About the project

GET:ORG explores new forms of platformed organizing that emerge when expert communities communicate on digital platforms. The project explores how platforms enable and shape organizing and the related power structures. In particular, we seek to theorize and empirically analyze the agency of novel interactive and generative technologies, such as automated conversations, categorizations, feeds, and AI assistants, in both breeding and hindering organizing.  Empirical insights will be drawn from large-scale digital discourse datasets generated in a diverse set of organizations and organizational communities, both established and emergent. 

We will also critically investigate platform technologies through technography and user interviews. The interdisciplinary project combines perspectives of organizational research, communication, information systems research, and computational social science. Our overarching theoretical premise builds on the Communicative Constitution of Organization theory (CCO), affordance theory, and critical platform studies. The project generates new knowledge on digital organizing in society and provides a framework for using computational methods in organizational research. 

Empirically we focus is on expert communities in four kinds of contexts: established and emergent organizations, and in contexts of high or low automation. Thus, the project utilized both intra-organizational datasets (e.g., Slack, MS Teams) and public social media data (StackExchange, Twitter, Reddit).

The project is coordinated by the University of Helsinki; other partners are Tampere University and University of Jyväskylä.