The data analytics industry and the promises of real-time knowing: perpetuating and deploying a rationality of speed

ABSTRACT

This article draws upon a sample of 34 data analytics providers in order to explore the rhetorical framing of the speediness of the data analytic solutions that they offer. General perceptions of cultural speed-up frame understandings of organisational life, against this backdrop of data analytics are presented as a potential solution to the need to speed-up and keep-up with the competition. As a result, it is argued that notions of speedy analytics are central to the spread and intensification of data-led decision-making, governance and ordering processes. The promises of real-time knowing are one means by which organisational speed and agility are seen to be achievable. The result is the pushing back of the limits of datafication. This article is concerned with the power of the data analytics industry and the powerful ways in which this industry presents and projects properties and promises onto data and data analytics. It suggests that this industry taps into, cultivates and then attempts to deploy the wider rationality of a need for speed.

KEYWORDS:

• Big data
• data analytics industry
• capitalism
• power
• data imaginary

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.