Armin Beverungen | Leuphana University (original) (raw)

Book Chapters by Armin Beverungen

The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence: Net Politics in the Era of Learning Algorithms, 2019

In this chapter I focus on the changes in algorithmic trading in financial markets brought about ... more In this chapter I focus on the changes in algorithmic trading in financial markets brought about by developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Financial trading has for a long time been dominated by highly sophisticated forms of data processing and computation in the dominance of the "quants". Yet over the last two decades high-frequency trading (HFT), as a form of automated, algorithmic trading focused on speed and volume rather than smartness, has dominated the arms race in financial markets. I want to suggest that machine learning and AI are today changing the cognitive parameters of this arms race, shifting the boundaries between "dumb" algorithms in HFT and "smart" algorithms in other forms of algorithmic trading. Whereas HFT is largely focused on data internal and dynamics endemic to financial markets, new forms of algorithmic trading enabled by AI are enlarging the ecology of financial markets through ways in which automated trading draws on a wider set of data such as social data for analytics such as sentiment analysis. I want to suggest that to understand the politics of these shifts it is insightful to focus on cognition as a battleground in financial markets, with AI and machine learning leading to a further redistribution and new temporalities of cognition. A politics of cognition must grapple with the opacities and temporalities of algorithmic trading in financial markets, which constitute limits to the democratization of finance as well as its social regulation.

Nach der Revolution. Ein Brevier Digitaler Kulturen, 2017

Im algorithmischen Management, in dem Algorithmen als Teil von vernetzten Computersystemen Manage... more Im algorithmischen Management, in dem Algorithmen als Teil von vernetzten Computersystemen Managementaufgaben in Organisationen ubernehmen, werden Exekutivmacht und Rechenkraft neu verschaltet. Wie entwickeln sich dadurch Organisation und Management, und wie wird Handlungsmacht in digitalen Kulturen verteilt?

The Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology, and Organization Studies, 2020

This chapter interrogates the executive dashboard as a contemporary example of the deployment of ... more This chapter interrogates the executive dashboard as a contemporary example of the deployment of computation in management. Conceptualizing the dashboard as an interface, it explores how it reconfigures human-machine relations and their respective intelligences. The dashboard separates the executive manager and the computational system, as much as it augments both in their capacities for decision and control. Human decision making emerges as a residuality and an exception to computational processes, while decision making is also distributed within and delegated to the technical system. The dash boarding of human-machine intelligences produces a smartness characterizing contemporary computation, management, and organization.

Journal Papers by Armin Beverungen

Theory, Culture & Society, 2018

Certain strands of contemporary media theory are concerned with the ways in which computational e... more Certain strands of contemporary media theory are concerned with the ways in which computational environments exploit the 'missing half-second' of human perception and thereby influence, control or exploit humans at an affective level. The 'technological unconscious' of our times is often understood to work at this affective level, and high-frequency trading is regularly provided as a primary illustrative example of the contagious dynamics it produces. We challenge and complicate this account of the relation between consciousness, affect and media technologies by drawing on the recent work of N. Katherine Hayles and by focusing in detail on the ways in which the 'costs of consciousness' are accounted for and negotiated in high-frequency trading. We suggest that traders actively develop modes of awareness accounting for the costs of consciousness, and that the necessary 'stupidity' of high-frequency trading algorithms as well as competition pose limits to the full automation of financial markets.

Archiv für Mediengeschichte, 2017

Hochfrequenzhandel, in dem Algorithmen fast in Lichtgeschwindigkeit Aufträge auf den Finanzmärkte... more Hochfrequenzhandel, in dem Algorithmen fast in Lichtgeschwindigkeit Aufträge auf den Finanzmärkten dieser Welt ausführen, wurde in den letzten Jahren in den Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften langsam mehr Aufmerksamkeit zuteil. Nicht zuletzt durch den Flash Crash vom 6. Mai 2010, währenddessen Hochfrequenz-Algorithmen sich gegenseitig affizierten und so in kürzester Zeit den Dow Jones zum Einsturz brachten, wurde in der Öffentlichkeit deutlich, wie sehr automatisierter Handel allgemein Finanzmärkte prägt und zu kaum beherrschbaren Dynamiken führt. Hochfrequenzhandel ist aus medienkulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive gerade deswegen interessant, weil er mit der medientechnologischen Beschaffenheit von Finanzmärkten spielt.

