Wintersemester 2021/2022

This course introduces you to an important set of topics that matter for human resource management (HRM) and organization. HRM is an extremely important management function because the acquisition, sponsorship, and retention of talented personnel is extremely important for all organizations out there. Likewise, many of these organizations transform and change as digital technology increasingly pressure them to do so. For example, Netflix was a rental service that sent physical copies to its customers before it became a streaming service. This show casts the importance of understanding basic principles of organizing and managing change. This course will be split roughly in halves dedicated to introducing students to HRM and organization, respectively. Please note though that an introductory course like this can only be seen as appetizer to these important topics.

Today´s legal privacy framework is not only extensive, but oftentimes also confusing. In addition to the already high requirements of the GDPR come national peculiarities based on opening clauses, as well as sector specific privacy laws in areas such as electronic communication, human resources or health. Moreover, in our globalized society, with large multinational conglomerates dominating the market in almost every area, it is likely that one will also have to take privacy laws from other jurisdictions into account. Meeting all of these different requirements can become increasingly challenging and companies receive substantial pressure from the regulators, as well as the consumers, to improve their handling of personal data. It is therefore crucial to create a structured and comprehensive privacy framework within any organization in order to successfully address these challenges. The course provides an overview of the existing management struggles and practices, enabling participants to identify potential privacy risks and implement proactive strategies for their mitigation.

The course offers an introduction into recent approaches to “Digital Sociology”, an emerging field of reflexive and critical accounts focusing on the sociotechnical rearrangements connected to digital infrastructure, platforms, and digital media. After trying to tackle the conceptual and empirical challenges of digital transformations with the classical tools, theories, and methods of sociology in the 1990-2010s, recent approaches have been taking up insights from Science & Technology Studies to contribute to interdisciplinary fields such as Critical Data Studies, Critical Algorithm Studies or FAccT (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency).

Transdisciplinary discourse about topics that matter for the digital transformation of European society is an important part of the ENS community. In the research seminar, researchers from ENS and beyond will present contemporary work. At selected occasions, advanced students from ENS’ master’s program or PhD students may also be invited to present their projects.

With the start of semester 3 the students have two options: Either they complete an internship, or they develop and realize a digital project in groups of 2-5 students in cooperation with a local business school, public institution, or non-profit organization. This course offers ENS students scientific assistance and reflection of their internship or group project. The weekly meetings in the co-working-space are split between scientific input, presentations and subsequent discussion. This course offers the students to employ a design science perspective on their practical work: it combines practitioner’s expectations on the concrete project with scientific modes of inquiry and theory. In particular, Design Science Research and Action Design Research are the two methods of choice that the students are using on their concrete project. Depending upon the concrete project, one method is chosen after consultation with the instructor. A particular focus will be the evaluation of the project’s goal or possible digital artifacts created during the semester.

For the formation of modern cities and states, circulation has become a central matter (Foucault 2009) and infrastructural issues of how to bring data, energy, water and other materials to circulation have become primary concerns of governance (Cowen 2014). Infrastructures as vast and complex socio-technical assemblages align humans, technologies and nature, (re)distribute resources and power (Barry 2011), and regulate needs and services for an urban population (Folkers 2017). In this seminar, we will explore various conceptualizations of infrastructures. Based on empirical case studies on data, knowledge, border and urban infrastructures, we will examine how infrastructures are assembled, constructed, repaired and maintained. We will question the politics embedded into infrastructures, study their regulation, and explore infrastructures' implications on the everyday life of people. Last but not least, we will discuss various forms of in- and exclusion infrastructures bring into being and think about different forms of critique, appropriation and intervention.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms have been playing an important role in political communication for some time now - in election campaigns, in mobilizing protest, in the communication of political organizations or in shaping citizen participation. In this seminar, we want to follow the traces of myths, theories and data and work through what we can consider as secured knowledge after more than 10 years of research on digital media in this field. To this end, the course offers an introduction to questions, theories and methods of political communication in general and historical perspective such as the mediatization of politics, as well as a specific focus on the transformations of political communication through media change and digitalization. The seminar will take place online only in synchronous video meetings.

Science and Technology Studies is an interdisciplinary research field at the intersection of Social Sciences and Humanities on the one hand, Natural Sciences and Engineering on the other. It emerged in the 1970s driven by discomfort with traditional approaches to the Philosophy, History, and Sociology of Science (and Technology, but that took until the 1980s). Instead of focusing on epistemology and ontology, STS researchers started looking at epistemic practices and the agency of material entities; instead of focusing on a history of geniuses and their inventions, STS researchers started looking for failures and workarounds; instead of investigating scientific institutions and value systems, STS researches started to empirically analyze how scientific facts and technologies are practically made in laboratories, offices, and on conferences. The course will give an introduction into the main developments that led to the institutionalization of STS, highlight major case studies and controversies and introduce major concepts, theories, and methods to shape STS today. Students will learn about laboratory studies and controversy analysis, the social construction of technology and actor-network theory, the politics of artifacts and the technical democracy – to name just a few major topics.

With the start of semester 3 the students have two options: Either they complete an internship, or they develop and realize a small digital project in small groups of 2-5 students in cooperation with a local business school, public institution, or non-profit organization. This course offers ENS students to obtain guidance and feedback on the internship or group project. It is supposed to provide a platform to get feedback and solve various upcoming legal, practical, or organizational problems. The weekly meetings provide collegial exchange and consultation and offer the opportunity to learn and benefit from each other. In addition, students are given the opportunity for individual consultation with the course instructor and reflection on their practical experience.

Entrepreneurship is different from management within an established firm. Established firms often use techniques such as top-down planning or calculating business cases. In contrast, entrepreneurs often neither have the time nor the money to go into such detailed pre-planning. This course introduces you to some basic ideas in this context and enables you to apply them to what you have at hand: your project idea. This course is structured along three segments that will help you shape your project: business-related theory, sociological theory, and finally methods such as design science and action design research that will help you to put your project on a solid theoretical basis. In each of these segments, you will receive theoretical input from your course instructor and then apply this input to your project. We may group projects together as we move along in case they are very much aligned in spirit.

With the start of semester 3 the students have two options: Either they complete an internship, or they develop and realize a digital project in groups of 2-5 students in cooperation with a local business school, public institution, or non-profit organization. This course offers ENS students to obtain guidance and feedback on the internship or group project. It is supposed to provide a platform to get constructive feedback and accompany upcoming issues from an Information Systems perspective. The weekly meetings in the co-working-space shall provide collegial exchange and consultation. They offer the participants the opportunity to learn and benefit from each other. These sessions will be moderated but require the participants active participation. In addition, students are given the opportunity for individual consultation with the course instructor and reflection on their practice experience on an appointment basis.

The STS Workbench focusses on current topics in Science Technology Studies. Alternating more or less weekly, we discuss guest presentations by international experts and young scholars as well as current (pre)publications at the interface of science, technology and society. The term “workbench” is synonymous with the program: we are looking at rough and unpolished work, data and analysis from ongoing projects and conceptual and theoretical experiments – and we screw apart and reassemble issues, concepts and methods of current STS research.