Socio-material Interaction Research Articles

Sending the Right Signals: A Theoretical Model to Understand How Interpretative Leadership Capacity Advances Cross-Sector Collaboration

Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) are increasingly asked to facilitate cross-sector collaboration between state, private industry, and nonprofit actors and organizations. Growing evidence indicates certain contexts and conditions support cross-sector col-laboration more than others. However, there is still limited understanding of how, spe-cifically, process and practice produce leadership activity necessary to advance cross-sector collaboration. The purpose of this study is to examine illustrations of how the leadership practice of interpretative signaling emerges in facilitated committees work-ing to enable cross-sector collaboration. Relying on a Leadership-as-Practice (LAP) frame, this video ethnography of Collaborative Leadership Learning Group (CLLG) sessions establishes a theoretical model helpful to capturing how everyday dialogic, re-lational, and socio-material interactions emerge leadership between committee mem-bers attempting to enable cross-sector collaboration. Leadership practice was primarily connected to informal authority that was dispersed through networks of people and community systems. Four forms of interpretative signaling are illustrated as a general practice in the theoretical model.

Digital technologies and accounting quantification: The emergence of two divergent knowledge templates

The opportunities of digital technologies, but also their risks, are shaping organisations and societies. Their influence on the future of accounting is often presented as decisive. In fact, information technologies and accounting are so intertwined that it seems impossible to separate the two. Nevertheless, as practices, they emerge from different knowledge disciplines. We examine the intersection of accounting and information technologies through an ethnographic study conducted in a multinational high-tech company in the process of implementing a new IT system. We pay particular attention to the interactions between accountants and technologists, which we analyse through the concept of knowledge templates. A template based on mobilising formalised knowledge to intervene on the organisation in a systematic way treats technology as a set of solutions for predetermined needs. Conversely, a template that treats technology as an emerging complex imposes modes of coordination based on modularity, traceability, and collaboration. Through sociomaterial interactions, a plurality of templates emerges that influences local practices. This article contributes to the literature by showing that accounting emerges through its entanglement with different bodies of knowledge following potentially divergent knowledge templates. Information technologies therefore pose a challenge to accounting: is it possible to conceive of a modular and radically decentralised accounting? This would be an accounting that accepts the pluralism of representations, orientations, and legitimate organisational discourses. It would be an accounting system with greater emancipatory potential.

Conceptualizing socio-emotional disablism: a duoethnography of Crohn’s disease and OCD during COVID-19

We utilize duoethnography to help readers better understand the constitutive nature of disability in the contexts of chronic illness and mental health. By doing so, we articulate the concept of socio-emotional disablism, which expands structural and psycho-emotional theories of disablism to account for the ways socio-material interactions trigger emotion-work—the communicative labor and fatigue that accompanies negotiating our own emotions as well as the emotions of others in disabling contexts—thus limiting relational and ideological engagement with disability. We conclude by discussing what the concept of socio-emotional disablism teaches us about how to build more inclusive social futures through deeper interpersonal engagement and more sustainable public health practices.

The Ethnographic Quest in the Midst of COVID-19.

The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has threatened ethnographic inquiry, undermining its quintessential characteristic. Participant observation, then, has been thoroughly dismembered by the radical measures implemented to prevent the spread of the virus. This phenomenon, in short, has dragged anthropologists to a liminal state within which ethnography is paradoxically caught in an onto-epistemological unstable vortex. The question of being here and not there, during the pandemic, is epitomised in the instability of different spatio-temporal contexts that overlap through technological mediations. Reflecting on previous fieldwork experiences and current virtual inquiries with the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon unfolds how COVID-19 has thoroughly reshaped how the author approaches subjects' socio-ecological settings. Against this background, the article argues that corporeal immersion remains a necessary condition for the anthropological scrutiny of multispecies relationalities amidst the challenging times of the Anthropocene. The article nevertheless demonstrates that the intellectual efforts to grasp the different material temporalities of virtual spaces embrace the ethical principles concerning the renunciation of fieldwork with vulnerable communities. Furthermore, a reflective and speculative stance is proposed to actualise the snapshots of faraway physicalities linking them to past embodied and multi-sensory experiences. It is ultimately theorised how these mnemonic devices operate as creative forms of inquiry that overcome the pandemic consequences, extra-stimulating our cognitive capabilities to reflect on prior and possible socio-material interactions.

