Theo Vurdubakis
Biographic Data
| ID | 200295 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Theo Vurdubakis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Theo |
| FAMILY NAME | Vurdubakis |
| SIGNATURE | VURDUBAKIS T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6446-4144 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 117 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Alignment and Articulation Work in Computer Mediated Organization
The concept of ‘alignment’ has been commonly used to refer to the re-organizations of the world deemed necessary in order to accommodate the workings of complex technological systems. However, such re-organizations also, and inevitably, dis-organize the settings where such technologies are deployed. This, in turn, incites further orderings – and thus further dis-orderings. Complex (if often invisible) patterns of ‘articulation work’ typically eme…
Envisioning Amazonia: Geospatial technology, legality and the (dis)enchantments of infrastructure
The article discusses the sociotechnical infrastructures of deforestation detection in the Brazilian Amazon and the forms of visibility and legality these enact. It draws upon a long-term ethnographic study of how digital infrastructures impinge upon, and are enacted as, social relations. We focus upon the role of satellite images in these processes and on how the arrangements for their production and circulation become sites where knowledge and …
Licence to kill? On the organization of destruction in the 21st century
War, the organized destruction of human beings, of human lifeworlds and modes of livelihood, has long been regarded as outside the usual preoccupations of organization studies. And yet, as the various on-going “asymmetric wars” increasingly become the taken for granted background noise of contemporary life, this aloofness becomes difficult to maintain. This special issue then is an initial contribution to a long overdue conversation. By way of in…
Something happened: Spectres of organization/disorganization at the airport
The article explores the practical accomplishment of organization at an international airport during the course of a number of ‘security alerts’ that disrupted routine ‘modes of ordering’ (Law, 1994). Airports, we suggest, invite us to re-think ‘organization’ as the partial, contingent and always-incomplete outcome of complex order(ing)s and disorder(ing)s played out across various spaces, agencies and materials. When ‘something happens’ we begin…
On the naming of monsters: Organization, (in)equality and diversity in the age of technological reproduction
Purpose – The pupose of this paper is twofold. First, to consider the cultural reception of recent developments in genetic technology and human reproduction, particularly in relation to the prospect of human cloning and the advent of the “designer human”; and second, to explore the ways in which public discussion of these developments presuppose and recast issues of diversity, difference and (in)equality. Design/methodology/approach – The researc…
On the Pragmatics of Inscription: Detecting Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon
Methods' and their devices have been conventionally viewed as the means through which the move from world to representation (and back again) might be reliably performed. An alternative view, perhaps most clearly exemplified by the post-ANT empirical programme of 'material semiotics', sees methods and devices as integral to the ways particular 'realities' are enacted in practices of inscription and intervention. Drawing upon this latter work, the …
Enacting the Global in the Age of Enterprise Resource Planning
In this article we seek to address 'the experience of work in a global context' by revisiting the relationship between globalisation and information technologies and attributions of local and global effects. We do this through an empirical investigation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, information systems which are purported to enable the institution and the enactment of global business practices. Rather than looking for the metrics…
Codes and Codings in Crisis: Signification, Performativity and Excess
The connections between forms of code and coding and the many crises that currently afflict the contemporary world run deep. Code and crisis in our time mutually define, and seemingly prolong, each other in 'infinite branching graphs' of decision problems. There is a growing academic literature that investigates digital code and software from a wide range of perspectives -power, subjectivity, governmentality, urban life, surveillance and control,…
Bodies, Technologies and Action Possibilities: When is an Affordance
Borrowed from ecological psychology, the concept of affordances is often said to offer the social study of technology a means of re-framing the question of what is, and what is not, 'social' about technological artefacts. The concept, many argue, enables us to chart a safe course between the perils of technological determinism and social constructivism. This article questions the sociological adequacy of the concept as conventionally deployed. Dr…
Enacting Airports: Space, Movement and Modes of Ordering
In the era of an increasingly `light' and `liquid' modernity (Bauman, 2000) airports appear to be privileged and distinctive sites of organization, constitutive of what Castells calls a `space of flows' that is helping to extend and integrate the so-called `network age' of global economy and `glocal' culture. This paper draws on original empirical research at Fulchester International Airport and studies the movement of various subjects and object…
The night of the bug: Technology, risk and (dis)organization at the fin de siècle
Euro-American forms of social organization are increasingly performed via ever more intricate computer systems and networks. Against this backdrop, the corrosive spectre of computer failure has assumed the role of the 'network society's dreaded other, the harbinger of dis-organization and dis-order.At the close of the twentieth century anxiety over the probable effects and consequences of the so-called 'Millennium Bug' provided a stark contrast t…
