Sociomaterial Practices Research Articles

The device on the desk – a sociomaterial analysis of how Snapchat adapts to and participates in the classroom

ABSTRACT This study analysed how students’ mobile phones and Snapchat are adapted to and participate in the classroom. Insights from the actor network theory were used to discuss the interconnections between students, mobile phones, Snapchat, desks, and plenary teaching. We applied video analysis to examine the minute details of unfolding sociomaterial practices. The data, which was produced in a Finnish upper secondary school in 2015–2016, is a composition of ethnographic classroom video material and screen-capture video recordings from students’ smartphones. In this study, we asked how the presence of mobile phones and Snapchat become possible in the relatively restricted pedagogical space of plenary teaching. The analysis yielded two important findings. First, students use effort to adapt Snapchat to the demands of the ongoing plenary teaching. Second, the analysis demonstrates the flexibility of the mobile phone–Snapchat entanglement that plays a crucial role in its adaptation.

How Implementation of Cognitive Assistive Technology in Home-Based Services for Young Adults with Intellectual Disabilities Influences Support Staff`s Professional Practice.

The implementation of technology in home-based services takes place in contextualised socio-material practices negotiated through interactions between a diversity of actors. Prerequisites for succeeding in this process are time and competence, and that use of the technology is experienced as meaningful, for both the support staff and the resident. In this article, we investigate how implementation of cognitive assistive technology (CAT) in home-based services for young adults with intellectual disabilities influences the support staff`s professional practice. The participants are eight support staff members, five women and three men. Data were collected through two group interviews, the second one 8months after the first one. The data were analysed according to a systematic text condensation (STC) approach. Implementation of CAT is a demanding process, revealing different perspectives on professionalism and changing power relations, and entails a new way of working for the support staff.

Infrastructuring digital sovereignty: a research agenda for an infrastructure-based sociology of digital self-determination practices

ABSTRACT Today, a number of high-profile initiatives across the globe are concrete implementations of the ‘digital sovereignty’ principle: i.e., the idea that states should ‘reaffirm’ their authority over the Internet and the broader digital ecosystem, to protect their citizens, institutions, and businesses from the multiple challenges to their nation’s self-determination in the digital sphere. According to this principle, sovereignty depends on more than supra-national alliances or international legal instruments, military might or trade: it depends on locally owned, controlled and operated innovation ecosystems, able to increase states’ technical and economic independence and autonomy. Presently, digital sovereignty is understood primarily as a legal concept and a set of political discourses. As a consequence, it is predominantly analyzed by political science, international relations and international law. However, the study of digital sovereignty as a set of infrastructures and socio-material practices has been comparatively neglected. This article explores how the concept of digital sovereignty can be studied via the infrastructure-embedded ‘situated practices’ of various political and economic projects which aim to establish autonomous digital infrastructures in a hyperconnected world. Although the article focuses primarily on outlining the agenda for a wider and comparative research program, I will place a specific focus on Russia, subject of an ongoing research project, as a pilot case.

Claiming and Reclaiming Settings, Objects, and Situations: A Microethnographic Study of the Sociomaterial Practices of Everyday Life at Swedish Youth Homes

The aim of this study is to explore social interactions in the spatial and material environment within everyday life at special youth homes in Sweden, where youths with psychosocial problems, or criminal behavior are cared for involuntary. A microethnographic approach was chosen, and data was collected through participant observation. A theory integrating analysis, using Burke’s (1969) dramatistic pentad as a tool for structuring the data and Goffman’s (1956; 1961) dramaturgical perspective was undertaken. The findings demonstrate that the staff’s control over settings and objects also means control over the definition of what kind of place the special youth home is, and what takes place there. This is shown through a decorous behavior of sociomaterial control practices, rather than care practices, by the staff. This study contributes to knowledge on spaces and objects as crucial parts of care practices highlighting the intentions inscribed in institutional design and objects.