A sociomaterial conceptualization of flows in industrial ecology

AbstractA major starting point in industrial ecology (IE) is that reaching ecological sustainability requires understanding relations between human actions and material (tangible) flows. IE studies have enabled assessments of different technical and sociotechnical configurations but only to a limited degree provided concepts that support the design of interventions for industrial ecologies. We contribute by proposing asociomaterial flow approach, here applied to life cycle thinking. After problematizing some common concepts in IE, the key concepts, a procedure, and some applied variants of the proposed sociomaterial approach are presented. The approach is theoretically grounded in related sociomaterial research. This body of theories underpins our conceptualization of how flows in, for example, a product life cycle can be related to nets of human actions within one rather than several analytical frames. The sociomaterial interaction point (SMIP) is a key concept in our approach for the sociomaterial connection between material flows and actor networks. A SMIP can be described as the interactions where humans come closest to the flows. The conceptualization of the methodology provides a framework for exploring actor and action networks shaping material flows and a basis for a relational analysis of governance, organization, and management of the flows in industrial ecologies. A sociomaterial approach to flow studies can therefore help in designing more concrete sustainability interventions in industrial ecologies.

Exploring liminality in the co-design of rehabilitation environments: The case of one acute stroke unit.

This paper describes an Experience-based Co-design (EBCD) project that aimed to increase patient activity within an acute stroke unit. We apply the concept of liminality to explore ways in which the EBCD process, a form of Participatory Action Research, may dilute or even dissolve social hierarchies and challenge assumptions about practices and constraints in this care setting, thereby opening up possibilities for transformation that enhances the therapeutic value of the space for patients and care providers alike. By occasioning a liminal phase of possibility for change, the work of one co-design group explored in detail here suggests that, in this process, the sociomaterial interactions involving patients, family members, staff, and the physical space are refashioned and re-inscribed in transformed ‘emplaced’ relationships of care.

Becoming a passenger: exploring the situational passenger experience and airport design in the Copenhagen Airport

ABSTRACT This paper develops the analytical framework of Becoming a Passenger to offer a new vocabulary for analysing the situational passenger experience in the Copenhagen Airport. This knowledge will shed light on the development of design guidelines for decision-making, particularly in the fields of mobilities and urban design, to improve passenger experiences and airport operations beyond a functionalistic, an efficient and economic approach. Becoming a passenger is defined as process + experience. Empirical analyses through this framework show specific mobile situations that support the new vocabulary added to understand passenger experience and reveal which spatial conditions and socio-material interactions trigger hybrid and active forms of passengers. This challenges notions of ‘seamless travel’ and flexible design based only on an operational perspective. The use of this analytical model sheds light on important aspects of developing airport design as agile (a learning tool) and airports as learning incubators.

The Case for Sociologically - Informed Approaches to Researching and Doing Legal Design

A central theme motivating the 2019 workshop on ‘Socio-Legal Studies in Germany and the UK: Theory and methods’ from which this paper emerged was ‘how academic traditions and institutional contexts have influenced the development of socio-legal research in Germany and the UK’; and whether there exists a ‘typical pathway into and through law and society research’ in each jurisdiction. My current research explores the potential of design to help us to understand and enhance sociolegal research methods. A key insight arising from that research is that designerly ways have the potential to be more inherently ‘social’ than legal ways. Reflecting back on the workshop discussion two questions arise for me—one retrospective and inward-looking, one prospective and outward-looking—around which this paper is structured this paper. Firstly, what signs of Anglo-German life can I find in the literature and practice underpinning my current research into sociolegal research and design? Secondly, might design have a role to play in nurturing a sense of Anglo-German sociolegal community? The combined effect of Anglo-German scholarship and practice is to teach us that a ‘sociological imagination’ is essential if we are to fully understand possible synergies between design and sociolegal research, and the risks and rewards of activating them. At the time of writing, social relations of all kinds are being strained, broken, deepened and reinvented to accommodate the material threats posed by a global pandemic; and all on the back of sustained pressure relations, perhaps especially Anglo-German relations, arising from Brexit; and all in the context of the rise of other nationalistic movements across the world. We cannot know what sociolegal research will or ought to look like in the coming months and years. My own experience of pandemic-lockdowns-as-natural-experiment has made visible to me how important sociomaterial interaction with my sociolegal community is, and reinforced my conviction that we must pay more attention to designing those moments that we are lucky enough to share in person.