IBM's Chess Players: On AI and Its Supplements
This article investigates the ways in which the reporting of technological developments in artificial intelligence (AI) can serve as occasions in which Occidental modernity's cultural antinomies are played out. It takes as its reference point the two chess tournaments (in 1996 and 1997) between the then world champion Gary Kasparov and the IBM dedicated chess computers Deep Blue and Deeper Blue and shows how these games of chess came to be seen a…
Electronic Cash and the Virtual Marketplace: Reflections on a Revolution Postponed
By the late 1990s the notion of the `virtual' had become a key term in attempts to render meaningful the changes being brought about by new information and communication technologies on extant forms of enterprise and organizing. Many commentators had already identified the financial services sector as a site where the transformative powers of the new electronic technologies would be most visibly enacted. Drawing upon a two-year ethnographic inves…
Transformative Capacity, Information Technology, and the Making of Business 'Experts
This paper explores the making of experts and the basis of claims to expertise in corporate organisational settings. The performance of expertise within organisations is increasingly associated with the implementation and use of integrated business information systems which purport to abstract the world into an informational form to make businesses run more efficiently. We argue that as these systems are put to work to replace the calculations of…
The Secret of Yucca Mountain: Reflections on an Object in Extremis
The processes through which boundaries are made and unmade-conceptually, socially, and materially-have been of enduring interest to a wide range of social scientific disciplines including sociology, anthropology, geography, science studies, etc. The subject matter of this paper-the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository in Nye county, Nevada, which is meant to keep such waste safe for 10 000 years-constitutes, we contend, a case study…
The Outer Limits: Monsters, Actor Networks and the Writing of Displacement
This article focuses on science fiction and actor network theory as ways of writing displacement which are relevant to organization studies. Recent work within organizational theory and related (sub)disciplines has suggested that the articulation of organization as a privileged site of presence is made possible by that which is Othered and excluded (or rather deferred) as representing disorganization and disorder. Organizations in this view const…
Disrupted Boundaries: New Reproductive Technologies and the Language of Anxiety and Expectation
In this Comment, we elaborate upon Mulkay's discussion of the rhetorics of hope and fear in the UK debate over research on human embryos, by focusing on the narrative strategies and cultural presuppositions that allow certain technological developments to be (re)presented as `hopeful' or `fearsome'. We argue that boundary talk and its associated vocabularies of purity and pollution provide Mulkay's rhetorics with a semantic construction kit. They…
Re-Presenting Technology: It Consultancy Reports as Textual Reality Constructions
This paper examines the reports produced by management consultants as exercises in textual reality construction. Concentrating on a particular variant of this genre - namely, the information technology (IT) strategy report - its focus is on the ways in which 'reality' and the forms of knowledge appropriate to it are constituted in the course of certain communicative practices. More specifically, we look at the practices that aim to control techno…
Bodies, Technologies and Action Possibilities: When is an Affordance
Borrowed from ecological psychology, the concept of affordances is often said to offer the social study of technology a means of re-framing the question of what is, and what is not, 'social' about technological artefacts. The concept, many argue, enables us to chart a safe course between the perils of technological determinism and social constructivism. This article questions the sociological adequacy of the concept as conventionally deployed. Dr…
On the Pragmatics of Inscription: Detecting Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon
Methods' and their devices have been conventionally viewed as the means through which the move from world to representation (and back again) might be reliably performed. An alternative view, perhaps most clearly exemplified by the post-ANT empirical programme of 'material semiotics', sees methods and devices as integral to the ways particular 'realities' are enacted in practices of inscription and intervention. Drawing upon this latter work, the …
Codes and Codings in Crisis: Signification, Performativity and Excess
The connections between forms of code and coding and the many crises that currently afflict the contemporary world run deep. Code and crisis in our time mutually define, and seemingly prolong, each other in 'infinite branching graphs' of decision problems. There is a growing academic literature that investigates digital code and software from a wide range of perspectives -power, subjectivity, governmentality, urban life, surveillance and control,…
Re-Presenting Technology: It Consultancy Reports as Textual Reality Constructions
This paper examines the reports produced by management consultants as exercises in textual reality construction. Concentrating on a particular variant of this genre - namely, the information technology (IT) strategy report - its focus is on the ways in which 'reality' and the forms of knowledge appropriate to it are constituted in the course of certain communicative practices. More specifically, we look at the practices that aim to control techno…
The Secret of Yucca Mountain: Reflections on an Object in Extremis
