Data Workers in Organizations: What They Do, How They Do, and Why They Do It!

Over the last decade, data workers have increasingly made their way not only into technology and born-digital firms but also in incumbent firms in long-standing industries. Organizational scientists, management scholars, and information systems researchers have started paying attention to data workers as an emerging occupational group, who tend to embody expertise in collecting, organizing, analyzing, and generating insights from data that may help in explaining as well as predicting various phenomena that are of interest to business managers or policy makers. Scholars have started examining data workers at the field level, inter-organizational level, as well as intra-organizational level. Building on this emerging literature, this symposium sets out to explore what data workers do, how they do, and why they do it, in the context of economic forecasting, medical science, as well as banking and financial services. Disenchantment with Big Data Analytics: When Knowledge Mediators Fail Presenter: Elina I. Mäkinen; Tampere U. Experts and Machines: How Central Bank Economists Produce Inferences via Simulation Model Presenter: Pauli Pakarinen; Stanford U. Custodians of Rationality: Data Scientists’ Role in Organizational Decision-Making Presenter: Mayur Prataprai Joshi; Alliance Manchester Business School, U. of Manchester Legitimating Illegitimate Practices: How Data Analysts Compromised Standards to Scale Expertise Presenter: Ryan Stice-Lusvardi; Stanford U.