Zazen and Self as Environment

The teachings of Eihei Dōgen Zenji (1200–1253) emphasize a non-instrumental orientation to zazen as “practice-realization”, which might be described as a single movement of purposeful action and actualization of aims. Yet the question remains, if zazen is not in some sense a set of clearly defined steps toward specific ends, exactly how are its benefits manifested, and why would Dōgen place such an elusive approach at the centre of practice? In the following, I will discuss how Dōgen’s conception of practice does not necessarily function as a prescriptive methodology leading to specified results, but might better be described as an orientation to everyday experience that facilitates a comprehensive integration of physical and perceptual interactions within shared environments. Any sense of the utility or benefit of zazen is inseparable from reference to these relations within specific contexts of practice. Exploring close parallels between Dōgen’s conception of universal self (jiko) and gestalt theory, particularly as it is referenced in ecophilosophy and sociomaterial practices literature, suggests ontological and ethical implications of “practice-realization” from contemporary secular perspectives.

The Temporal Incompleteness of Infrastructure and the Urban

ABSTRACT This commentary advances “incompleteness” as an explanatory category for infrastructure processes that do not yield or conform to standard ideals, and a corrective to interventions that regard everything that does not appear to yield or conform as failed. Incompleteness offers a useful lens for approaching infrastructures through situated, contingent, and embodied dimensions. It permits a proper reading of infrastructure as transient, and infrastructure development as a process that is affected not solely by neoliberal interventions but also socio-material practices and inscriptions. As such, incompleteness transcends conventional and completist frames, and complements theorizations of infrastructure since Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism.

Performing openness: how the interplay between knowledge sharing and digital infrastructure creates multiple accountabilities

PurposeThe present study aims to address the emergence of platform-organized open innovation (OI). The research has the two main aims: the first is to increase the understanding of the performance of OI by investigating how the achievements of OI are measured in situated practices from a performative and strategic knowledge management (SKM) orientation. The methodological disadvantages of not pre-given case selection are partially counterbalanced by the second aim of the research, which is to extend existing SKM theory and examine how platforms create knowledge as they include actors and digital devices, thereby potentially redistributing relations of accountability.Design/methodology/approachBuilding on performativity theory, the paper studies how the achievements and knowledge created in OI are managed and evaluated in practice. The case description draws on different sources from a spiral case study, as openness is performed by platform, firm, crowd and innovation intermediaries.FindingsThe paper illustrates how a strategy of digitally enabled openness brings its own issues as platforms enable knowledge sharing and perform a redistribution of accountability. In the heterarchies studied through this research endeavor, managers and their team members were accountable not only to multiple units, or teams, across the organization, but also to the crowd. The case material demonstrates that the ecology of devices and their performative struggles create lateral accountability.Research limitations/implicationsWhile recent streams of research suggest that the context of OI (i.e. distributed sources of knowledge for innovation) shifts the unit of analysis of organization design from the individual firm to networks of actors organized on platforms, the authors find that the focal firm still remains a key conceptual parameter in SKM research, which, in turn, makes it difficult to capture the suggested radicality of OI.Practical implicationsThe authors show, that in practice, the firm has to take into account the performance of the external crowd and at times put resources into its training and education. In heterarchy, distributed authority is assumed to be facilitated through lateral accountability, whereby the traditional principles of vertical authority no longer hold, but rather, managers and their team members can be accountable to multiple units, or teams, across the organization.Originality/valueThe paper develops a performative theory of openness. OI is a model, strategy and socio-material practice whereby digital designs create an ecology of devices that can enact all kinds of openness. Ultimately, the current paper proposes that SKM and OI theory need to consider how platforms perform relations of accountability beyond the boundaries of the single organization.