The processes through which boundaries are made and unmade-conceptually, socially, and materially-have been of enduring interest to a wide range of social scientific disciplines including sociology, anthropology, geography, science studies, etc. The subject matter of this paper-the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository in Nye county, Nevada, which is meant to keep such waste safe for 10 000 years-constitutes, we contend, a case study…
Disrupted Boundaries: New Reproductive Technologies and the Language of Anxiety and Expectation
In this Comment, we elaborate upon Mulkay's discussion of the rhetorics of hope and fear in the UK debate over research on human embryos, by focusing on the narrative strategies and cultural presuppositions that allow certain technological developments to be (re)presented as `hopeful' or `fearsome'. We argue that boundary talk and its associated vocabularies of purity and pollution provide Mulkay's rhetorics with a semantic construction kit. They…
Something happened: Spectres of organization/disorganization at the airport
The article explores the practical accomplishment of organization at an international airport during the course of a number of ‘security alerts’ that disrupted routine ‘modes of ordering’ (Law, 1994). Airports, we suggest, invite us to re-think ‘organization’ as the partial, contingent and always-incomplete outcome of complex order(ing)s and disorder(ing)s played out across various spaces, agencies and materials. When ‘something happens’ we begin…
Envisioning Amazonia: Geospatial technology, legality and the (dis)enchantments of infrastructure
The article discusses the sociotechnical infrastructures of deforestation detection in the Brazilian Amazon and the forms of visibility and legality these enact. It draws upon a long-term ethnographic study of how digital infrastructures impinge upon, and are enacted as, social relations. We focus upon the role of satellite images in these processes and on how the arrangements for their production and circulation become sites where knowledge and …
Transformative Capacity, Information Technology, and the Making of Business 'Experts
This paper explores the making of experts and the basis of claims to expertise in corporate organisational settings. The performance of expertise within organisations is increasingly associated with the implementation and use of integrated business information systems which purport to abstract the world into an informational form to make businesses run more efficiently. We argue that as these systems are put to work to replace the calculations of…
Re-Presenting Technology: It Consultancy Reports as Textual Reality Constructions
This paper examines the reports produced by management consultants as exercises in textual reality construction. Concentrating on a particular variant of this genre - namely, the information technology (IT) strategy report - its focus is on the ways in which 'reality' and the forms of knowledge appropriate to it are constituted in the course of certain communicative practices. More specifically, we look at the practices that aim to control techno…
Disrupted Boundaries: New Reproductive Technologies and the Language of Anxiety and Expectation
In this Comment, we elaborate upon Mulkay's discussion of the rhetorics of hope and fear in the UK debate over research on human embryos, by focusing on the narrative strategies and cultural presuppositions that allow certain technological developments to be (re)presented as `hopeful' or `fearsome'. We argue that boundary talk and its associated vocabularies of purity and pollution provide Mulkay's rhetorics with a semantic construction kit. They…
The Outer Limits: Monsters, Actor Networks and the Writing of Displacement
This article focuses on science fiction and actor network theory as ways of writing displacement which are relevant to organization studies. Recent work within organizational theory and related (sub)disciplines has suggested that the articulation of organization as a privileged site of presence is made possible by that which is Othered and excluded (or rather deferred) as representing disorganization and disorder. Organizations in this view const…
The Secret of Yucca Mountain: Reflections on an Object in Extremis
The processes through which boundaries are made and unmade-conceptually, socially, and materially-have been of enduring interest to a wide range of social scientific disciplines including sociology, anthropology, geography, science studies, etc. The subject matter of this paper-the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository in Nye county, Nevada, which is meant to keep such waste safe for 10 000 years-constitutes, we contend, a case study…
Electronic Cash and the Virtual Marketplace: Reflections on a Revolution Postponed
By the late 1990s the notion of the `virtual' had become a key term in attempts to render meaningful the changes being brought about by new information and communication technologies on extant forms of enterprise and organizing. Many commentators had already identified the financial services sector as a site where the transformative powers of the new electronic technologies would be most visibly enacted. Drawing upon a two-year ethnographic inves…
Transformative Capacity, Information Technology, and the Making of Business 'Experts
This paper explores the making of experts and the basis of claims to expertise in corporate organisational settings. The performance of expertise within organisations is increasingly associated with the implementation and use of integrated business information systems which purport to abstract the world into an informational form to make businesses run more efficiently. We argue that as these systems are put to work to replace the calculations of…
Enacting Airports: Space, Movement and Modes of Ordering
In the era of an increasingly `light' and `liquid' modernity (Bauman, 2000) airports appear to be privileged and distinctive sites of organization, constitutive of what Castells calls a `space of flows' that is helping to extend and integrate the so-called `network age' of global economy and `glocal' culture. This paper draws on original empirical research at Fulchester International Airport and studies the movement of various subjects and object…
