Conference Agenda

In just a few decades, a new vocabulary - consisting of platforms, clouds, machine learning, personalisation and much more - has become inevitable to describe a rapidly growing part of our social world. Under the heading of algorithmic management, sociologists have begun to study how these new elements relate to the contemporary conditions of work and its control. By and large, their conclusions suggest that algorithms open up novel ways to discipline labour in pursuit of ever greater efficiency – Taylorism on steroids, for short. Despite some similarities, I argue that algorithmic management should not be understood as a simple extension of scientific management, since it operates within a different worldview: Whereas Taylor’s scientific management saw humans as programmable machines, algorithmic management sees machines as capable of learning.

This contribution explores this different worldview of algorithmic management, so as to illustrate how the concept can be made useful for the sociology of education. This is done by focusing on classroom instruction as a moment where algorithms, professional practice and school organization intersect. Taking cues from Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and pragmatist theories of interaction, I examine how digital interactivity translates educational aspirations into the interaction with a lifeless object. How are the defining traits of pedagogical interaction reorganised to orchestrate its progression? This translation act, I shall argue, hinges on its ability to (algorithmically) anticipate and coordinate futures, so that a platform or app's intent to educate can appear as a constancy. On basis of this characterisation, I aim to complement the existent literature on datafication which has hitherto understood the above depicted evolution as either the unwelcome intrusion of surveillance capitalism or as the surge of mindless automatons that threaten to strip professional care of its humanity. In contrast with that literature, I highlight how digitally mediated (self-)instruction participates in and perpetuates education’s broader wish to program an uncontrollable future.