Organization Studies, Apr 1, 2015

In this paper we explore how so-called ‘social media’ such as Facebook challenge Marxist organiza... more In this paper we explore how so-called ‘social media’ such as Facebook challenge Marxist organization studies. We argue that understanding the role of user activity in web 2.0 business models requires a focus on ‘work’, understood as value productive activity, that takes place beyond waged labour in the firm. A reading of Marx on the socialization of labour highlights the emerging figure of ‘free labour’, which is both unpaid and uncoerced. Marxist work on the production of the ‘audience commodity’ provides one avenue for understanding the production of content and data by users as free labour, but this raises questions concerning the distinction between productive and unproductive labour which is central to Marx’s labour theory of value.
The Marxist literature on ‘the becoming rent of profit’ allows for a partial understanding of how the value produced by free labour is captured, thereby developing the understanding of the economic dimension of ‘free labour’ as unpaid. It overstates, however, the ‘uncontrolled’ side of ‘free labour’, and neglects the ways in which this work is managed so as to ensure that it is productive. We therefore call for a return to Marxist labour process analysis, albeit with an
expanded focus on labour and a revised understanding of control associated with digital protocols. On this basis, a Marxist organization studies can contribute to an understanding of the political economy of digital capitalism.

In this paper we explore how so-called ‘social media’ such as Facebook challenge Marxist organiza... more In this paper we explore how so-called ‘social media’ such as Facebook challenge Marxist organization studies. We argue that understanding the role of user activity in web 2.0 business models requires a focus on ‘work’, understood as value productive activity, that takes place beyond waged labour in the firm. A reading of Marx on the socialization of labour highlights the emerging figure of ‘free labour’, which is both unpaid and uncoerced. Marxist work on the production of the ‘audience commodity’ provides one avenue for understanding the production of content and data by users as free labour, but this raises questions concerning the distinction between productive and unproductive labour which is central to Marx’s labour theory of value. The Marxist literature on ‘the becoming rent of profit’ allows for a partial understanding of how the value produced by free labour is captured, thereby developing the understanding of the economic dimension of ‘free labour’ as unpaid. It overstates, however, the ‘uncontrolled’ side of ‘free labour’, and neglects the ways in which this work is managed so as to ensure that it is productive. We therefore call for a return to Marxist labour process analysis, albeit with an expanded focus on labour and a revised understanding of control associated with digital protocols. On this basis, a Marxist organization studies can contribute to an understanding of the political economy of digital capitalism.

In this paper we explore the case of Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK, as a neighbourhood in a city whic... more In this paper we explore the case of Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK, as a neighbourhood in a city which has appropriated the discourse of the creative industries from the bottom up in order to foster its regeneration against capital’s art of rent. We show how Stokes Croft’s self-branding as a cultural quarter has led to struggles over the creative and cultural commons thus produced, which we conceptualise as value struggles where localised value practices clash with capital’s imposition of value. Our case study including two vignettes points both to the productivity of such value struggles in producing new value practices understood as commoning, as well as the limits of reproducing a common life in the face of existing financial and property regimes. Stokes Croft therefore serves as a case in point of the tragedy of the urban commons and points to potential ways of overcoming it.

Urban Studies, 2014

In this paper we explore the case of Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK, as a neighbourhood in a city whic... more In this paper we explore the case of Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK, as a neighbourhood in a city which has appropriated the discourse of the creative industries from the bottom up in order to foster
its regeneration against capital’s art of rent. We show how Stokes Croft’s self-branding as a cultural quarter has led to struggles over the creative and cultural commons thus produced, which
we conceptualise as value struggles where localised value practices clash with capital’s imposition of value. Our case study including two vignettes points both to the productivity of such value struggles in producing new value practices understood as commoning, as well as the limits of reproducing a common life in the face of existing financial and property regimes. Stokes Croft therefore serves as a case in point of the tragedy of the urban commons and points to potential ways of overcoming it.

