Sociomaterial Practices Research Articles

Sociomateriality and boundary objects in information systems development

Information systems (IS) development is a complex organisational activity involving multiple stakeholders who interact with various artefacts in order to facilitate understanding and cooperation across diverse knowledge domains. A considerable body of work has analysed such artefacts as boundary objects, focusing on their interpretive flexibility across communities of practice. Increasing interest in the materiality of organisational practices directs attention to how such objects result from the performance of sociomaterial relations. This paper draws on these two strands of research to complement the analysis of project-related artefacts as boundary objects with a sociomaterial perspective on such objects and the practices within which they are constituted. The contribution of this combined approach is illustrated using the findings of a longitudinal case study of IS development. We trace the production and use of a prototype, the various people and practices with which it was associated, the multiple sociomaterial configurations that constituted it as a boundary object, and the social and material consequences of its use. The utilisation of sociomateriality as a theoretical lens enables us to further our understanding of how project-related artefacts act as boundary objects, and in doing so, constitute IS development as a sociomaterial practice.

Materiality, Sociomateriality, and Socio-Technical Systems: What Do These Terms Mean? How are They Related? Do We Need Them?

This chapter reviews the history of three terms increasingly used by researchers in the fields of organization studies and information systems: “materiality,” “sociomateriality” and “socio-technical systems.” After this review, I explore ways in which these terms overlap and depart in meaning from one another in scholars’ writings. I suggest that materiality might be viewed as a concept that refers to properties of a technology that transcend space and time, while sociomateriality may be used to refer to the collective spaces in which people come into contact with the materiality of an artifact and produce various functions. I suggest that the concept of a sociomaterial practice is akin to what socio-technical systems theorists referred to as the “technical subsystem” of an organization, or the way that people’s tasks shape and are shaped by their use of machines. This technical subsystem is recursively organized alongside the social subsystem of an organization, which is characterized by an abstract set of roles, communication patterns, and so on.

Opening the black box of the organization: Socio-material practices of geopolitical ordering

Despite their implication in almost all aspects of the field, organizations remain a black box within critical geopolitics. The majority of the literature looks at organizations from the outside, either treating them as producers of geopolitical representations or as geopolitical actors. An explicit engagement with what organizations are, what makes their actorness and what fashions them with power is missing. This contribution draws on ideas from actor-network theory (ANT) to conceptualize organizations as socio-material networks that emerge from continuous processes of ordering. Tracing these processes along the associations they establish should be an important task of a critical geopolitics. The paper sketches a research agenda around four nodes for such a focus on the socio-material practices of ordering: the circulation of geopolitical ideas, the production of geopolitics, governance at a distance and technologies of ordering.

Sociomaterial practices in engineering work

PurposeEngineering work is a specific form of sociomaterial practice, drawing on and combining social and material resources to accomplish desirable effects, often combining technological and social resources. A study of an electrical engineering development project suggests that the work unfolds as a process whereby technological artefacts are verified on the basis of testing procedures and whereby events concerning technological failure, what has been called the “back‐talk” of technology, are handled using joint problem‐solving. The purpose of this paper is to report on a study of a new product development project at a multinational telecommunications company.Design/methodology/approachAn ethnographic case study of a new product development project at a major multinational telecommunications company was undertaken.FindingsEngineering work is based on distributed know‐how and joint collaborations, emerging as a patchwork of activities where one single person may know a lot, but not everything, about the technology‐in‐the‐making. The paper concludes that joint concern for the technology, manifested as its gradual advancement, is what serves as the glue holding the community of engineers together.Originality/valueThe paper presents an original study of the work of a team of electrical engineers and inquires into how engineers combine technical and social resources when attempting to make the technology work.