Relationships and material culture in a residential home for older people

AbstractResidents of older people's homes furnish their rooms with belongings that are associated with meaningful relationships. Previous research shows how material culture symbolises residents’ past and existing relationships, helping residents to remain embedded within familial and social networks. Less attention has been paid to how relationships are actively (re)constituted through socio-material interactions, and to the potential for objects to facilitate new relationships. This article presents findings from an ethnographic study into the everyday experiences of residents of an older people's home in northern England. Using observations of daily life and in-depth interviews with residents, it demonstrates how residents used material culture in gift-giving, divestment practices and in mundane social interactions. In this way, residents used objects to not only maintain relationships with family members outside the home, but form new relationships inside the home with other residents and members of staff. Combining theories of materiality, relationality and social practice, I argue that residents’ interactions with material culture helped to facilitate new social interaction and meaningful relationships. This is important in a social context where loneliness has been identified as a significant threat to residents’ mental and physical health. Residential homes for older people can develop guidance on practical activities and strategies that can use material culture to increase social interaction and enhance quality of life for residents.

RE-CONCEPTUALIZING L2 WRITING REVISION STRATEGIES FROM AN ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE: AN INTERVIEW BASED INQUIRY

This study examines an ESL writer�s revision activity in composing an argumentative essay from an ecological perspective. The study aimed to explore how sociomaterial conditions present in the pedagogical context lead to the writer�s use of revision strategies in responding to instructor feedback. By using an interview-based case study approach, data were collected from one ESL writer and instructor in an ESL freshman composition class at a large public university in the US. Based on the analysis of field-notes, transcripts from interviews and writing conferences, and various cultural artifacts, the study found that the writer�s goal-oriented agency foregrounded his engagement with instructor feedback, which narrowed down the problem space perceived to be important by the writer to achieve his goal in writing. The writer�s selective attention to the specific writing issues to be attended in his revision attempt provided an essential perceptual pretext for the concoctions of several sociomaterially-afforded revision strategies. The study also found that sociomaterial interactions inherent within one strategy use conditioned the emergence of another strategy while showcasing that the writer�s strategy use could be emergent and generative in nature. Based on the findings, the study discusses the emergence of the revision strategies as a result of collective interplay of student agency and student-perceived sociomaterial affordances in the writer�s attempt to establish sociocognitive alignment with the instructor�s expectations delivered through feedback. Implications for ecologically-oriented L2 revision strategy research are discussed.

Emerging and developing situational interest during children's tablet‐mediated biology learning activities at a nature center

AbstractThis study qualitatively investigated how children's situational interests were triggered and developed during the Tree Investigators project, an outdoor, tablet‐mediated biology learning program. Utilizing a situative learning framework, we elucidate a comprehensive account of the children's expression and development of science‐related situational interests. Video recordings of five dyads of children (aged 9–11) were collected during summer camp sessions at a nature center. Video‐based analyses were conducted to identify patterns of the children's situational interest development while they learned about tree life cycles at the camp. Our analyses focused on how the children's interactions with the physical settings (e.g., mobile app, trees) and other people (e.g., peers) triggered and maintained situational interest in different ways. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the relationships between children's situational interests, cognitive and emotional engagements, and socio material interactions, especially in an outdoor, tablet‐mediated education environment. In order to support children's situational interests, our findings suggest including tactile and open‐ended activities, considering the different influences of the same resources to different children, and respecting diverse areas of interests within peers.

