ABSTRACT
Towards the end of Making Our Way Through the World, there are observations about the potential impact of both information technology and the multinational enterprise in disturbing the contexts in which reflexivity is practised, with the potential to favour the exercise of autonomous reflexivity in particular (Archer 2007: 320-1). In this contribution I seek to combine these two terms with a view to assessing the impact on reflexivity of the widespread use of information and communication technology (ICT) within organizations, with a particular focus on data intensive applications. I am not concerned with the extra-organizational use of applications such as social networking, important though these might be for reflexivity. The discussion of these is understandable, because their use is publicly exercised, but it can obscure the importance of what Kallinikos (2006) calls the ‘deep web’, that is, the myriad applications which run within organizations. My focus is on formal work organizations, often of a large and for-profit nature, because that is both where the putative impact is stronger and where more research has been carried out. Much of the discussion relates to managerial and professional staff, often covered under the broad rubric of ‘knowledge workers’ (Burris 1993). That latter term is notoriously slippery of definition, as is the term ‘knowledge’ itself (Lyons 1988). Some dimensions of the debate in the organizational studies literature will emerge during the main body of the discussion, but I provide a brief overview of the contending positions in the literature. It is clear from this that most of the work is not developed either from a critical realist perspective or from a concern with reflexivity, but there are useful insights that I believe can be gleaned.