Enacted Agency in a Cross-Border, Online Biliteracy Curriculum Making: Creativity and bilingual digital storytelling

This research investigated potentials of bilingual digital story making to engage the creativity of 13 Canadian and Chinese biliteracy learners aged 11–15. Findings in this paper draw on six focal participants and their digital story creation. Informed by asset-oriented multiliteracies, new media literacies, and new materialism, this research adopted a netnography methodology to explore the communal and sociomaterial practices embedded in the intra-actions of human, matter, and virtual spaces of Seesaw and Skype. Drawing on data from six focal students, findings relate how intra-actions among researchers, teachers, students, matters, and spaces shaped participants’ creative acts. This research adds to the knowledge of developing and applying material-informed pedagogies which attend to the enacted agency among teachers, students, materials, and spaces.

Holding 'new recovery' together: Organising relations and forms of coordination in professional sociomaterial practices of addiction recovery.

Questions about what addiction recovery is and the mechanisms by which people 'recover' have long animated alcohol and other drug research and policy. These debates became even more intense following the advent, and increasing influence in some quarters, of the 'new recovery'. Starting from the position that recovery is ontologically multiple (Mol & Law, 2002), we trace how alcohol and other drug professionals attempted to make sense of 'new recovery' as a concept and set of professional practices during a period of Australian drug treatment system reform. Drawing on Annemarie Mol's (2002) account of organising relations and forms of coordination (addition, translation and distribution), we explore how the new recovery was enacted and coordinated in alcohol and other drug professionals' sociomaterial practices, and highlight the ontological work involved in holding such an unstable object together. First, we argue that the addition of multiple enactments of addiction and recovery contributed to the formation of a singular and serviceable problem (that was simultaneously heterogeneous and complex), making the 'disease-to-be-treated' amenable to diverse treatment approaches, including new recovery. Second, we analyse the role of metaphor in translating authoritative logics and obligations into an enactment of new recovery suitable for application in clinical settings. Lastly, we track how incompatible enactments of recovery, both new and old, were kept apart through distribution. Although new recovery ultimately failed to gain policy traction in the Australian context, we focus on the ontological work undertaken by professionals in response to its introduction as such case studies can be useful for analysing other powerfully governing policy objects and their operations.

Technology and the hybrid workplace: the affective living of IT-enabled space

Information technology (IT) and space are sociomaterial dimensions of organizations that Human Resource Management (HRM) often take for granted, discounting how workers enact them in practice. With digital technologies rapidly changing the spaces of work, this paper proposes a framework for HRM to appreciate the role of the lived, affective experience of IT-enabled (physical and virtual) hybrid workspaces. We integrate the information systems (IS) literature on sociomaterial practices and insights on organizational space to suggest implications for HRM practice and pathways for future research on how virtual and physical spaces are related and lived in the emergence of new hybrid workplaces and practices.

Books (Are Not Like People): A Postdigital Fable

What are books? In 2054, where reading and writing have been banned, a scholar in a dystopian academy known as University V might legitimately pose such a question. This article uses speculative fiction as a form of narrative enquiry to explore the socio-materiality of the iconic educational artefact of the textbook. It gives an empirical account of socio-material practices of textbook use (and non-use) gathered from a series of interviews with online distance education students. We analyse these interviews via speculative fiction. We engage in a sense-making activity of the student testimony by narrating their story, via a scholar looking back at our times from a post-literature future. We seek to contribute to a relative dearth of future studies that use real student data. We give an example of how speculative fiction may be used as a form of research method to analyse and interpret such data. In so doing, we seek to cast a light on current educational practices, to show how books and people are entangled. As people, objects and spaces of education intertwine, they call our attention to the interplay of form and function. They decentre the human actor. We attempt to show how form legitimates certain types of knowledge, certain people, indeed people themselves from other non-human actors. We conclude that knowledge is not disembodied, is not stable and is not locked up in books. In our final analysis, we conclude what may seem obviously true, that books are not like people.