Digital Transformation and Trust (Dis)intermediation – Coleman’s Models Thirty Years On

Focusing on digital technology resources carries the danger that socio-material interaction will be ignored. There is already a tendency to make overly simplistic assumptions in digital innovation research, neglecting the complexity of socio-material interaction. This article examines one kind of social interaction, namely trust intermediation, comparing the trust intermediation models developed by James S. Coleman with new kinds of trust intermediation and disintermediation originated by digital innovation. Intermediaries in trust play a crucial role in overcoming mistrust and initiating cooperation by contributing to a reduction in information asymmetry and free-riding temptation, whilst providing reputational information supporting new trust relationships. As conditions can vary with different types of trust intermediation, differentiation becomes necessary, an issue which is often unappreciated in trust literature. As assumed in Coleman’s examples, intermediaries are traditionally taken to be human; yet digital innovation and transformation have led to new trust intermediation possibilities, which are nowadays becoming increasingly significant. This article assigns these new kinds of trust intermediation to Coleman’s basic trust intermediation types, reveals their regular use and identifies the changes already in existence. Trust disintermediation by blockchain technology is finally being discussed against this background.

Translating Inclusion

The purpose of this article is to explore how practices of translation shape particular paths of inclusion for people living in marginalized residential areas in Denmark. Inclusion, we argue, is not an end-state but rather something that must be constantly performed. Active citizenship, today, is not merely a question of participation but also learning to become active in all spheres of life. The article draws on empirical examples from a multisite fieldwork in six different sites of local community work in Denmark, to demonstrate how different dimensions of translation are involved in shaping active citizenship. We propose the following different dimensions of translation: translating authority, translating language, and translating social problems. The article takes its theoretical point of departure from assemblage urbanism, arguing that cities are heterogeneous assemblages of sociomaterial interactions. Through the practices of translation, local community work both transforms the possibilities for residents and disrupts the compositions of urban assemblages. Through this, we argue, local community work creates new opportunities for residents.

Recombination in digital innovation: Challenges, opportunities, and the importance of a theoretical framework

In this article I argue that the quest to establish digital innovation as a research domain is hindered by three challenges. As digital innovation research we are too often: a) reifying the agency of digital innovation actors; b) developing explanations of digital innovation detached from the specifics of digital technology, and c) developing overly specific explanations of digital innovation. I begin by providing a brief overview of the recombination perspective and considering why this perspective holds great appeal in the digital age. I then engage with Henfridsson et al.'s (2018) value spaces framework as a platform for framing value creation and value capture in relation to recombination in digital innovation. Next, I push Henfridsson et al.'s arguments one step further to discuss them in relation to what I consider to be the key challenges for digital innovation research. Illustrating with some of my own recent projects, I suggest that in order to fully address these challenges we need to (1) develop explanations of digital innovation acknowledging the complexity of sociomaterial interaction in digital innovation; (2) develop explanations of digital innovation building on the specifics of digital technology, and (3) develop explanations of digital innovation based on an oscillation between the specific and the general. The article concludes by pointing to future challenges and developments for digital innovation research.

Economic deals in the construction industry

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between social-material interaction and the monetary aspects of business relationships in the construction industry. The authors term the formal financial agreements necessary for such activities “deals”, and this paper seeks to open a research avenue to further investigate the multifaceted interaction processes among business actors. The construction industry is a suitable empirical setting for this purpose; its project-based character and societal position of linking business with the construction of essential community infrastructure imply that different types of money-handling activities need to be managed continuously with both short-term and long-term effects taken into account.Design/methodology/approachTo investigate the deals, i.e., the interface between socio-material interaction and the money-handling processes in the construction industry, as well as studying the potential interrelatedness of deals, the authors performed a case study involving three interrelated housing projects in Uppsala, Sweden.FindingsThe study shows that deals do not only have an intricate relationship to the social-material interaction processes among construction actors, but they also become interrelated in specific ways to form “deal structures” as actors engage in different business relationships over time. This means, for instance, that a single deal can enable several other deals, and involved actors have different abilities in performing deals. Hence, most deals are part of a “broader” interaction pattern of social and material resources spanning the organizational borders of individual companies.Originality/valueWithin the industrial marketing and purchasing, the socio-material interaction among actors has been well studied, but less attention has been paid to the monetary dimension and its relationship to the socio-material interaction processes. In particular, this study provides an understanding of monetary agreements in the construction industry.