Keeping it real: Bringing sociomateriality into strategy-as-practice

This paper addresses the dearth of research into sociomaterial practices in the strategy-as-practice field. We introduce a relational ontology in order to conceptualize sociomaterial objects as an entangled bundle of relational outcomes in which strategy work is performed. Building on an in-depth qualitative study of the appraisal of reinsurance deals, we identify a bundle of sociomaterial objects that include maps, pictures, data packs and spreadsheets. We demonstrate how these objects perform the relational outcomes of visualizing, locating, characterizing, integrating, and comparing. Drawing on these findings, we develop the concept of progressive entanglement, which we model in order to show how relational outcomes are progressively entangled in the strategy work of constructing and objectifying a reinsurance deal and situating it within a market for such deals. Our conceptual framework extends existing work in the strategy-as-practice field and the wider field of practice theory that calls for research into sociomateriality.

The politics of the delete button

Workers today are faced with possibilities of wider networks of knowledge generation. Learning in and through work is one of the many spaces in which pedagogy may unfold. Web technologies amplify this fluidity and networked learning now encompasses a plethora of practices. New technologies are believed to contribute to more mobile and connected professional learning and knowing practices. Yet, objects do not act by themselves, and it is the relations around these technologies—the sociomateriality of the configurations assembled—which potentially reconfigure ways of knowing. In this paper, the negotiation of relational and material aspects of online pedagogical practices is explored. I focus on the delete button and deleting practices of self-employed workers engaged in informal work-related learning in online communities. Exploring a pervasive everyday practice, such as deleting, affords glimpses into the sociomaterial entanglements energizing enactments of online pedagogy and knowledge production. Understanding the delete button as a fluid object in fluid space begins to illuminate its complexity. Deleting practices which work to stem the tide of information pushing itself onto screens, as well as those practices that attempt to delete traces left behind on screens and “in the cloud”, are examined. Constantly negotiating absence and presence, deleting practices mobilize both digital inclusion and exclusion. Such sociomaterial practices around the delete button shape interactions with information and knowing possibilities and enact networked learning practices in particular ways. Although disarmingly straightforward at first glance, by unravelling some of the complex human-object assemblages associated with deleting, opportunities for interruption and innovation in online learning practices emerge. Actor Network Theory (ANT) provides the theoretical and conceptual tools for this exploration. ANT is well suited for studying complex and mobile practices which take the pervasive role and energy of objects into account. Emphasizing more critical understandings of the co-constitutive and performative relationship between people and web technologies, and how these relations both smooth and complicate work-learning practices online, enables adult educators to keep Latour’s (2005) “matters of concern” open. I conclude with observations on the politics of the delete button and implications for more sophisticated digital fluency in everyday pedagogy.

Mobile Learning and Immutable Mobiles

How are mobile devices used to support learning in informal settings? The majority of m-learning research to date has focussed on formal or professional learning contexts and is marked by controlling the devices used and the tasks to be completed. Studying learning and practice in an informal context provides an insight into how mobile devices are used when the device, applications, and practices are determined by the participant rather than a research agenda. In this observational study we draw on multi-site and focussed ethnographic approaches to trace the connections between practices, calculation, evaluation, a learning community and the central role of an iPhone in forming these connections in two craft breweries. An actor-network theory (ANT) sensibility provides the vocabulary and focus for a consideration of the agency of the heterogeneous actants in the breweries.We use ANT to consider not only the human and non-human actants observed, but also the processes of calculation and qualitative evaluation which are brought together in the concept of ‘qualculation’. We introduce the challenge of ANT to conventional notions of the process of learning, drawing on the work of Steve Fox (2001), and note the limits of this work in setting out the challenge but not what would show evidence of learning in an actor-network. We trace how a recipe is transformed from originating beer through both physical and calculated transformations and show the role of the iPhone in achieving these in two breweries. A novice brewery expends significant effort in attempting to maintain the immutability of the recipe and to conform to its predicted outcomes. We consider in detail moments of breakdown and mistranslation and show how the recipe remains mobile but immutable while the brewery itself becomes the location of change and development. An experienced brewery transforms and changes the recipe with the help of the iPhone to make rapid calculations and alterations. The recipe here is a fluid object with experience used in making substitutions and adjustments. Our conclusions do not put forward ANT as an account for learning or a theory of learning. Rather we seek to illustrate the application and potential of ANTs sensibility in attending to the processes of socio-material practice. We also seek to extend the understanding of how learning can be seen in actor-network terms through providing evidence of learning’s transformative effects in the assemblage of a actor-network.

