The Politics of Clicks and Swipes: The role of Data Standards in Digitalized Work Practices

In this article, we explore the critical role played by data standards in the digitalization of organizations. Existing studies has pointed at how standards are altering organizations and professional work in multiple ways. This study extend this literature by focusing on how data standards are inscribed in digital technologies making them an invisible yet consequential part of how digital technologies come to work. We draw on the sociology of translation and report from an ethnographic study of the implementation of a healthcare platform with a new standard for digital data sharing and documentation of eldercare and social services in Denmark. Our translation-inspired analysis reveals how the standard transformed into three modes of organization – homogenized, routinized, and quantified – and how these modes enabled and constrained the organizing properties of the new standards. We theorize how clicks and swipes become essential activities for realizing the standard and its inherent politics. We conclude by outlining how a focus on standards inscribed into digital technologies may challenge and enable future organizational research into digitalization of work in organizations.