital intensifies both processes. First, datafication affords the centralizing, converging, and controlling elements of organizing (integration). Second, connectivity enables the diversifying, decentralizing, dispersing, and dividing elements of organizing (distribution). Moreover, we theorize that digital organizing allows for concurrent and mutual reinforcement of these two antithetical processes of integration and distribution.