Data warehousing organization: Infrastructural experimentation with educational governance

Organization is increasingly entwined with databased governance infrastructures. Developing the idea of ‘infrastructure as partial connection’ with inspiration from Marilyn Strathern and Science and Technology Studies, this article proposes that database infrastructures are intrinsic to processes of organizing intra- and inter-organizational relations. Seeing infrastructure as partial connection brings our attention to the ontological experimentation with knowing organizations through work of establishing and cutting relations. We illustrate this claim through a multi-sited ethnographic study of ‘The Data Warehouse’. ‘The Data Warehouse’ is an important infrastructural component in the current reorganization of Danish educational governance which makes schools’ performance public and comparable. We suggest that ‘The Data Warehouse’ materializes different, but overlapping, infrastructural experiments with governing education at different organizational sites enacting a governmental hierarchy. Each site can be seen as belonging to the same governance infrastructure but also as constituting ‘centres’ in its own right. ‘The Data Warehouse’ participates in the always-unfinished business of organizational world making and is made to (partially) relate to different organizational concerns and practices. This argument has implications for how we analyze the organizational effects of pervasive databased governance infrastructures and invites exploring their multiple organizing effects.