Post-Human Institutions and Organizations

217 Pages·2021·2.534 MB·English

by  Margaret S. Archer, Ismael Al-Amoudi , Emmanuel Lazega

Half title page
Post-Human Institutions and
Organizations
When the Matrix trilogy was published in the mid-1980s, it introduced to
mass culture a number of post-human tropes about the conscious machines
that have haunted our collective imaginaries ever since. This volume
explores the social representations and significance of technological
developments – especially AI and human enhancement – that have started to
transform our human agency. It uses these developments to revisit theories of
the human mind and its essential characteristics: a first-person perspective,
concerns and reflexivity. It looks at how the smart machines are used as agents
of change in the basic institutions and organisations that hold contemporary
societies together, for example in the family and the household, in commercial
corporations, in health institutions or in the military. Its main purpose is to
enrich the ongoing public discussion of the social and political implications
of the smart machines by looking at the extent to which they further digitalise
and bureaucratise the world, in particular by asking whether they are used to
develop techno-totalitarian societies that corrode normativity and solidarity.
Ismael Al-Amoudi is Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management, Univ
Grenoble Alpes ComUE, France.
Emmanuel Lazega is Professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris
(Sciences Po), France.
Series page
The Future of the Human
Until the most recent decades, natural and social science could regard the
‘human being’ as their unproblematic point of reference, while monsters,
clones and drones were acknowledged as fantasies dreamed up for the
purposes of fiction or academic argument. In future, this common, taken for
granted benchmark will be replaced by various amalgams of human biology
supplemented by technology – a fact that has direct implications for
democracy, social governance and human rights, owing to questions
surrounding standards for social inclusion, participation and legal protection.
Considering the question of who or what counts as a human being and the
challenges posed by anti-humanism, the implications for the global social
order of the technological ability of some regions of the world to ‘enhance’
human biology and the defence of humankind in the face of artificial
intelligence, the books in this series examine the challenges posed to the
universalism of humankind by various forms of anti-humanism, and seek to
defend ‘human essentialism’ by accentuating the liabilities and capacities
particular to human beings alone.
Series Editor
Margaret Archer, University of Warwick, UK
Titles in this series
Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex Machina
Edited by Ismael Al-Amoudi and Jamie Morgan
Post-Human Institutions and Organizations
Confronting the Matrix
Edited by Ismael Al-Amoudi and Emmanuel Lazega
For more information about this series, please visit:
www.routledge.com/The-Future-of-the-Human/book-series/FH
Copy right page
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Ismael Al-Amoudi and
Emmanuel Lazega; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Ismael Al-Amoudi and Emmanuel Lazega to be identified as the authors of
the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-8153-7794-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-23347-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by [Typesetter]
Dedication page
To Leo & Anna,
And to Lina, Anna, Cassandre & Roza,
This is the world you will have to live in, and struggle in, and embellish.
Contents page
Running Head Right-hand: Contents
Running Head Left-hand: Contents
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
1 Introduction: digital society’s techno-totalitarian matrix
ISMAEL AL-AMOUDI
2 What they are saying about artificial intelligence and human
enhancement
DOUGLAS V. PORPORA
3 Considering AI personhood
MARGARET S. ARCHER
4 Post-human sociality: morphing experience and emergent forms
ANDREA M. MACCARINI
5 The digital matrix and the hybridisation of society
PIERPAOLO DONATI
6 Stupid ways of working smart? Colonising the future through
policy advice
JAMIE MORGAN
7 Anormative black boxes: artificial intelligence and health policy
ISMAEL AL-AMOUDI AND JOHN LATSIS
8 Swarm-teams with digital exoskeleton: on new military templates
for the organizational society
EMMANUEL LAZEGA
Index
List of figures
Running Head Right-hand: Figures
Running Head Left-hand: Figures
Figures
Figure 2.1 What have been saying about robots, androids, etc.
Figure 2.2 What they have been saying about human enhancement
Figure 5.1 The morphogenetic cycle of SAC (structure, agency,
culture) run by the DM and generating the hybridisation of society
Figure 5.2
Figure 5.3 The morphogenetic cycle through which identities and
social relations are hybridised
Figure 5.4 The hybridisation of human identity and social relations
due to the DM
Figure 6.1
List of contributors
Running Head Right-hand: Contributors
Running Head Left-hand: Contributors
Contributors
