Organizations Decentered: Data Objects, Technology and Knowledge
探讨数字技术如何将数据从管理工具转变为组织认知和行动的核心资源，通过数据对象（如用户、产品）重塑知识过程，推动组织去中心化，对理解数字平台和组织变革有参考价值。
Data are no longer simply a component of administrative and managerial work but a pervasive resource and medium through which organizations come to know and act upon the contingencies they confront. We theorize how the ongoing technological developments reinforce the traditional functions of data as instruments of management and control but also reframe and extend their role. By rendering data as technical entities, digital technologies transform the process of knowing and the knowledge functions data fulfil in socioeconomic life. These functions are most of the times mediated by putting together disperse and steadily updatable data in more stable entities we refer to as data objects. Users, customers, products, and physical machines rendered as data objects become the technical and cognitive means through which organizational knowledge, patterns, and practices develop. Such conditions loosen the dependence of data from domain knowledge, reorder the relative significance of internal versus external references in organizations, and contribute to a paradigmatic contemporary development that we identify with the decentering of organizations of which digital platforms are an important specimen.