Journal ArticleDOI
Accountability in Action? The case of a database purchasing decision
Daniel Neyland,Steve Woolgar +1 more
TLDR
The paper examines the ways in which ideas of accountability - involving considerations such as 'value for money' - inform the practical processes of deciding about the purchase of a new database technology.Abstract:
The increasing prevalence of audit in university settings has raised concerns about the potentially adverse effects of invasive measures of performance upon the conduct of research and generation of knowledge. What sustains the current commitment to audit? It is argued that in order to address this question we need to understand how and to what extent notions of accountability are played out in practice. This is illustrated through the analysis of materials from an ethnographic study of 'good management practice' in the deployment of technologies in university settings. The paper examines the ways in which ideas of accountability - involving considerations such as 'value for money' - inform the practical processes of deciding about the purchase of a new database technology.read more
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"Opening up" and "closing down" power, participation, and pluralism in the social appraisal of technology
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the role of power in science and technology and identify key commonalities transcending the analysis/participation dichotomy, concluding that greater appreciation is required in both analytic and participatory appraisal to facilitate the opening up (rather than the closing down) of governance commitments on science and technologies.
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The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors demonstrate the value of Foucault's conception of discipline for understanding organizational responses to rankings using a case study of law schools, and explain why rankings have pe...
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Evaluating the Audit Explosion
TL;DR: In this paper, a framework for greater comparative sensitivity is suggested, both in cross-national and cross-sectoral terms, which focuses on variation in the knowledge base, formal organization, and operational dimensions of auditing.
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Reconfiguring relations of accountability: Materialization of social media in the travel sector
TL;DR: Using research on user-generated content, an on-going field study of small businesses in a remote geographical area for whom TripAdvisor has changed ‘the rules of the game,’ explores the moral and strategic implication of this transformation.
Reconfiguring relations of accountability: Materialization of social media in the travel sector
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine online rating and ranking mechanisms and analyze how their performance reconfigures relations of accountability, and explore the moral and strategic implication of this transformation in the travel sector.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Organizational Accountability of Technological Work
Graham Button,Wes Sharrock +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors address the problem examined by sociologists of ''Big Science'' -the co-ordination of individuals on large-scale projects -in this case, industrial technology projects.
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The uncertain sciences
TL;DR: The Uncertain Sciences as discussed by the authors is a collection of books that have taken time, in which the author reflects on the reading and thoughts of many years, and attempts to see whether they can all add up and sustain hope.