The framing of product ideas in the making: a case study of the development of an energy saving pump

Research regarding work with ideas in industrial settings has predominantly treated ideas as rather stable ‘black boxes’. This article contributes a new understanding of idea work and seeks to expand our understanding of how a product concept is constituted and synthesised through socio-material interaction of organisational members and engagement in idea work. The article contributes a case study of the development process behind the energy-saving Alpha Pro circulator launched by the Danish pump manufacturer Grundfos. Based on an analysis of how organisational players engage in the controversial and shifting understandings of what seems to constitute a successful product, the article offers a new perspective on navigating the players’ ideas in the political processes of innovation. It suggests that navigation of technological frames can offer a new perspective to make explicit the implicated actors’ world views, including what they perceive as relevant problems and related strategies for solving them.

Environmentally coupled repairs and remedies in the airline cockpit: Repair practices of talk and action in interaction

Our article explores the repair practices pilots use to correct various troubles during flights. The intersubjective understanding of action is a salient part of the time-critical activities of aviation. Repairs solve troubles before any accident risk emerges, thus contributing to flight safety. In repair practices, the social and technical environment is interwoven. If remedies concern faulty lines of action, they target the techno-material condition of the aircraft. Such repair practices are not repairs of talk, but remedies of action in a socio-material interaction. We discuss remedies of action as a particular type of repair practice, and outline their role in socio-material interactions. The aim is to continue building a holistic analysis of social action, not just to add a multimodal layer over an analysis of talk. The rethinking of social action contributes to the exploration of social actions anchored to their socio-material environment.

Assemblage and critical urbanism

This paper offers a discussion of what assemblage thinking might offer critical urbanism. It seeks to connect with and build upon recent debates in City (2009) on critical urbanism by outlining three sets of contributions that assemblage offers for thinking politically and normatively of the city. First, assemblage thinking entails a descriptive orientation to the city as produced through relations of history and potential (or the actual and the possible), particularly in relation to the assembling of the urban commons and in the potential of ‘generative critique’. Second, assemblage as a concept functions to disrupt how we conceive agency and critique due to its focus on sociomaterial interaction and distribution. Third, assemblage, as collage, composition and gathering provides an imaginary of the cosmopolitan city, as the closest approximation in the social sciences to the assemblage idea. The paper is not an attempt to offer assemblage thinking as opposed, intellectually or politically, to the long and diverse traditions of critical urbanism, but is instead an examination of some of the connections and differences between assemblage thinking and strands of critical urbanism.

The art and craft of train travel

Current theories concerning the social and material construction of time and space have little to say concerning the specific things and people involved. For example, how do times and spaces get made on a train—with passengers, train seats, tables, and views through the window? Through a travelogue of one train journey across England, this paper explores the art and craft of train travel, and the making of a particular time and space. The paper draws together science studies approaches to socio-material relations, and geographical concerns with socio-spatiality, to discuss passengers as spatially distributed persons and property. Reflecting on ethnographic evidence in the form of quotations and photographs woven through the text, it demonstrates how these heterogeneous passengers craft their travel times as an effect of their travel time use; how socio-material interactions with pens, papers, puzzles and electricity pylons make time. Following Michel Serres, it also suggests how passenger time is not a simple flow but a percolation, and how these passenger times coalesce in train carriages to form communities. The paper is itself a journey, in the form of words and images, which begins and ends with the imaginary, social, and material work of making a destination.

STS goes to school: Spatial imaginaries of technology, knowledge and presence

The following text presents a revised and extended version of the public defence of my Ph.D. thesis, which I presented at the Faculty of Social Sciences on 18th November 2005, Copenhagen University. The thesis applies and develops theoretical perspectives from Science and Technology Studies – especially Actor-Network Theory – on the empirical field of primary education. This field has not prior been approached by these theories. Based on ethnographic field studies the thesis presents and compares what I call spatial imaginaries of interactions of humans and learning materials in a traditional classroom and in a computer lab. The study describes and discusses the forms of knowledge and the forms of presence performed through these socio-material interactions. The study thus contributes a definition of materialities that takes the understanding of technology in education beyond the dominant humanist approach to schooling.