Physics or Archaeology?

Abstract

Abstract The proliferation of data associated with the growing digitalization of organizational processes, sometimes designated with the label ‘big data’, offers a potentially rich resource for research. Some management and organization scholars, drawing on claims of the emergence of a data-driven ‘computational social science’, view the new abundance of data, seen as capturing the fundamental elements of organizational processes directly from reality, as contributing to a transformation in our understanding of organizations and the methods by which we study them. The ‘social physics’ envisaged by August Comte in the 1830s, they suggest, can now become a reality. In this chapter, however, a process perspective on data is presented that questions the assumption that data transparently instrument reality. Rather, it is argued, data are always constructed and only ever offer a partial and ambiguous representation of the phenomena they are seen as describing. Archaeology, in which researchers reconstruct phenomena from fragmented evidence, often shaped by their presuppositions, may therefore offer a better model than physics of how the profusion of digital data may contribute to organizational research.