In this paper we explore the financialisation of the university, and how it is possible that univ... more In this paper we explore the financialisation of the university, and how it is possible that universities behave as if they were private corporations despite legally being corporations with a charitable status. We argue that this is largely attributable to financialisation, which creates tension with the university’s charitable status. The paper commences with a brief history of incorporation, and examines developments in corporate governance. With the dominance of finance, and the treatment of institutions as mere nexus of contracts, distinctions between public and private become redundant. The paper continues with an account of the effects of financialisation on university governance, under which the university acts increasingly like a for-profit corporation, with its financial governance in direct contradiction to its charitable status. Here, the university emerges as a key site of neoliberalism, where financialised subjects are shaped. Finally, we examine to what extent the financialisation of the university may be halted through a reflection on its status as a charitable corporation.

The article opens with a critical analysis of the dominant business model of for-profit, academic... more The article opens with a critical analysis of the dominant business model of for-profit, academic publishing, arguing that the extraordinarily high profits of the big publishers are dependent upon a double appropriation that exploits both academic labour and universities’ financial resources. Against this model, we outline four possible responses: the further development of open access repositories, a fair trade model of publishing regulation, a renaissance of the university presses, and, finally, a move away from private, for-profit publishing companies toward autonomous journal publishing by editorial boards and academic associations.

Business schools have become implicated in the widespread demonisation of the financial classes. ... more Business schools have become implicated in the widespread demonisation of the financial classes. By educat- ing those held most responsible for the crisis – financial traders and speculators – they are said to have produced ruthlessly talented graduates who have ambition in abundance but little sense for social responsi- bility or ethics. This ethical lack thrives upon the trading floor within a compelling critique of the complicity of the pedagogy of the business school with the financial crisis of the global economy. An ethical turn within the curriculum is now widely encouraged as a counteractive force. Within this paper, however, we argue that taking this ethical turn is not enough. For business ethicists to learn from the financial crisis, the crisis’ legacy needs to be taken account of, and financialisation needs to be taken seriously. Pedagogical reform cannot bracket itself off from the crisis as if it were coincidental with or separate from it. Post-crisis pedagogy must rather take the fact that it is requested now, in light of the crisis, as its very point of departure. The financial crisis must not be understood as something to be resisted in the name of Business Ethics. Instead, the financial crisis must be understood as the very foundation for contemporary Business Ethics in particular and for contemporary business and management education more generally.

Culture and Organization, Jan 1, 2007

This paper engages with Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby the Scrivener, as well as contempo... more This paper engages with Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby the Scrivener, as well as contemporary discussions thereof, so as to consider a peculiar concept of excess suggested to us by its main character. Our discussion focuses upon three of the most prominent contemporary Bartlebys: ‘The Politicized Bartleby’ of Slavoj Zizek, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; ‘The Originary Bartleby’ of Gilles Deleuze; and ‘The Whatever Bartleby’ of Giorgio Agamben. On the basis of these interpretations we derive a concept of excess as the residual surplus of any categorical interpretation, the yet to be accounted for, the not yet explained, the un-interpretable, the indeterminate, the always yet to arrive, precisely that which cannot be captured, held onto nor put in place. This particular discussion of Bartleby is connected to a more general discussion of a management and organization studies that has become increasingly reliant upon literary texts. On this topic, we pass a not altogether optimistic commentary, itself informed by the excessive demand of adequately interpreting Bartleby.

Editorials by Armin Beverungen

ephemera. theory and politics in organization., 2008

Organization, 2019

Digital media are pervasive, ubiquitous and mundane constituents of organization. Organized life ... more Digital media are pervasive, ubiquitous and mundane constituents of organization. Organized life relies on, and is propelled by, technologies that store, transmit and process data and are based on networked computation. How can we understand and explore the fundamental mediatedness of organization? This article contextualizes and introduces the special issue on 'The organizational powers of (digital) media' by staging an encounter between organization theory and media theory. In provoking investigations of the power and effects of technological mediation in its many guises, not least in regard to digital or computational media, this encounter ushers in a 'medial thought' of organization.

