Despite the growing “data imperative” and “fetishization of data” across organizational contexts, critical scholars have adhered to a set of normative understandings for how people experience and engage with data and datafication in and around organizations: namely, as numbers and statistics that are “captured”, interpreted, and operationalized. In reality, however, data and datafication are experienced within organizational life in a multiplicity of ways that often have very little to do with numbers and statistics. In this essay, we shift our attention to these less overt and less examined ways in which data and datafication shape organizational life—specifically, the aesthetic, emotional, and discursive aspects of our everyday encounters with it. By attending to the multiple, complex, and nuanced entanglements of data and organization, organizational scholars will be better equipped to navigate the increasingly fraught terrain between technocratic data worship and anti-science politics that characterize the current political moment. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a more politicized, historicized, and democratized data studies that can support movements for social, economic, and ecological justice.

尽管跨组织环境的“数据必要性”和“数据迷信性”在不断增长，但批判学者仍对人们如何在组织内部和周围体验和参与数据和数据化进行了一系列规范性理解：即，作为数字和统计“捕获”，解释和实施。但是，实际上，数据和数据分配是在组织生命中以多种方式经历的，而这些方式通常与数字和统计关系不大。在本文中，我们将注意力转移到数据和数据化塑造组织生活的方式上，这些方式没有太多公开和检查，尤其是我们日常与之相处的美学，情感和话语方面。通过关注数据和组织的多重，复杂和细微的纠缠，组织学者将有更好的能力来驾驭技术官僚主义的数据崇拜和表征当前政治时刻的反科学政治之间日趋紧张的地形。在此过程中，我们希望为更政治化，历史化和民主化的数据研究做出贡献，以支持社会，经济和生态正义运动。