“In a violently poetic text, Lawrence describes what produces poetry: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent – Wordsworth’s spring or Cézanne’s apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab. Then come the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions: communication. Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon forth) than against the “clichés” of opinion. The painter does not paint on an empty canvas, and neither does the writer write on a blank page; but the page or canvas is already so covered with preexisting, preestablished clichés that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision.”¹ [DEL 91]

The purpose of this book is to describe how organizational digital policies are achieving the development of strategic models and socio-technical dispositifs, and both the changes and the supervision of the practices of employees, as part of the production of organizations.

The phenomena discussed here are a testament, not only to the transformations taking place (or claimed as such) since the decade of 2000–2010, and affecting the Modes of existence within the workplace and the frame of reference for managerial actions, but they also resonate more broadly with a general trend toward the digitization of our companies.

The organizational factories studied here are coupled with digital machines, collective enunciation assemblages that serve as a milieu for strategic model-selection dispositifs, as libidinal economies attached to the complication of the techno-politics of organizations, as local adjustments from local pragmatic approaches, and pragmatic approaches carried out by the proliferation of interfaces.

On the basis of several ethnographic analyses, we propose both a description of the processes for the formulation of these policies, a “manufacture”, as it is made, experienced and stated, as well as a general reflection on the methods and research that allows us to examine these processes.

Thus, this same movement is linked with the concept of “assemblage” by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari [DEL 80] and to the approaches of the actor-network theory by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon [AKR 06]. In this way, an analytical framework is created to adapt this ethnographic work to organizations. Our exploration stretches from the offices of project leaders to symposiums and other events dedicated to the self-glorification of the best practices of organizations in the era of all things “digital”, through workshops where employees meet, and extends to the observation of social-digital practices.

Starting from the examination of the battles that are waged in the context of the design of an information system, of the strength relationships and of the tests that are made there, but also by contextualizing it in front of an entire set of performation processes and with the installation of how it is laid out in its techno-political dimensions. One of the purposes of this book is also to show the extent to which digitization requires us to put the question of politics at the heart of our analysis of interfaces and the “molecular revolution” that characterizes it [GUA 77, NOY 13, NOY 16]. Therefore, we attempt to explore, with great attention, the status and functions of interfaces, by relying on several cases regarding the interlacing of the political economies of the semio-policies that these interfaces demonstrate.

Based on approaches to pragmatic sociology and socio-technical approaches, the issue of politics lies at the heart of the comprehension of organizational production processes and the production of digital milieu, which we focus on in this work.

Organizational production processes are described through the lens of several phenomena and dynamics of formatting: the implementation of socio-technical scripts taken in conflicts and the relationships of various forces, the creation of a generalized “narratique” framework [FAY 72] nourishing desire for permanent innovation, moving towards “a data-centric imperium”.

Chapter 1 presents an ethnographic survey carried out over several years, referred to as the Moeva case: it concerns the creation and changes to digital policy and an associated dispositif in a large organization.

This survey examined an assemblage in the process of transforming and describing the manufacture of organizational techno-politics. The scripts were shown to be very dynamic “actants”, including in their agonistic and confrontational dimensions. They are at the heart of performative processes and the source of disputes: they are framework entities, activity patterns, design routines and professional models anchored in practice, constraints, and perceptions given to project managers and to users, but also to the programs of practice enrolled in the interfaces themselves. On this basis, digital innovation in the organizational environment and its manufacture thus presents itself as a combination of scripts: with each script, we encounter a mixture of narratives, drawings, experiences, desires, and semiotics: an assemblage of all these things.

The scripts are immanent to the organization, its project, its practices, its frames of reference for dominant actions, and the technologies that are put to use. We show that producing the organization is the equivalent of creating a script.

It then becomes a question of seeing how they are designed and how the cooperation that occurs in them is put into place: their form of mobilization (how one script mobilizes another script), their reinforcement, or their conflict (the imposition of another activity model or another techno-political approach). By being attentive to “what they do and what they require to be done,” we show a part of the chain of events, of formatting, given that they are processes of performativity.

And when a trial-event is found, there are at least two scripts that clash, and with them all the forces they carry. And we show that examining the production of a digital organization factory is akin to these conditions, to produce an “ethology of the forces” similar to the Deleuzian school of thought as expressed by its heir, B. Latour [SAS 03]. The question of defining the empirical or the observable elements provides access to a kind of “concrete ethology of the forces”. This issue is far from being resolved.

In this work, we essentially insist on scripts, as an organized set of utterances (not exclusively linguistic), having the ability to affect and to bring about the world they designate. Innovation can be seen as a struggle between scripts, for the conquest of the superior position or the control of its environment, such as the resolution of strength relationships between the performative processes in which the scripts are included and of which they are carriers.