The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence: Net Politics in the Era of Learning Algorithms, 2019

Nach der Revolution. Ein Brevier Digitaler Kulturen, 2017

The Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology, and Organization Studies, 2020

Theory, Culture & Society, 2018

Archiv für Mediengeschichte, 2017

Organization Studies, Apr 1, 2015

In this paper we explore how so-called ‘social media’ such as Facebook challenge Marxist organiza... more In this paper we explore how so-called ‘social media’ such as Facebook challenge Marxist organization studies. We argue that understanding the role of user activity in web 2.0 business models requires a focus on ‘work’, understood as value productive activity, that takes place beyond waged labour in the firm. A reading of Marx on the socialization of labour highlights the emerging figure of ‘free labour’, which is both unpaid and uncoerced. Marxist work on the production of the ‘audience commodity’ provides one avenue for understanding the production of content and data by users as free labour, but this raises questions concerning the distinction between productive and unproductive labour which is central to Marx’s labour theory of value. The Marxist literature on ‘the becoming rent of profit’ allows for a partial understanding of how the value produced by free labour is captured, thereby developing the understanding of the economic dimension of ‘free labour’ as unpaid. It overstates, however, the ‘uncontrolled’ side of ‘free labour’, and neglects the ways in which this work is managed so as to ensure that it is productive. We therefore call for a return to Marxist labour process analysis, albeit with an expanded focus on labour and a revised understanding of control associated with digital protocols. On this basis, a Marxist organization studies can contribute to an understanding of the political economy of digital capitalism.

Urban Studies, 2014

In this paper we explore the case of Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK, as a neighbourhood in a city whic... more In this paper we explore the case of Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK, as a neighbourhood in a city which has appropriated the discourse of the creative industries from the bottom up in order to foster
its regeneration against capital’s art of rent. We show how Stokes Croft’s self-branding as a cultural quarter has led to struggles over the creative and cultural commons thus produced, which
we conceptualise as value struggles where localised value practices clash with capital’s imposition of value. Our case study including two vignettes points both to the productivity of such value struggles in producing new value practices understood as commoning, as well as the limits of reproducing a common life in the face of existing financial and property regimes. Stokes Croft therefore serves as a case in point of the tragedy of the urban commons and points to potential ways of overcoming it.

Culture and Organization, Jan 1, 2007

ephemera. theory and politics in organization., 2008

Organization, 2019

Where is business ethics today? And with this, where are business ethics today? Where do we find ... more Where is business ethics today? And with this, where are business ethics today? Where do we find them? Are there enough? These questions strike us today, and present us with our starting points. First of all in considering how business ethics has evolved, and what state it is in. But also, in asking where business and ethics are today and how and where they might be in the future. Starting out with these seemingly innocent questions, we face a set of somewhat more troubling questions about the location of business ethics. For some, business ethics is quite easy to locate. When seen as a business function, an academic discipline or a part of business school education, business ethics is often taken as some- thing that obviously has a location. If business ethics is readily locatable, then it can be disciplined, generalised, taught and instituted as part of best practice and corporate strategy. But are business ethics so easily locatable? Are they a ‘something’ characterised by a ‘thingliness’ that might allow them to be taken in hand and put to use? If business ethics are not open to such reification, then we might find that ethics in business involves a basic disloca- tion relating to phenomenal experiences arising when things are out of place. Business ethics would then take place when, as was sensed by Hamlet, things are ‘out of joint’. The experience of whistle- blowers and the victims of corporate malfeasance is certainly one of deeply felt dislocation. If we find business ethics in these practices, might ethics also be found in other spaces of dislocation?

ephemera, Nov 1, 2009

Once we shift the focus of analysis in the direction of the university and financialisation, we m... more Once we shift the focus of analysis in the direction of the university and financialisation, we move beyond the content of university teaching, its curricula and pedagogies, and look at the form which university education takes today. In so doing, we proceed to ask how this very form is itself shaped by finance. And so we come to question why there is hardly a university left without a private equity club, a hedge fund society, or a trading room. While some insist on the learning experience and ethical aspects of trading, others note the ways in which these activities imbue a particular conservatism and opportunism, which deny the call for a critical engagement with finance (Jacobs, 2009). The most extreme form this teaching of finance takes is perhaps the belief that finance could function without production – a belief Marx was amused by long ago.

ephemera, Aug 1, 2008

What is the modern university for? By what or whose standards is it to be judged? Is its existenc... more What is the modern university for? By what or whose standards is it to be judged? Is its existence justified by simple virtue of its being the case? Is it instead to be understood as a means towards the attainment of a particular end or set of ends? Or is it, just like the Socratic Republic (Plato, 1993: 358a), to be said to be amongst the very best of things: those which are simultaneously justified in themselves and by virtue of the various ends which they can be said to have achieved? Such questions come with quite a degree of pedigree. They are questions which divide the university’s inhabitants perhaps just as much as they divide those divided from it. They are certainly questions which lend themselves towards discussion and debate. They are, therefore, just the sorts of questions which our contributors have been invited to address and engage.