Ismael Al-Amoudi is Professor of Social and Organisational Theory and
Director of the Centre for Social Ontology at Grenoble Ecole de Management,
Univ Grenoble ComUE (France). His work borrows from anthropology,
management studies, political philosophy, social theory and sociology. One
recurring theme in his research concerns the nature of social norms and the
basic processes through which they are legitimated and contested. Another
theme concerns the contribution of ontology to the human and social sciences.
He is a member of the editorial boards of Organization and of The Journal for
the Theory of Social Behavior. Recent publications include articles in the
Academy of Management Learning & Education; British Journal of
Sociology; Business Ethics Quarterly; Human Relations; Journal for the
Theory of Social Behaviour; Organization; and Organization Studies.
Margaret S. Archer founded the Centre for Social Ontology at the Ecole
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2011, where she was Professor of
Social Theory. Currently she is Visiting Professor at the Arctic University of
Norway, Tromsø, the University of Navarra (Pamplona) and the Uniwersytet
Kardinała Stefana Wyszńskiego in Warsaw. Pope Francis appointed her as
President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in 2014. Previous to
that she was elected as the first woman President of the International
Sociological Association at the 12th World Congress of Sociology (1986).
Archer was a founder member of both the Pontifical Academy of Social
Sciences and the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences and is
a trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism. She has published many well-
known works on social theory, including Culture and Agency: The Place of
Culture in Social Theory (Cambridge); Realist Social Theory: The
Morphogenic Approach (Cambridge); Being Human: The Problem of Agency
(Cambridge); Structure Agency and the Internal Conversation (Cambridge);
Making Our Way Through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility
(Cambridge); and The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity (Cambridge).
Pierpaolo Donati is Alma Mater Professor (PAM) of Sociology at the
University of Bologna. Past-President of the Italian Sociological Association,
he has served as Executive Committee Member of the IIS and Director of the
National Observatory on the Family of the Italian Government. He is currently
a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (since 1997) and of
the Academy of Sciences of the University of Bologna (since 1998). He has
published more than 800 works. He is known as the founder of an original
‘relational sociology’ or ‘relational theory of society’. Among his more recent
publications are Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for the Social
Sciences (Routledge, 2011); The Relational Subject (with M. S. Archer)
(Cambridge, 2015); Discovering the Relational Goods (Rubbettino, 2019);
Life as Relation: A Dialogue Between Theology, Philosophy, and Social
Science (with A. Malo and G. Maspero) (Routledge, 2019); and Sociología
relacional de lo humano (Eunsa, 2019).
John Latsis is Associate Professor in Social and Organisational Theory at the
University of Reading. His research interests are in social theory and
economic philosophy and cover questions about the nature of conventional
behaviour and rule following in social life, the influence of theory on
economic action, and the socio-economic dimensions of human need. Recent
publications include articles in the Cambridge Journal of Economics; Journal
of Institutional Economics; British Journal of Sociology; Journal for the
Theory of Social Behaviour; and the Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics.
Emmanuel Lazega is Professor of Sociology at the Institut d’Etudes
Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), a member of the Centre de Sociologie des
Organisations (CNRS) and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de
France. His current research projects focus on social network modelling of
generic social processes such as solidarity, control, regulation and learning.
His publications can be downloaded from www.elazega.fr.
Andrea M. Maccarini is Professor of Sociology and Associate Chair in the
Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies, University of
Padova. He is head of the Class of Social Sciences in the Galilean School of
Higher Studies. He has been Chair of the Italian Sociological Association
(AIS) section of Education and has served as Italian representative at the
governing board of OECD-CERI (Center for Educational Reform and
Innovation). His main research interests lie in social theory, cultural change
and the sociology of education. He is author of several books and articles,
including A. Maccarini, Deep Change and Emergent Structures in Global
Society. Explorations in Social Morphogenesis (Springer, 2019); A.
Maccarini, E. Morandi, R. Prandini (eds.), Sociological Realism (Routledge,
2011).
Jamie Morgan is Professor of Economic Sociology at Leeds Beckett
University. He co-edits the Real-World Economics Review with Edward