Symposium 6: Learning with technology as coordinated sociomaterial practice

While considerable attention has been given to the concept of learning – what it is, how we might know it when we see it, and how to intervene in it – by contrast, technology remains under-theorised. While theoretical approaches that have developed accounts of the relationship between technology and human action, few of these are well represented within educational technology or networked learning. This paucity of theorisation has resulted in simplistic accounts of the role of technology in various kinds of learning, usually involving some kind of causal or determining mechanism. Such accounts are vulnerable to critique (e.g. Friesen, 2009), but nonetheless remain prevalent.In this paper, I will recap some of the problems with this position, and then consider alternatives that address issues around agency and the role of the social. Specifically, drawing on Mol’s concept of praxiology, developed in the context of work on the constitution of diseases in medical practice, I will explore alternative ways in which educational uses of technology can be understood. This value of this will be illustrated through the design of a study of digital literacies. Some implications of this include for researchers – including concerns about reflexivity – will then be drawn out.

Education as sociomaterial critique

In order to extend its scope, depth and effectiveness, critique should shift from its reliance on humanistic assumptions and be reconceptualised as a sociomaterial practice through which realities are enacted differently as multiple and tensional. This kind of critique counters the ways regimes of power are materially entrenched. This article explores such an alternative conception of critique by drawing on Butler’s notion of performativity, the agential realism of Barad and the ontological politics of Mol. It explores the particular ways in which actor-network theory could be understood as a resource of critique. Because of its central role in the enactment of reality, Education is an important field within which critique is developed further in relation to ontological and epistemological assumptions behind different learning spaces and the incoherences and tensions of different ontics.

Affective assemblages: body matters in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school classrooms

Set within the affective turn in cultural and social theory, in this paper, I explore the significance of materiality and matter, most specifically, bodily matter, in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school classrooms. The received view in education is that affect is tantamount to emotion or feeling and that materials, such as bodily affectivity, technologies and texts, are used by teachers and learners to support and advance teaching and learning. Telling a sociomaterial story, I account for how materials participate in pedagogic practice and for what is performed through this participation (e.g. corporeal capacity, changed power relations regarding the subjectivities of teacher and learner and teaching and learning). Drawing on video case data collected as part of a national study, and utilising an analytic of assemblage, I trace affective relations in action towards making an argument about the centrality of affects, as socio-material practices, to teaching-learning events in school classrooms and beyond. Registering bodily as intensity, affect effects change in pedagogical relationships, impelling acknowledgement of its substantive nature and its political import. Altogether, bodily matter matters. Implications of this mattering for education policy and practice are drawn out.

Material enactments of identities and learning in everyday community practices: implications for pedagogy

In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in applying actor-network theory (ANT) to educational research and analysis. This article presents an account of how an ANT analysis of socio-material practices with a focus on objects can bring informal learning and identity formation to view. It is based on a doctoral study of the everyday practices of women in voluntary community organisations in a rural town in Victoria, Australia. In the absence of formal representational learning, an analysis of data with a focus on the centrality of objects to learning in practices and processes shows how relations of different entities can be traced in material enactments of learning and identity. The emergence of a new dimension in learning (materiality) changes the whole methodology of learning, and a new understanding of learning has implications for pedagogy and adult education.

Using video observation to gain insight into complex clinical work practices.

Experience shows that the precondition for development of successful health-information-technologies (HIT) is a thorough insight into clinical work practices. In contemporary clinical work practices, clinical work and health information technology are closely integrated. Research within Virtual Centre for Health Informatics at Aalborg University, Denmark have during recent years focused on video observation to supplementing traditional ethnographical research methods in providing insight into complex clinical work practices. The objective of this paper is to argue for the potentials of the video observation method to inform and to improve HIT development compared to traditional ethnographic methods. Based on several studies conducted within the healthcare sector, we find, that the video observation method is superior to other ethnographical research methods when it comes to rapidly disclosing the complexity in clinical sociomaterial work practices. We also find that the video techniques used in the healthcare context allows us to revisit the field of observation through the data, to broaden our initial focus and to share data with both the clinical staff involved and other researchers. Hence, it provides us a more in depth insight in the complex clinical sociomaterial work practices than when observing by the use of pen and paper.

Made to Measure: Taming Practices with Results-based Accountability

This paper focuses on what happens when accountability regimes, represented in calculative planning processes, migrate onto situated, sociomaterial practices. Specifically, the article investigates what happens when the practices of results-based accountability (RBA) are translated into the social justice practices of locally-based community organizations. Based on the tenets of contemporary practice theory and a three-year participatory action research project with community organizations in Australia, the study illustrates that performance measurement and accountability frameworks such as RBA are not technologies that peer and measure innocently and disinterestedly from a distance. Rather, RBA, as a bundle of material-discursive practices, is part of the performance measuring apparatus creating differences that include some things and exclude others. We articulate some of the organizing practices of social justice in a locally-based community organization, follow their translation into RBA planning practices and then return to analyse the introduction of RBA practices into the daily work of an organization. In this way, we demonstrate how situated and ongoing practices begin to unravel through intra-action with RBA boundary-making practices and its redrawn relations of accountability.

One Clear Image? Challenging Simplicity in Place Branding

Unique selling points! Simplicity sells! One clear identity! One clear image! These are some of the place branding mantras of today. In this paper, this “simplicity trend” is critically examined and challenged by raising the question whether clear images and simplicity are truly the only options in destination branding. After a short introduction and discussion of the underlying assumptions of destination branding strategy, an illustrative case is used to demonstrate how tourism stakeholders create several different “versions” of the tourist destination through a multiplicity of discursive, performative and socio-material practices at the tourist destination. Based on these findings, place marketers are encouraged to embrace and benefit from the multiple destination rather than seeking to reduce its multiplicity. It is argued that diversity branding might actually be deployed, strategically, in order to create more refined points of difference rooted in a richer and more complex understanding of destination identity(ies) and image(s).

Sociomaterial practice and the constitutive entanglement of social and material resources

PurposeThe concept of sociomaterial practice has been proposed as a term including materiality as constitutive elements in any social practice. The concept also suggests that while social relations are constituted by and mediated by materiality, materiality per se is enacted in a social context. Practice is thus unfolding as a form of constitutive entanglement of social and material resources at hand. The paper aims at discussing the concept of practice as what is mobilizing both material and intangible resources.Design/methodology/approachThe study draws on interviews with construction workers, foremen, and site managers in three projects in a medium sized construction company.FindingsThe study suggests that while construction work is both regulated by piece‐rate wage systems and being largely composed of standard operation procedures, there is still a strong reliance on collectively accomplished routines for communicating and interacting in the workplace. Rather than being determined by and reducible to material conditions, social relations and mutual trust play a key role in construction projects.Originality/valueThe concept of sociomaterial practice is opening up for a more articulated recognition of the entanglement of social and material resources in organizing work. The study presents first‐hand data on how construction work rests on the collective capacity to combine both material and social elements.

Materializing tourist weather: ethnography on weather-wise wilderness guiding practices

This study examines the hitherto under-explored relationships between weather, human action and the natural environment from a practice-based perspective. Using an ethnographic study on wilderness guiding in Finnish Lapland, the article first examines the integral role of weather when conceptualizing tourist activities taking place outdoors. The authors identify three types of weather-related practices: anticipating and coping with the weather, as well as discursive practices related to weather. They therefore demonstrate how weather manipulates human practices by narrowing down or extending the possibilities for outdoor activities. Second, by materializing weather, the study provides a more nuanced understanding of the diverse ways in which weather – a material entity in itself – is involved in the enactment of various socio-material practices; here the authors make the case for a specific repertoire of weather-wise skills. The study concludes that weather holds agency as it exerts a significant power in directing and redirecting human nature-based activities.

Curious Indeed, or Curious in Deed? Some peculiarities of post-settlement relations with an antipodean river

Prominent in many historical accounts of European first contact with Australian nature are stories of encounters between European curiosity and curious Australian biota, such as the platypus and the eucalyptus. In this paper, I argue that post-settlement relations with the Goulburn River, one of the largest rivers in south-east Australia, likewise attest to the centrality of curiosity in early European engagements with Australian landscape. In mapping several relational ontologies of the Goulburn River, I attend to the socio-material practices in which this river has been performed as different and as normal. My interest is in a specific form of difference, that of antipodean difference: the river as topsy-turvy, backwards, unusual, or inverted in relation to some presumed norm, whether that norm be rooted in memories and experiences of European rivers or imaginings of an original state of nature. This is a story of how an extraordinary river became ordinary, and of how we might understand antipodean difference as curious in deed (i.e. as performed), rather than as curious indeed (i.e. as an innate quality of Australian nature).

The Sociomaterial Practice of IT-Enabled Change: A Case Study of a Global Transformation

This article applies a sociomaterial perspective to IT-enabled change. The empirical data consists of in-depth interviews and internal documents from a longitudinal case study of the telecommunications company Ericsson. They managed to successfully transform their finance and accounting (F&A) unit from a highly decentralized structure into a so-called shared service centre (SSC) structure. The transformation was executed within three years and was enabled by an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The findings consist of a framework with four dimensions that explains that IT-enabled change is a practice that is both social and material: a sociomaterial practice. The contribution of this article is that it shows that it is in the entanglement of the social and material elements across time where we can find a deeper understanding of IT-enabled change.

Has science ever been normal? On the need and impossibility of a sustainability science

In this article, I develop a constructive critique of ‘post-normal science’ by challenging the underlying conception of ‘normal science’. Invoking Bruno Latour's constructivist approach, I change focus from a representationalist understanding to a practice-inspired account of science in which the composition of a matter of fact necessarily implies a politically significant differentiation between internalities and externalities. Contending that science has never been normal in that it has always already been political, I further elaborate on this political dimension by connecting Latour's concepts of matters of fact and matters of concern with Rudolf Boehm's distinction between logical and topical truth. Whereas logical truth is a measure of the validity of matters of fact, topical truth is a measure of the relevance and adequacy of scientific knowledge regarding a particular matter of concern. This allows me to argue that any attempt to install a new ‘post-normal science’ with a higher topical truth vis-à-vis sustainability issues neglects the irreducible political moment situated at the point of determining who and what we should be concerned about. Finally, I draw on the notion of ‘forms of life’ to suggest a ‘politics of the imaginable’ that takes socio-material practices as primary matters of a concern for sustainability.

The Thing Called Environment: What It Is and How to Be Concerned With It

This paper wants to think beyond the science-politics divide that is omnipresent in sustainability discourse. With Bruno Latour, we investigate if and how decomposing matters of fact and recomposing them back as matters of concern can open up a scientific-political space in which sustainability challenges can be addressed in an adequate manner. By connecting Latour's constructivist account of science in action with Rudolf Boehm's concept of topical truth, we aim to lighten up the normative-political entanglement between science and politics, facts and values. Rather than conceiving of knowledge in terms of representations of the world, a constructivist topical perspective emphasises the socio-material practices from and within which these representations arise. Such a view then also changes the way we think about ourselves and our place in the world in fundamental ways: the world now becomes something that we are embedded in and part of rather than something we are detached from and merely observers of, as representationalism suggests. In this way, decomposing environmental matters of fact such as climate change, which have never been a human-independent entity out there to begin with, allows to adequately recompose them as societal matters of concern, which they have been from the very beginning.