Abstract
The future of work will be measured. The increasing and widespread adoption of analytics, the use of digital inputs and outputs to inform organizational decision making, makes the communication of data central to organizing. This article applies and extends signaling theory to provide a framework for the study of analytics as communication. We report three cases that offer examples of dubious, selective, and ambiguous signaling in the activities of workers seeking to shape the meaning of data within the practice of analytics. The analysis casts the future of work as a game of strategic moves between organizations, seeking to measure behaviors and quantify the performance of work, and workers, altering their behavioral signaling to meet situated goals. The framework developed offers a guide for future examinations of the asymmetric relationship between management and workers as organizations adopt metrics to monitor and evaluate work.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | zmad023 |
| Journal | Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 1 2023 |
Funding
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-1750731. Additionally, the project described was supported in part by the National Center for Research Resources and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health, through grant UL1 TR001414 (Institute for Clinical and Translational Science at UC Irvine). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.
Keywords
- analytics
- commensuration
- data
- measurement
- metrics
- signaling
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Communication