The night of the bug: Technology, risk and (dis)organization at the fin de siècle
Euro-American forms of social organization are increasingly performed via ever more intricate computer systems and networks. Against this backdrop, the corrosive spectre of computer failure has assumed the role of the 'network society's dreaded other, the harbinger of dis-organization and dis-order.At the close of the twentieth century anxiety over the probable effects and consequences of the so-called 'Millennium Bug' provided a stark contrast t…
IBM's Chess Players: On AI and Its Supplements
This article investigates the ways in which the reporting of technological developments in artificial intelligence (AI) can serve as occasions in which Occidental modernity's cultural antinomies are played out. It takes as its reference point the two chess tournaments (in 1996 and 1997) between the then world champion Gary Kasparov and the IBM dedicated chess computers Deep Blue and Deeper Blue and shows how these games of chess came to be seen a…
Bodies, Technologies and Action Possibilities: When is an Affordance
Borrowed from ecological psychology, the concept of affordances is often said to offer the social study of technology a means of re-framing the question of what is, and what is not, 'social' about technological artefacts. The concept, many argue, enables us to chart a safe course between the perils of technological determinism and social constructivism. This article questions the sociological adequacy of the concept as conventionally deployed. Dr…
Codes and Codings in Crisis: Signification, Performativity and Excess
The connections between forms of code and coding and the many crises that currently afflict the contemporary world run deep. Code and crisis in our time mutually define, and seemingly prolong, each other in 'infinite branching graphs' of decision problems. There is a growing academic literature that investigates digital code and software from a wide range of perspectives -power, subjectivity, governmentality, urban life, surveillance and control,…
Enacting the Global in the Age of Enterprise Resource Planning
In this article we seek to address 'the experience of work in a global context' by revisiting the relationship between globalisation and information technologies and attributions of local and global effects. We do this through an empirical investigation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, information systems which are purported to enable the institution and the enactment of global business practices. Rather than looking for the metrics…
On the Pragmatics of Inscription: Detecting Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon
Methods' and their devices have been conventionally viewed as the means through which the move from world to representation (and back again) might be reliably performed. An alternative view, perhaps most clearly exemplified by the post-ANT empirical programme of 'material semiotics', sees methods and devices as integral to the ways particular 'realities' are enacted in practices of inscription and intervention. Drawing upon this latter work, the …
On the naming of monsters: Organization, (in)equality and diversity in the age of technological reproduction
Purpose – The pupose of this paper is twofold. First, to consider the cultural reception of recent developments in genetic technology and human reproduction, particularly in relation to the prospect of human cloning and the advent of the “designer human”; and second, to explore the ways in which public discussion of these developments presuppose and recast issues of diversity, difference and (in)equality. Design/methodology/approach – The researc…
Something happened: Spectres of organization/disorganization at the airport
The article explores the practical accomplishment of organization at an international airport during the course of a number of ‘security alerts’ that disrupted routine ‘modes of ordering’ (Law, 1994). Airports, we suggest, invite us to re-think ‘organization’ as the partial, contingent and always-incomplete outcome of complex order(ing)s and disorder(ing)s played out across various spaces, agencies and materials. When ‘something happens’ we begin…
Licence to kill? On the organization of destruction in the 21st century
War, the organized destruction of human beings, of human lifeworlds and modes of livelihood, has long been regarded as outside the usual preoccupations of organization studies. And yet, as the various on-going “asymmetric wars” increasingly become the taken for granted background noise of contemporary life, this aloofness becomes difficult to maintain. This special issue then is an initial contribution to a long overdue conversation. By way of in…
Envisioning Amazonia: Geospatial technology, legality and the (dis)enchantments of infrastructure
The article discusses the sociotechnical infrastructures of deforestation detection in the Brazilian Amazon and the forms of visibility and legality these enact. It draws upon a long-term ethnographic study of how digital infrastructures impinge upon, and are enacted as, social relations. We focus upon the role of satellite images in these processes and on how the arrangements for their production and circulation become sites where knowledge and …
Alignment and Articulation Work in Computer Mediated Organization
The concept of ‘alignment’ has been commonly used to refer to the re-organizations of the world deemed necessary in order to accommodate the workings of complex technological systems. However, such re-organizations also, and inevitably, dis-organize the settings where such technologies are deployed. This, in turn, incites further orderings – and thus further dis-orderings. Complex (if often invisible) patterns of ‘articulation work’ typically eme…
Sociology (16 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Political science (10 works) · Information Systems Theories and Implementation (8 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works)