Thanks Katie for making the announcement!

The article’s title assumes prior knowledge of organization theory. But the abstract (posted below) and article itself are more straightforward. In addition to colleagues from CASCI and iSchool, I would also like to invite our HCI friends who work on visualization and design to join this discussion on beautiful technologies and technology fashions next Tuesday.

Abrahamson, E. (2011). The iron cage: Ugly, uncool, and unfashionable. Organization Studies, 32(5), 615-629.
Abstract:
Historical studies reveal how organizational markets supplied artifacts that became fashionable because they met not only consumers’ cultural tastes, but also their technological preferences. This article calls such artifacts cultural-technological fusions. The digital mode of production tends to generate more types of fashionable fusions, which replace each other at a growing rate, and travel increasingly swiftly across consumers globally. These changes in fashion markets mandate a revised theory of fashion bearing on the organizational production of digital culture-technology fusions and on the characteristics of fusions so produced. This article’s theory describes digital production processes enabling fusion’s rapid visualization, creation, and awareness among global consumers, production processes that create or reinforce three types of fusions: ‘beautiful technologies’, that is technologies rendered aesthetic; ‘efficient beauties’, that is aesthetic artifacts rendered technologically efficient; ‘concoctions’, that is new technologies fused with new cultural tastes. Finally, the theory discusses the novel characteristics of the market supply and consumption of fashionable fusions.

Ping Wang
University of Maryland, College Park

On 10/14/2014 2:33 PM, Katie Shilton wrote: