Socio-material Networks Research Articles

Sociomaterial networks for a systemic circular economy transition in an intermediate Global South city

The transition to a Circular Economy (CE) requires systemic change. The narrow focus of technocratic assessments of the CE inhibits the transformation of the economic system that the CE demands. Understanding Global South perspectives and context in the transition to avoid widening regional inequality is imperative, particularly in intermediate cities that hold most promise in the scale of implementation. This analysis uses sociomaterial theory to investigate the entanglement of the social and the material with a systemic narrative. We use a qualitative assessment of the local informal recycling sector and other invisible and nascent circular economy stakeholders to assess the current network in an intermediate city in Ecuador as a case study. The sociomaterial network in transformation has strengths that need to be reinforced but also significant gaps in how materials and relationships in informal sectors are considered and valued. From a practical perspective, there are several role gaps, such as reducing regulatory barriers to operate in a CE and implementing extended producer responsibility. Materials that must enter the economy in the form of products must last longer, be recyclable but also have realistic market and structural conditions to be recycled. Caring relationships and organizational strengthening must be fostered, as they constitute the main social support for the most vulnerable in informal sectors that sustain the CE. Finally, a value-based education must be addressed holistically, alongside a ubiquitous paradigm shift towards global circular value chains for a just transition

Potential and Gaps of Sociomaterial Networks in the Global South to Transition to a Circular Economy

Potential and Gaps of Sociomaterial Networks in the Global South to Transition to a Circular Economy

(Un)Making the Insurrectional City: Illicit Infrastructures of Care and Repression in the 2018 Nicaraguan Protests

In this paper, we explore the socio-material infrastructures that maintained and repressed the 2018 Nicaraguan protests, as they made and unmade the insurrectional city. We consider the insurrectional city to be an urban place that is socio-materially reconfigured by the act of revolt and ensuing conflict. In Nicaragua, the insurrectional city (re)emerged as an entangled moral material battleground where past and present practices and notions of insurrection, as well as diverging imaginations for the future collided. With the 2018 protests, new material and human flows settled onto the streets, disrupting extant ways of being in and moving through the city. These were directly deemed illicit by government authorities, who projected the protesters as vandals, thugs, and later even terrorists. A competing ethics of care emerged then, as protesters and (para-)state actors understood the protection and defense of their lives and respective political projects differently. Autoconvocados (self-convened protesters) organized socio-material networks to distribute vital goods for protesters occupying public space, at the same time that the government mobilized its hybrid repressive apparatus to quash and criminalize both the protesters and the care networks supporting their activities. To understand the city-making practices that the protests engendered – both during the months-long insurrection and in its aftermath – examining the interplay between care, repression and legitimacy is crucial.

The Humans and Non-Humans Interaction: the Features of Digital Discourse

The article is devoted to the interaction between people and digital non-human. The relevance is due to both the speed of the emergence and spread of digital technologies, during which digital non-human objects are created, and the specifi cs of the interaction of people and non-human in the digital environment, in contrast to traditional technological environments. The purpose of the article is to identify and articulate this specifi city. The main methods used are research of sources and analysis, and the methodology is based on an actor-network approach. The article studies how people and non-people interact in the digital space and reveals the specifi cs of these interactions in comparison with the interaction of people with traditional technological non-human. As shown, the key in this interaction is the indistinguishability of digital objects for humans, which leads to very specifi c forms of interaction with them, differing from interaction with well known technological non-human agents. This feature leads to the formation of new forms of sociality and the emergence of new social phenomena, for example, FOMO, post-truth etc. In conclusion, it is recorded that people and digital artifacts in the form of digital objects, creating sociomaterial networks mutually constitute each other. It is necessary to continue research on the interaction of people and digital non-human, so that even at the design stage of digital technological objects, the basic foundations of sociality and human perception are laid in order to minimize possible negative consequences of future interactions between people and digital non-human.

Communication Technologies and Aid Practices: Superbergamo, Group Chats, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article examines “Superbergamo”, a collective which emerged in response to the needs of vulnerable citizens during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bergamo (Italy). The analysis reveals the central role of social media and group chat systems in facilitating the spontaneous creation of the group, and the subsequent development of coordinated voluntary emergency activities that brought aid to thousands of local people. Inspired by Actor-Network theory, the analysis traces of the group's emergence, showing how human and non-human actors—including social media and group chat apps—played a crucial role in shaping the aid practice. In so doing, we contribute to the literature on emergency responses from the public and social media. More significantly, we show how the critical contribution of technology to the development and sustenance of aid practices can be mapped, by providing evidence of how groups, practices and sociomaterial networks are necessarily entangled.

Enriching research quality: A proposition for stakeholder heterogeneity

Abstract Dominant approaches to research quality rest on the assumption that academic peers are the only relevant stakeholders in its assessment. In contrast, impact assessment frameworks recognize a large and heterogeneous set of actors as stakeholders. In transdisciplinary research non-academic stakeholders are actively involved in all phases of the research process and actor-network theorists recognize a broad and heterogeneous set of actors as stakeholders in all types of research as they are assigned roles in the socio-material networks, also termed ‘problematizations’, that researchers reconfigure. Actor-network theorists consider research as a performative act that changes the reality of the stakeholders it, knowingly or unknowingly, involves. Established approaches to, and notions of, research quality do not recognize the heterogeneity of relevant stakeholders nor allow for reflection on the performative effects of research. To enrich the assessment of research quality this article explores the problematization as a potential new object of evaluation. Problematizations are proposals for how the future might look. Hence, their acceptance does not only concern fellow academics but also all other human and other-than-human actors that figure in them. To enrich evaluative approaches, this article argues for the inclusion of stakeholder involvement and stakeholder representation as dimensions of research quality. It considers a number of challenges to doing so including the identification of stakeholders, developing quality criteria for stakeholder involvement and stakeholder representation, and the possibility of participatory research evaluation. It can alternatively be summarized as raising the question: for whose benefit do we conduct evaluations of research quality?

The Language Ecology of Graduate Students: An Exploration through Vocabulary Contribution

This study explores the language ecology of graduate students through vocabulary contribution. Understanding students’ learning ecology may be done through the identification of pertinent sociomaterial networks with which students engage to initiate or complement learning. This study was set in an academic writing module taught by the researcher. An open invitation was extended to his students to contribute any vocabulary they encountered outside of his classroom. Along with the vocabulary contribution, students also had to provide the excerpt where the word occurred and the source-type. Contributions were made on an online Excel file. There was a total of 277 contributions made, of which 259 were unique (229 words and 30 unique strings of words). Students’ contributions of strings of words were not anticipated. A majority of these contributions came from academic sources, such as research articles or book chapters, which may be a pertinent aspect of the graduate students’ language ecology. Through the findings, it is recommended that English for academic purposes (EAP) or English for specific purposes (ESP) instructors identify language ecologies found in the broader university setting to glean relevant pedagogical materials that can support students’ language development.

Affordance in Socio-Material Networks: A Mixed Method Study of Researchers' Groups and Analog-Digital Objects.

In this paper, we argue that we can better understand the relationship between social interaction and materiality by linking qualitative analysis of analog and digital practices, adopting Basov's model of socio-material networks. Our research questions turn about the interrogation of how social links distress the usage of analog and digital objects by researchers. We consider scientific networks with the relationship between researchers and their tools as a three-level social material network. It sheds light on how different types of researchers position their engagement with analog and digital materiality over time and its affordance and emotional attachment. This study contributes to the understanding of researchers' practices that involve new and old techniques and specific and not-specific tools.

Phasing out and in: System transition through disassociation in the German energy transition – The case of light and coal

In this paper, we focus on and compare policies for phasing-out coal and lignite energy production and light bulbs as part of regime-level climate change mitigation measures. Our approach broadens the transition focus on discontinuation policies by adding a relational STS perspective. Our goal is to understand how the relationships that constitute sociotechnical regimes are deliberately brought to an end. In order to understand this “dissociation”, we explore how policymakers instigate phase-out by engaging technology users and producers to loosen their entanglements in existing socio-material networks and eventually end their established sociotechnical relations. In two case studies we show how dissociation was achieved through 1) translating the German coal and lignite phase-out into a regional development challenge and 2) translating a well-established business with highly standardised and cosy incandescent lighting into a fast-changing lead market for energy-efficient LED technology.

The Biography of an Algorithm: Performing algorithmic technologies in organizations

Algorithms are ubiquitous in modern organizations. Typically, researchers have viewed algorithms as self-contained computational tools that either magnify organizational capabilities or generate unintended negative consequences. To overcome this limited understanding of algorithms as stable entities, we propose two moves. The first entails building on a performative perspective to theorize algorithms as entangled, relational, emergent, and nested assemblages that use theories—and the sociomaterial networks they invoke—to automate decisions, enact roles and expertise, and perform calculations. The second move entails building on our dynamic perspective on algorithms to theorize how algorithms evolve as they move across contexts and over time. To this end, we introduce a biographical perspective on algorithms which traces their evolution by focusing on key “biographical moments.” We conclude by discussing how our performativity-inspired biographical perspective on algorithms can help management and organization scholars better understand organizational decision-making, the spread of technologies and their logics, and the dynamics of practices and routines.

“The frog in the pan”: relational transformation of public values in the UK tax authority

PurposeThe authors aim to contribute to conceptual and empirical understanding of publicness in public sector accounting research by analysing how accounting technologies facilitated the transformation of public values of the UK tax authority.Design/methodology/approachThe authors develop a conceptual framework for analysing public values in terms of relational power. Combining governmentality and actor–network theory, the authors focus on the complex relationships through which human and non-human actors interact and the public values that emerge from these evolving socio-material networks. Based on a critical-interpretivist ethnographic study of interviews, documents and secondary survey data, the authors identify the emergent properties of accounting technologies in their case study.FindingsThe authors explain how accounting technologies facilitated the transformation of public values in the tax authority by reshaping relational power. Traditional public values were eroded and replaced by neoliberal values through a gradual change process (“frog in the pan”) of (1) disconnecting workers and citizens both spatially and socially; (2) losing touch with the embodied nature of tax administration; and (3) yielding to a dehumanising performance management system. Neoliberal accounting technologies transformed the texture of relationships in such a way that workers and citizens became disempowered from effective, accountable and humane tax administration.Research limitations/implicationsFurther research is needed that gains wider access to tax authority workers, extends the scope of the empirical data and provides comparisons with other tax authorities and public sector organisations.Social implicationsThe authors show that a relational approach to public values enables identification of what is “valuable” and how public sector organisations can become “value-able”.Originality/valueThe authors offer an interdisciplinary conceptualisation of publicness based on public administration literature, develop a relational conceptualisation of public values and provide original empirical evidence about the changing publicness of the UK tax authority.

Multispecies Interferences: Taxidermy and the Return of Wolves Taxidermy and the Return of Wolves

As in other countries in Central and Western Europe, the return of wolves to Switzerland since the mid-1990s has generated intense debates and has taken place in various fields in which material and immaterial entities come together in new multispecies networks. This paper focuses on one of those fields: wolf taxidermy. Based on interviews and fieldwork in taxidermy workshops and Swiss nature museums, the main question here is whether there are moments of wolfish agency in this unquestionably human-dominated process of taxidermy. A praxeological, performative and relational understanding of agency is laid out to explore this question. The selective and restricted agentic capacities wolves perform – mostly as a sort of offstage agents absent from the workshop itself – within the sociomaterial networks of wolf taxidermy is captured with the term interference.

Translations in Biobanking: Socio-Material Networks in Health Data Business

In this paper, we utilize actor-network theory (ANT) to contribute to research on commercialization of innovation. Based on a qualitative study on emerging innovative biomedical business we demonstrate how innovative research and development (R&D) is entangled with business and commerce through a texture of socio- material relations. The empirical study of biobanking in Finland foregrounds an interplay of social and material elements in innovative biomedical business. We deploy the concept of translation for analyzing how human and non-human actors conjoin and challenge each other when pursuing data management into a commercial service. Our discussion centers on the role and transformations of biobank data in constituting connections of innovative business between organizations and institutions in health data economy. The article enriches theorization of commercialization of innovation by addressing the dynamic and malleable nature of socio-material relations as the groundwork of innovation business, and by showing how innovation and business entangle through translations. We argue that in seeking to understand commercialization of innovation, the focus should not be on the innovative product or service and the way by which it is transferred from one actor to another and modified by a variety of actors involved in a commercialization network. Instead, the question is about what is the capability and power to pursue and steer changes in networked relations between material and human actors.

The mothers in me

Abstraction of the narrative The paper aims to evoke readers’ reflective and affective capacities and thereby facilitate understanding of the multisensorial, affective, and relational nature of knowing and becoming. It highlights the role of embodied knowing in becoming by following the journey of an individual faced with sudden trauma. It describes the affective energies crossing time and space in the continuously changing sociomaterial networks of relationships encountered in different organizational settings, be they in academia, health and social services, family, or otherwise. The paper is based on an auto-ethnographic narrative of becoming a mother that connects individual experiences with cultural understandings. The narrative is an outcome of a diffractive analysis of becoming; knowing emerges during the course of a writing process in which theoretical understandings, emotions, concepts, discourses, embodied experiences, and affects come together. The paper brings out the multiplicity of contradictory discourses involved in knowing and becoming. In so doing, it highlights the entangled coexistence of body and mind, reality and imagination, public and private, reason and emotion, as well as past, present, and future.

Performing a Myth to Make a Market: The construction of the ‘magical world’ of Santa

If you believe in Santa, do not read this paper. Through an in-depth, qualitative, empirical study, we follow the Santa myth to a remote northern location in Lapland, Finland where, for one month a year, multiple actors come together to create a tourist market offering: the chance to visit Santa in his ‘magical world’. We explore how the myth is transformed into reality through performative, organisational speech acts, whereby felicitous conditions for the performance of visits to Santa are embedded in a complex socio-material network. We develop the performative turn (Gond et al., 2016) in organisational studies by introducing a new category of speech act, ‘translocution’, a compendium of imagining, discussing, proposing, negotiating and contracting that transforms the myth into a model of an imaginary-real world. Through translocutionary acts, actors calculate, organise the socio-material networks of the market, and manage the considerable uncertainty inherent in its operation. Details of the myth become market facts, while commercial constructs fade into the imaginary. The result, when felicitous conditions are achieved, is a ‘Merry Christmas’ of magical, performative power.

Conceiving multiple markets through network analysis: evidence from the emergence of the World Music market

ABSTRACTThe idea of multiple markets, conceptualised as a variety of concrete market configurations, was fruitfully developed in the socio-material networks research programme. However, it has not yet been able to solve the following puzzle: the differentiation and specification of multiple markets that exist at the same time in the same place. In this paper, I argue that White’s model of ‘markets from networks’ can contribute to filling this gap, since it is centred on the specification of a market’s structural and cultural boundaries. His model allows for the analysis of concrete market practices intertwined with more abstract concepts of markets formed in discourses that move firms and markets across different levels – from local markets to market sectors. An in-depth analysis of the emergence of the World Music market demonstrates the advantages of employing this model in the analysis of multiple markets.

Pensando la conservación desde el multi-naturalismo en una localidad indígena de los andes colombianos

A través de una experiencia etnográfica con el Cabildo Indígena de Puracé (CIP) en el Resguardo del mismo nombre (RIP) se puede observar cómo la “conservación” ha propiciado un espacio de interacción entre la organización indígena (CIP) y el Estado que permite evidenciar, por un lado, lo productivo que puede llegar a ser este proceso y por otro lado, que lo que sucede en esta dinámica puede ser mejor entendido a la luz de una plataforma analítica multi-naturalista y no solamente desde el marco multi-culturalista. Particularmente nos centraremos en mostrar cómo dos no-humanos, las vacas y los cóndores, se insertan de maneras específicas en redes socio-materiales particulares. En cada una de estas tanto las vacas como los cóndores son seres diferentes con los cuales se interactúa de manera particular. A partir de esto se sugiere una mirada que contemple la co-existencia de más que una sola naturaleza en un mismo espacio geográfico.

Property and Organization Studies

Property is pervasive, and yet we organization scholars rarely discuss it. When we do, we think of it as a black-boxed concept to explain other phenomena, rather than studying it in its own right. This may be because organization scholars tend to limit their understanding of property to its legal definition, and emphasize control and exclusion as its defining criteria. This essay wishes to crack open the black box of property and explore the many ways in which possessive relations are established. They are achieved through work, take place as we make sense of signs, are invoked into existence in our speech acts, and travel along sociomaterial networks. Through a fictionalized account of a photographic exhibition, we show that property overflows its usual legal-economic definition. Building on the case of the photographic exhibit, we show that recognizing the diversity of property changes our rapport with organization studies as a field, by unifying its approaches to the individual-vs.-collective dilemma. We conclude by noting that if theories can make a difference, then whoever controls the assignment of property – including academics who ascribe properties to their objects of study – decides not only who has or who owns what, but also who or what that person or thing can be.

A question of power: the politics of kilowatt-hours

This article builds on long-term, ongoing studies of energy efficiency governance, and reports from one recent case study of a multi-use area development combining local heating/cooling and district heating. We approach the subject matter with a particular interest for the heterogeneous substances and processes at play in realising an engineering project. With a particular focus on controversies, we analyse the achievements of energy efficient solutions as processes of transformation, translation and exchange.The study involves exploration of different energy systems. However, while isolation and infinity are natural entities in the laboratories, they are rare in the real world. The real world leaks, and we intentionally allow some leakages but not others. That is the politics of energy efficiency: in the translation processes of energy streams into classification schemes, we isolate some parts of our systems but not others; we include some energy considerations but not others. This pragmatic is a virtue of necessity, since the impossible imperative of following all energy paths in infinity would require us to constantly deal with the whole world.Power being relational, successful energy efficiency lends support from careful exploitation of processes of transformation, translation and exchange, both within and across material-technological and socio-political domains. The conclusion of our studies is twofold: First, in order to understand the phenomenon of energy efficiency one needs to understand the functioning of sociomaterial networks and analyse the sociomaterial controversies and transformation processes that takes place within them, under the imperative of the formal and often highly standardised technical system classifications. We may call this the politics of kilowatt-hours. Second, exploring new scaling philosophies and strategies require parallel, research based exploration of new energy efficiency governance principles.

For Refugees, the Road to Employment in the United States Is Paved With Workable Uncertainties and Controversies

Drawing on data—including survey responses, interviews, documents, and participant observation—collected during a 26‐month ethnography of refugees in a northeastern U.S. city, I examine how recently arrived refugees create and access new employment opportunities. I utilize actor‐network theory (ANT) to examine refugees' linkages as emerging, temporal, and fluid. I empirically trace the drawing together of, and interaction among, individual refugees, formal organizations, new cultural ideas, and a myriad of material objects. I examine the connections between the uncertainties about actors, action, and agency that point to the need to understand society as sociomaterial networks. I analyze the controversies that are deployed in an emerging assemblage as the refugees entered the paid workforce in the United States. I am guided by a broad question: How are meaning, knowledge, and facts that come to make up a network actually made, maintained, remade, and, sometimes, undone? I demonstrate that putting assemblage to work offers insights into the ways in which heterogeneous elements come together in often unanticipated ways to create stable, even if temporary, employment networks for refugees in the United States.