Chapter 2 expands on the phenomena of performation already described in the case of Moeva to describe, in support of other areas, what we designate as a general “narratique” [FAY 72] of digital organizational policies: we envisage it through the story that the actors give themselves, from the self-referential processes, of dynamics that are also hetero-poetic, but also by examining the “innovative reasoning” thus brought into play. Here again, it is power relationships within the assemblages and between utterances that are discussed in particular. The assemblage, in an indissoluble way, is “the machine assemblage of desire and the collective assemblage of enunciation”². The assemblage is a way of thinking about the relationship, the connection, and the composition of relationships “that hold these heterogeneous elements together”. The assemblage is defined in particular by the “alliances”, “alloys”, “attraction and repulsion”, “sympathy and antipathy”, “alteration”, etc., which it facilitates or censors and thus, also by means of the potential for transformation, it allows. It is no longer a question of posing the problem in terms of the spread of technologies, practices, orthodox discourses, cognitive equipment, etc., based on the assumption of a clearly defined center, but to consider the dynamics, the connections that are aggregated, the relationships between a plurality of actors and localities. These features of the layout prove to be close to phenomena described by the actor-network theory, which can be considered to have been inherited in some respects from the Deleuzian philosophy. For testimony of this proximity, M. Callon redefined performation on this basis. We envisage processes of performation, based on theoretical orthodoxy and experimentation (for example, when the managerial world develops a theory from its own practices), of performation opened up on the outside (via the formatting of organizational environments from the realm of the internet or other information systems designed for other organizations), of technical performation, etc., all these phenomena being considered in a process in which performation is desired. The organization is immanent in the pragmatisim of the scripts, the processes of alteration/creation that they bring, as well as to the energies, impulses, and libidinal economies that are affiliated with them and/or that are their byproducts. Again, under the same framework of interpretation, we are led to examine pragmatic communications from the consequences that we have already evoked from the rise of the performativity through “speech acts”, celebratory practices, the clutch-like functions of these watchwords. For these watchwords, just stating them is sufficient in order to be able to see the entire organizational and managerial script that goes with it, because again, it is the collective assemblage of enunciation that comes first, and the watchwords are merely both the expression and the expressed idea of the assemblage that gives them strength and efficiency. In doing so, we present a summary of the evolution of narratives from a “network-centric” perspective to a “data-centric” perspective. This shift and the diversity of the performation processes are illustrated by the case of the creation of an open data policy within a project group in the public sector.

Thus, we explore different performative configurations, and do so in order to especially elaborate on the description and understanding of how the populations of technical beings and human beings are woven together with their grammar and combinatory elements with the complexes that pass through them or that produce them. In doing so, we follow the considerably long networks of the powers that act at the heart of this manufacturing, whilst examining their transformation and their morphogenesis.

Finally, in Chapter 3, we insist that what has been presented so far is a political economy of the interfaces, or semio-politics. By this, we mean the entire set of rules, constraints, and arbitrations taking shape in digital interfaces or that are delegated to them. This delegation is partly carried out in the dark, because it sometimes instantiates itself out of any mastery and rational choice, of decision-makers and of users, thus under programs conceived elsewhere.

By making use, in particular, of the “signifying / a-signifying” theorems of F. Guattari, we highlight the way in which semio-politics affect the potentialities of digital practices, their extent and their richness. They play out and distinguish themselves according to several archetypal regimes: a regime of signs that becomes a regime of “capturing” and intensive encoding of relational processes; backed by the first, a connectivity regime that defines the rules of association/dissociation and therefore access, as well as a reflexivity regime from which the fields of visibility and the mastery of scales are defined. The analysis of a corporate social-network platform serves to illustrate the design and the concrete action of these regimes.

Semio-politics insist on the action of non-linguistic semiotics, on the exponential growth of digital data traces and the automated processing of these, on the movement of semiotics as the major players in the performation of practices and of an organizational political economy. Thus, we consider that the negotiation and evolution of these new means of semiotic management, under the current socio-technical conditions [GUA 83] are essential today, and we sustain that making history, building the memory of the interfaces, determining their power to open new futures within the organization and understanding the manner in which this affects the metastability of these collectives, is a major political task.

Finally, we turn our attention to the variations that affect organizational semio-politics and we show the complex relationships (with their related problems) that are interconnected with digital methods and analytics. We thus indicate the ways to analyze new empirical elements and to emphasize the rise of algorithms within this general process of transformation and the manufacturing of digital organizations. By placing ourselves at the heart of the creation of new socio-cognitive and techno-political ecologies (from the example of platforms for “online socialization” used by employees), we suggest the development and the enrichment of methods and ethno-digital approaches, requiring these elements to be located as close as possible to the assemblages, amid their complexity.