TOWARDS AN INFRASTRUCTURE-BASED SOCIOLOGY OF DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY PRACTICES: THE 'PILOT CASE' OF RUSSIA

"Digital sovereignty" is the idea that states should “reaffirm” their authority over the Internet and protect their citizens, institutions, and businesses from the multiple challenges to their nation’s self-determination in the digital sphere. According to this principle, sovereignty depends on more than supranational alliances or international legal instruments, military might or trade: it depends on locally-owned, controlled and operated innovation ecosystems, able to increase states’ technical and economic independence and autonomy. Presently, digital sovereignty is understood primarily as a legal concept and a set of political discourses. As a consequence, it is predominantly analysed by political science, international relations and international law. However, the study of digital sovereignty as a set of infrastructures and socio-material practices has been largely neglected. In this proposal, I argue that the concept of (digital) sovereignty should also be studied via the infrastructure-embedded “situated practices” of various political and economic projects which aim to establish autonomous digital infrastructures in a hyperconnected world. Although this contribution is also a call for a wider and comparative research programme, I will focus here on the “pilot case” of Russia, which is the subject of an ongoing research project. Ultimately, the analysis of infrastructure-embedded digital sovereignty practices in Russia shows how the Russian discourse on Internet sovereignty as a centralized and top-down apparatus paradoxically open up technical and legal opportunities for mundane resistances and the existence of “parallel” Runets, where particular instantiations of informational freedom are still possible.

CROWDFUNDING IN REMOTE CONFLICTS: BOUNDING THE HYPERCONNECTED BATTLEFIELDS

Recent political conflicts in Eastern Europe, including the armed conflicts in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Belarus have demonstrated that the scope of digitally mediated participation in war-related activities goes far beyond the information domain. In this context, a rapidly emerging sociomaterial practice is the use of crowdfunding platforms to provide aid to the conflict-affected military and civilian populations. Situating the inquiry in this empirical context, we ask: how do crowdfunding platforms constitute relationships between spectators and the hyperconnected battlefield, and what is the role of remote human suffering therein? Drawing on data craft, a theory/method package for critical internet studies, we investigate two sets of boundary objects that mediate the connection between zones of conflict and their remote participants. We find that conflict-related crowdfunding is a new form of identity proclamation with regard to the users’ positionality, which creates the conditions of possibility for post-conflict reconstruction and a future after the military conflict. This suggests that representations of distant human suffering are not the only mediators between spectators and the hyperconnected battlefield, adding a new research direction to our understanding of values that drive remote humanitarianism in the digital age.

‘There Is Nothing Wrong with Me’: The Materialisation of Disability in Sheltered Employment

This article explores the lived experiences of disabled men and women who work in sheltered employment. Specifically, it analyses how the entanglement of sociomaterial practices affects disabled workers’ co-constructions of work and disability. Theoretically grounded in posthumanist performativity theory, the article shows how embodied employment experiences within organisational spaces contribute to the materialisation of disability. Findings emerged from ethnographic participant observations and interviews with management and workers at a sheltered workshop. The data highlight how the entanglement of bodies, space, objects and discourses affects materialisations of disability in ways that appear more inclusive than in mainstream employment. However, these sociomaterial practices remain embedded in a productivity-oriented work logic.

From sites to vibes: Technology and the spatial production of coworking spaces

Mobile and network technologies enable new ways of working (NWW) that disrupt spatial relations and move work to spaces outside formal organizational boundaries. This article addresses this shift by examining the spatial consequences of everyday practices of technology in the context of coworking spaces (CWS) as a pronounced example of where NWW take place. Conceptually, this article links research on technology as a sociomaterial practice with literature on organizational space. Empirically, it draws from a qualitative study of 25 CWS and offers a theorization of the co-constitutive processes with relevant insights for both technology and organization studies. First, this article adds to research on the relational and dialectic nature of technology by documenting its implications in the constitution of CWS as site, contestation, and atmosphere. Second, it contributes to existing knowledge on space by shifting the focus from physical sites to spatial atmospheres and vibes that are produced through technology use and the copresence of others. It problematizes engagement with NWW by highlighting how the flexibility to work anytime, anywhere is tied to new responsibilities, including spacing work and spatial self-management, as workers are required to coproduce and aptly navigate the sites and vibes of NWW to achieve personal productivity and affective sociality.

