Big Data Revisited: A Rejoinder

We elaborate on key issues of our paper New games, new rules: big data and the changing context of strategy as a means of addressing some of the concerns raised by the paper’s commentators. We initially deal with the issue of social data and the role it plays in the current data revolution. The massive involvement of lay publics as instrumented by social media breaks with the strong expert cultures that have underlain the production and use of data in modern organizations. It also sets apart the interactive and communicative processes by which social data is produced from sensor data and the technological recording of facts. We further discuss the significance of the very mechanisms by which big data is produced as distinct from the very attributes of big data, often discussed in the literature. In the final section of the paper, we qualify the alleged importance of algorithms and claim that the structures of data capture and the architectures in which data generation is embedded are fundamental to the phenomenon of big data.