The project's empirical findings and conceptual developments yielded significant contributions to two research areas, with results featured in leading academic venues.
a) In labour studies, algorithmic management has typically been equated with automated surveillance of the workplace – scientific management on steroids. But such a viewpoint tends to overlook that algorithms are closely linked to the changing topology of organisation. Rather than an exercise seeking to coordinate oppositions within organisations – between labour and capital, for example, or between various departments, levels, or teams – algorithmic management turns to and envelops the outside world. The latter is no longer presented as a stimulus to which the organization is expected to adapt, but as an addressee that can be co-opted, mobilised and hence organised. The principles animating algorithmic management have been further explored in a publication for Organization Theory, co-authored with David Stark.
b) Many educational researchers have criticized the growing use of learning platforms, viewing this trend as a mechanization of education. By accepting technology as functionally equivalent if not superior to the human judgement of professional teachers, their warning sounds, our digital tools run the risk of subjugating rather than serving us. Rather than repeat this popular trope of the sorcerer's apprentice, the project has focused on platformisation as an internal reorganization of education. A first theorisation has been published in The Oxford Handbook of Education and Globalization. Other articles, focusing on the engineers behind the machines and the reconfiguration of the teaching profession are currently under review.
In doing so, MORPHOGENESIS achieved its objectives of 1) developing a framework to understand the distinctive organisational shape of digital learning platforms and 2) analyzing how these platforms reshape the classroom by producing original data on these topics.
