Current Projects

Politics in the Development of Algorithmic Governance

Algorithmic management and algorithmic governance have emerged as prominent topics of concern in the past decade. This research seeks to uncover how designers’ assumptions and ideologies impact the design of algorithmic governance systems. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a community of blockchain developers, I investigate the roles that ideology and worldview plays in the design and implementation of algorithmic governance systems.

An early draft of this work has been presented at ICIS in 2019:

2019. Nicholas Garcia. Organized Adhocracy: The Challenges of Transitioning to Blockchain-based Crowd Platforms and Decentralized Governance. International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) Special Interest Group in Grounded Theory Methods. December 18.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: How Organizations Manage Data Quality

Data quality and observability is a new problem space for many data teams. There seems to be a lot of pain but not much concrete understanding of how to measure it, improve it and what tools to use. This research explores and analyzes recent trends and shifts in how data teams operate both from the technical and organizational standpoint.

This research is in the early phases of data collection and analysis.

Applying Data Science Tools to Grounded Theory Building

These days, many researchers are searching for ways to take advantage of the newfound abundance of data without sacrificing research rigor. Empirical data is abundant as never before, as technology increasingly mediates and records social interactions in minute detail.

Drawing on the fundamental principles of grounded theorizing, we categorize computational data-analysis techniques based on their applicability to the different stages of theory development, such as initial coding, axial coding, focused coding, and theoretical sampling. We pay particular attention to tools and strategies that align with the principles of Process Theorizing.

Early versions of work have been presented at ICIS and PROS in 2018.

2018. Nicholas Garcia and Natalia Levina. Computational Techniques for Organizational Process Theorizing. 10^th International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, June 23.

2018. Nicholas Garcia. Natural Language Processing Primer for Grounded Theory Method (GTM) Research. International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) Special Interest Group in Grounded Theory Methods. December 16

An application of this work in the field of Sociolinguistics has been presented in 2019 and published in 2020:

2020. Chun-Yi Peng and Nicholas Garcia. Mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin: A text-mining approach to speaker stereotype. Open Linguistics 6:1-5.

2020. Chun-Yi Peng and Nicholas Garcia. Mediatized Taiwan Mandarin: The role of televised media in the formation of speaker stereotypes. Accepted to Association for Asian Studies 2020 – Hacking East Asia: Expanding the Horizons of Interdisciplinary Digital Methods. March 20 (Conference canceled due to COVID outbreak.)

2019. Chun-Yi Peng and Nicholas Garcia. Mediatized Taiwan Mandarin: The role of televised media in the formation of speaker stereotype. Paper presented at Language and Prejudice Symposium. Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden, Nov. 13-15.