Big Data Comes to the Office →

The M.I.T. computer scientist Alex Pentland has figured out how to capture, in numerical form, the social vibrations of office life.

The metaphor in Pentland’s title, “Social Physics,” is meant to express the extraordinary concreteness of his data, which—unlike the data captured by Facebook or Google—is rooted in your physical actions: in what you do, rather than what you say. (He calls what he does “reality mining,” in contrast to “data mining.”) …his work shows that there is an irreducible socialness to workplace life—a human element—that managers eliminate at their own peril. Offices aren’t untouched environments; they are already structured by theories about what makes people productive. Often, those theories are wrong.