Cristina Alaimo is Professor of Information Systems at ESSEC Business School (France). She previously held faculty positions at LUISS University (Rome) and Surrey Business School (UK). She earned her PhD in Management, Information Systems, and Innovation from the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK).

Her research traces the relation between data and socio-economic practice: how data are made and by whom, and what they then do to the organizations and markets that produce and use them. It established that data are produced rather than found, and treats them as cognitive, economic and organizational artifacts. The current work presses the claim further: through the categories, technologies and AI models that produce them, data come to compose the objects that organizations and markets act on, on social media platforms as in machine learning systems and biometric identification. She calls this a social science of data and AI.

Her work has been published in leading journals including Organization Science, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology, The Information Society, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations. She is co-author, with Jannis Kallinikos, of Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy (MIT Press, 2024), winner of the EGOS Book Award 2025.

Cristina serves as Senior Editor at Organization Studies and the European Journal of Information Systems, and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Management Information Systems. She is co-founder, with Lauren Waardenburg, of Theorizing Data & AI, a European scholarly community and annual conference. In 2025 she was named to the Thinkers50 Radar list, recognizing scholars with the potential to shape the future of management theory and practice. Writing and current work: cristinaalaimo.com