Article - Socio-Material Practices - Orlikowski 2007

Question 1

What is materiality?

Answer 1

The notion that the physical properties of an artifact have consequences for how the object is used.

• Visible: desks, chairs, phones, computers
• Less visible: data, voice networks, electricity

Question 2

Why is current organizational study research limited?

Answer 2

• It focuses on cultural, institutional and situated aspects of organizing, but not on how organizing is bound to material forms;

Question 3

What are the two current ways of dealing with materiality in organization research?

Answer 3

1. Disregard, downplay or take materiality of organizations for granted
   (Assumption that materiality does not matter too much)
2. Treating materiality to study specific cases of technology adoption, diffusion and use within and across organizations

Question 4

What are the conceptual difficulties of treating materiality to study specific cases of technology adoption, diffusion etc.?

Answer 4

1. Explicit focus on technology adoption, diffusion and use
   - > Implies materiality is only important in separate and distinct phenomena, and should only be considered occasionally;
2. Tend to focus only on technology effects or on interaction with technology

Question 5

What are the two approaches of treating materiality to study specific cases of technology adoption, diffusion and use?

Answer 5

1. Techno-centric approach
   How technology leverages human action (assumes tech is homogeneous, predictable and stable)
2. Human-centered approach
   How humans make sense of and interact with technology in certain circumstances
   This one understands that there are different meanings assigned to tech, but minimizes the role of technology itself.

Question 6

Where should a new theory about materiality in technology focus on?

Answer 6

How materiality is integral to organizing. It should position that the social and the material are constitutively entangled in every day life.

“There is no social that is not also material, and there is no material that is also social”

-> Post-humanist, as it seeks to decenter the human subject

Question 7

What does the author, Orlikowski, propose?

Answer 7

• We will gain analytical insight if we stop seeing the social and the material as distinct. Materiality is based on performed relations;
• Social and material are constitutive entangled. Distinct interacting entities have an influence on eachother, but that comes because these entities have an a priori independence on eachother;
• There are no independently existing entities with inherent characteristics;
• The distinction of artifacts is purely analytical (Seeing clothes separate from human, but in reality clothes choice is intertwined with the person);

–> Entities and thus materiality and the social part of organizing have an influence on each other and are, in practice, relationally dependent on each other.

–> See organizational practicess as sociomaterial, because otherwise it reinforces the idea that material is not intrinsic to organizing;

Question 8

What is the example of social-materiality with google search?

Answer 8

The search result is dependent on the materials involved, such as computers, networks and algorithms. It is however also dependent on the humans who made those materials (design, construction operations), and things as prior search queries by the searcher (human) and his location.

Question 9

How can the results of a google search be both emergent and contingent?

Answer 9

Emergent:
It only temporarily binds a heterogeneous assembly of distributed agencies.

Contingent (subject to change):
The assemblage changes over time, as algorithms, preferences and websites change

Question 10

What is meant with performativity of socio-material assemblage?

Answer 10

The power to effect change in the world by functioning as a social action and have the effect of change.

–> It is fragmented and produces intended and unintended outcomes

Question 11

What are concepts that are difficult to grasp because the social and the material are constitutively entangled

Answer 11

• Ephemerality –> Outcomes can change quickly
• -> For example a search algorithm improves based on the input of human searches
• Multiplicity –> Phenomena take different shapes in different places (google –> differ per location, political conditions etc)
• Dispersion and mobility –> Through materiality and innovations, the organizational culture might be influenced (communication style as a result of blackberry’s)