… of Sociology and …, Jan 1, 2007

The Fibreculture Journal, 2017

Ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things are often referred to as prime examples not only ... more Ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things are often referred to as prime examples not only of new modes of computing, but of a new paradigm of mediation itself. If Lewis Mumford could already ascribe key
characteristics of media – such as storage and transmission – to the city, so the city could in itself be understood as a medium (see Kittler, 1996), then nonetheless something changes considerably once 'the city itself is turning into a constellation of computers', as Michael Batty noted around twenty years ago (1997: 155). Today the city is indeed awash with distributed and networked computation, and many forms of knowledge and practice not only in architecture and urban planning are turning the city into a subject of computational practices while equipping it with computational capacities. Software codes city space and thereby allows for the co-production of its spatiality; more and more space in the city is reliant on code, producing 'code/space' wherein a space simply does not function without software (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011). This themed issue on 'Computing the City', which emerges from a workshop with the same title held at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University Luneburg in 2014, focuses specifically on the development of urban ubiquitous computing, its status as media infrastructure, its complicity with logistics,
as well as its contingent histories and virtual futures. The approach to computing the city taken here questions the accustomed self-description of a mediated society as a completely new infrastructure of living and dwelling. This is not yet another themed issue on the 'smart city' – as we will see below; a consideration of computing the city far exceeds the ways in which the smart city as discourse and project seeks to capture our imaginaries of future technological cities.

The coincidence between the smart city and logistics implies a certain foreclosure of its possib... more The coincidence between the smart city and logistics implies a
certain foreclosure of its
possibilities and virtual futures. Many accounts of smart cities recognise the historical
coincidence
of cybernetic control and neoliberal capital. Even where it is machines which
process the vast
amounts of data produced by the
city so much so that the ruling and managerial
classes disappear
from view, it is usually the logic of capital that steers the flows of data, people
and things. Yet
what other futures of the city may be possible within the smart city, what
collective intel
ligence
may it bring forth? Can one fathom the possible others of the logistical city
e.g. in the visions of
the cybernetic revolutionaries of Project Cybersyn or the cyberpunks of the
1990s? What other
historical or contemporary examples of resistances to
or alternative visions of
ubiquitous
computing in city could one draw on?

In this thesis I read critical studies of management reading Marx. I explore the inheritance of M... more In this thesis I read critical studies of management reading Marx. I explore the inheritance of Marx in the business school through a symptomatic reading of labour process theory and critical management studies. In Part I I explore the conditions of this thesis. The university-based business school is introduced as the context in which this thesis is written, and as an institution concerned with management as object of theory and its relation to capital. I outline a symptomatic reading which explores how particular theories or problematics focus on particular objects, such as management or capital. In Part II I read works in labour process theory to demonstrate how Marx is inherited in these discourses and how labour process theory seeks to constitute a study of management within a Marxist problematic, before abandoning the Marxist problematic and establishing a new problematic of management. In Part III I read works in critical management studies to demonstrate the ways in which Marx and a problematic of management is established. Here a variety of both theoretical and political positions emerge, from a Marxism to anti-Marxism in theory, and a for and against management in politics. The symptomatic reading demonstrates that overall a particular reading of Marx leads critical studies of management away from a clear position within a Marxist problematic, to moments in which Marx is no longer read and in which capital emerges as a symptom that is not accounted for theoretically. This is followed by a return to a reading of Marx in the business school, which seeks to account once again for capital. This thesis contributes to the work of inheritance in the business school, and the conclusion points to current moments in this work, which leave the question “whither Marx in the business school?” contested.

Management Learning, Jan 1, 2010

Organization, Jan 1, 2006

In the book review section of this issue, we have the opportunity of present-ing two reviews of C... more In the book review section of this issue, we have the opportunity of present-ing two reviews of Chris Grey's new (2005) book, A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Organizations. The two reviewers, Beverungen and Tienari, are ...