This session aims to develop an understanding of processes of organizing and upsetting by exploring the interactions between the apparently distinct categories of 'technology' and 'accountability'. New technologies and accountability initiatives are sometimes understood as having the intrinsic capacity to unsettle organizations, as resources which are deployed to shape and reshape organizational relations. Both have been described as forces for regeneration as well as vehicles for (managerial) control. For example, information and communication technologies have been associated with new skills, new organizational forms and a more flexible economy and also with new forms of monitoring and the commoditization of work. Accountability can both connote transparency, responsibility and professionalism, and is reckoned to have detrimental effects on trust and the quality of work, as a result of the pressure on organisations and individuals to live up to its demands.

Rather than accepting the intrinsic capacity of technology and accountability to cause turmoil in organizations, this session encourages a close sceptical examination of the relationships between them. Such relationships can be conceived in various ways. On the one hand, calls for greater accountability are often resolved through, and taken to imply, technological solutions. Certain technologies, including technologies of managing denoted by such acronyms as ERP (and SAP), BPR, TQM and RAE, attempt to reproduce and translate particular rights and obligations to those who are construed as subjects to accountability procedures. A focus on the practices and processes of representing and accounting is one way to develop an understanding of how this works, and how subject/object positions and value relations are created in the process. On the other hand, technological impacts and effects can be understood as emerging in and through accountability relations. Assessments of the nature and capacity of a technology, of its value and benefits as well as of what 'goes wrong' and why, are intertwined with assessments of who is accountable to whom, when and in what way.

The goal of this session is critically to explore the merits of analytical arguments that examine technology in terms of accountability and accountability in terms of technology, in particular with regard to their implications for organizing and for understanding organizations.

The session invites scholars from any theoretical tradition whose work addresses questions of accountability and technology broadly conceived, including technology and ordering, technology and normativity, technology and subjectivity/identity, and technologies of accounting and counting. We welcome papers that employ ethnography as research methodology – and/or that are premised on a 'practice' perspective – as well as other theoretical and empirical approaches. The scope of discussion that participants are invited to join is delineated by, but not limited to, the following questions:

• How is accountability currently understood? What do the diverse understandings of accountability add to our understanding of technology?
• In what sense do technologies form part of accountability procedures and rituals?
• What can we learn from the analysis of the practices through which actors and organizations attempt to technologise accountability and/or to make technologies accountable in a certain way?
• How are accountability and technology intertwined through claims and questions of instrumentality, mechanical objectivity, calculability and utility?
• How can a focus on technology-accountability relationships help us understand the creation of market relations, institutions, organisational identities and innovations?

Key readings

Key readings can be provided for those who are interested in participating in the session.

About the convenors

Elena Simakova is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Department of Science & Technology Studies and the Center for Nanoscale Systems at Cornell University, USA. Her research interests mainly focus on marketing knowledge and emerging technologies. Elena has worked on the constitution and functions of accounts of technology at the intersection of the social science research and commercial settings, including ethnography of innovation in the telecom industries, and the accountability relations performed around and through nanotechnologies and converging  technologies.

Catelijne Coopmans is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. Her research interests include the reconfiguration of accountability relations in the digital age, particularly in relation to visual knowledge objects such as computer simulations and medical images.

Steve Woolgar holds the Chair of Marketing at the Said Business School, and is a Professorial Fellow of Green College, University of Oxford. He was formerly Professor of Sociology, Head of the Department of Human Sciences and Director of CRICT (Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology) at Brunel University. His two main current research projects are on governance and accountability relations in mundane technological solutions to public problems; and on the dynamics of provocation.