February 4th to 6th we hosted the 8th Nordic Workshop on Digital Foundations of Business, Operations, Strategy, and Innovation (DBOSI-26) and DBOSI PhD day at the University of Gothenburg. The workshop was a success attracting 70 participants which is the record for DBOSI.
DBOSI was kicked-off with the PhD Day organized by Lisen Selander at beautiful Ågrenska Villan at the heart of Gothenburg. The PhD Day attracted 25 PhD student from around Europe. During the day students were mentored in small groups by a team of superstar mentors from the fields of Information Systems, Management, and Organizations. Mahya Ostovar delivered an inspiring keynote, encouraging students to follow their research passion and dare to take a stance.
Over the next two packed days, the main workshop unfolded as a lively conversation about emergent research ideas on how digital technologies are reshaping work, organizations, and society.
We opened with Claire Bogusz Ingram’s industry keynote tracing her own journey from studying Bitcoin libertarians to working at the Swedish Central Bank (Riksbanken). From there, the conference branched out into parallel sessions that showcased the breadth of ongoing research on digitalization across many contexts and disciplines. Papers on online labor platforms explored rhythms of platform work, data-driven collective action, and how workers navigate precarious digital labor market. In parallel, public sector sessions unpacked the sociotechnical realities of digitalization, where asphalt, algorithms, and administrative logics collide.
The first day’s discussions culminated in a keynote by Ola Henfridsson, who challenged us to think differently about decentralized organizing through tokenization. Which provided a great continuation to the discuss from the first keynote. The afternoon sessions on cyberphysical systems and data futures, examined everything from prototyping physical-digital ventures and vertical farming to romantic love, metadata, and the paradoxes of datafied healthcare.
Day two opened with Tina Blegind Jensen’s keynote on sensemaking reminded us that work is not just performed through technologies but interpreted, negotiated, and emotionally processed through them. The workshop sessions for the rest of the day encompassed various aspects of human-AI relations in the context of work, including discussion of nursing, law practice and software engineering. Beyond AI at work workshop participants discussed governance of digital infrastructures, ethics and accountability, as well as a prescient threat of algorithmic violence in warfare.
At the closing session we reflected on the workshop and looked ahead to the next edition (DBOSI-27) which will be organized at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland.