About the Book
Ask a person on the street whether new technologies bring about important social change and you are likely to hear a resounding "yes." But the answer is less definitive amongst academics who study technology and social practice. Scholarly writing has been heavily influenced by the ideology of technological determinism - the belief that some types or technologically driven social changes are inevitable and cannot be stopped. Rather than argue for or against notions of determinism, the authors in this book ask how the materiality (the arrangement of physical, digital, or rhetorical materials into particular forms that endure across differences in place and time) of technologies, ranging from computer-simulation tools and social media, to ranking devices and rumours, is actually implicated in the process of formal and informal organizing.
The book builds a new theoretical framework to consider the important socio-technical changes confronting people's everyday experiences in and outside of work. Leading scholars in the field contribute original chapters examining the complex interactions between technology and the social, between artefact and humans. The discussion spans multiple disciplines, including management, information systems, informatics, communication, sociology, and the history of technology, and opens up a new area of research regarding the relationship between materiality and organizing.
Table of Contents:
I. Setting the Stage
1: Jannis Kallinikos, Paul M. Leonardi, and Bonnie A. Nardi: The Challenge of Materiality: Origins, Scope, and Prospects
II. Theorizing Materiality
2: Paul M. Leonardi: Materiality, Sociomateriality, and Socio-Technical Systems: What Do These Terms Mean? How Are They Different? Do We Need Them?
3: Philip Faulkner and Jochen Runde: On Sociomateriality
4: Jannis Kallinikos: Form, Function, and Matter: Crossing the Border of Materiality
III. Materiality as Performativity
5: Neil Pollock: Ranking Devices: The Socio-Materiality of Ratings
6: Susan V. Scott and Wanda J. Orlikowski: Great Expectations: The Materiality of Commensurability in Social Media
7: Youngjin Yoo: Digital Materiality and the Emergence of an Evolutionary Science of the Artificial
IV. Materiality as Assemblage
8: Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie A. Nardi: Inverse Instrumentality: How Technologies Objectify Patients and Players
9: Anne-Laure Fayard: Space Matters, but How? Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Place
10: Jennifer Whyte and Chris Harty: Socio-material Practices of Design Co-ordination Across a Large Construction Project
V. Materiality as Affordance
11: Daniel Robey, Benoit Raymond, and Chad Anderson: Theorizing Information Technology as a Material Artifact in Information Systems Research
12: Samer Faraj and Bijan Azad: The Materiality of Technology: An Affordance Perspective
13: Carole Groleau and Christiane Demers: Pencils, Legos, and Guns: A Study of Artifacts Used in Architecture
VI. Materiality as Consequence
14: Brian T. Pentland and Harminder Singh: Materiality: What are the Consequences?
15: François Cooren, Gail Fairhurst, and Romain Huët: Why Matter Always Matters in (Organizational) Communication
16: Jenna Burrell: The Materiality of Rumor
VII. Epilogue
17: Albert Borgmann: Matter Matters: Materiality in Philosophy, Physics, and Technology
About the Author :
Paul M. Leonardi is the Pentair-Nugent Associate Professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University where he teaches courses on the management of innovation and organizational change in the School of Communication, the McCormick School of Engineering, and the Kellogg School of Management. His research focuses on how companies can design organizational structures and employ advanced
information technologies to more effectively create and share knowledge. He is the author of Car Crashes Without Cars: Lessons about Simulation Technology and Organizational Change from Automotive Design
(MIT Press, 2012). Bonnie Nardi is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, the University of California, Irvine. An anthropologist, she has studied the uses of digital technologies in offices, schools, homes, libraries, hospitals, scientific laboratories, and virtual worlds. Her theoretical orientation is activity theory. She is the author of many scientific articles and books. Her latest books are My Life as a Night Elf
Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft (University of Michigan Press, 2010) and Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (co-author, Princeton University Press, 2012).
Jannis Kallinikos is Professor and PhD programme Director in the Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management at the London School of Economics. His research covers a wide range of topics on the interpenetration of technology with the administrative and institutional arrangements of contemporary societies. Recent books include The Consequences of Information: Institutional Implications of Technological Change (Edward Elgar, 2006), and Governing Through
Technology: Information Artefacts and Social Practice (Palgrave, 2011).
Review :
Materiality and Organizing marks a long overdue turning point in the scholarly study of the human-technology relationship that now engulfs our lives. For too long, researchers have tended to treat technology as a dream conjured by agents and imbued with their projects. This brilliant sequence of essays restores and deepens the entire field of perception. It finally returns us to the facticity of technology as it persistently redefines the horizon of the possible. These tightly argued masterpieces reestablish technology as embodied and significant. Most importantly, they return us to materiality just in time. With each passing day, technology becomes both more abstracted from its physical manifestations and more ubiquitous, producing a dematerialized materiality. Only a relentless focus on this paradox will yield the intellectual tools that are required to participate in our own destinies.
This volume is a much-needed exploration of the material aspects of the technologies that have reshaped our world. For two decades, a narrative framing technologies as social constructions has led to important advances in our understanding of their nature and impacts. Materiality and Organizing provides an important counterbalance to this approach in its exploration of the dimensions of materiality that constrain but also enable technologies to connect with and affect people, organizations, and society. This volume is required reading for scholars interested in technology, its development, and its impacts. Its insights into information technology are particularly significant.
For too long the materiality of social life has been ignored by sociologists and organization studies scholars. The role of materiality in social life is turning out to be one of the most interesting and difficult issues in the field. This multidisciplinary collection does not offer a single solution but offers the latest thoughts of scholars who try and take materiality seriously in their own research. The resulting volume is a deep and fascinating collection of essays.