‘That’s Witchcraft’: Community entrepreneuring as a process of navigating intra-community tensions through spiritual practices

This paper theorizes the spiritual processes of community entrepreneuring as navigating tensions that arise when community-based enterprises (CBEs) emerge within communities and generate socio-economic inequality. Grounded on an ethnographic study of a dairy CBE in rural Malawi, findings reveal that intra-community tensions revolve around the occurrence of ‘bad events’ – mysterious tragedies that, among their multiple meanings, are also framed as witchcraft. Community members prepare for, frame, cope and build collective sustenance from ‘bad events’ by intertwining witchcraft and mundane socio-material practices. Together, these practices reflect the mystery and the ambiguity that surround ‘bad events’ and prevent intra-community tensions from overtly erupting. Through witchcraft, intra-community tensions are channelled, amplified and tamed cyclically as this process first destabilizes community social order and then restabilizes it after partial compensation for socio-economic inequality. Generalizing beyond witchcraft, this spiritual view of community entrepreneuring enriches our understanding of entrepreneuring – meant as organization-creation process in an already organized world – in the context of communities. Furthermore, it sheds light on the dynamics of socio-economic inequality surrounding CBEs, and on how spirituality helps community members to cope with inequality and its effects.

Place – The final frontier: Exploring the outer reaches of collaborative agency using the Japanese concept of Ba

Scholars within the field of Leadership-as-Practice (LAP) address the way that individuals ‘transcend their own immediate embeddedness’ to achieve volitional coherence known as collaborative agency. The process of collaborative agency is described as inseparable from LAP, yet it remains a nascent field of enquiry requiring additional empirical research. This article presents an investigation of collaborative agency through an abductive case study using video ethnography and interviews. To interpret our results, we turn to the Japanese ideogram for ‘place’, known as ‘Ba’. Rather than a physical reality, Ba is considered an existential space in which leadership groups weave together to create and ripen collaborative agency. Ba guides us to look across and around a group and its socio-material practice. We find that collaborative agency is trans-subjective in nature and sits on a spectrum on which we identify the outer reaches, from one end where Ba is woven through to the other end, called Collapse. We suggest that the place of leadership is within the warp and weft of collaborative agency, including but not limited to a special place woven in Ba where collaborative agency is high and where the group reports they are able to transcend their individualism.

Non-discursive philosophy by imagining new practices through design

In this commentary on Rietveld’s inaugural lecture, we exemplify with one of our design cases for project Expedition RWS 2050, how Rietveld’s and our method are complementary. Within this project, RWS invited us to contribute our design skills and make relevant future scenarios experienceable. To scaffold imaginative discussions about everyday life in 2050 with a cross-section of the Dutch population, we wrote seven short speculative stories and designed a set of physical discussion tools. When looking at this design case and the cases Rietveld describes in his inaugural lecture, one can see that we both are guided by and contributing to the development of ecological and enactive philosophy, which rejects the dichotomy between sensorimotor and higher cognition. In his approach, Rietveld pushes the boundaries of the affordances of the material during the making process, whereas we predominantly investigate the affordances of the things and practices which we have designed. Despite these differences, we are both pursuing engagement with philosophical practice through non-discursive means while imagining new sociomaterial practices.

‘Not in our Name’

In this paper, we draw on our collaborative work running a salon for thinking about care in STS research, which quickly became more about fostering an ethico-politics for thinking with care as a mode of academic intervention. Not dissimilar to the origins of the salon in nineteenth-century France, the salon provided a provocative and disruptive space for early career researchers (ECRs) to think together. As attention and critique increasingly point towards the unequal distribution of harms arising from marketization and the vulnerability of ECRs in the ‘neoliberal university,’ we have witnessed a surge in activities that promise a supportive space, such as pre-conference conferences, seminar series, discussion forums and self-care workshops. In this paper, we ask not only what these modes of care might make possible, but also what exclusionary practices and patterns they mask or render more palatable (Ahmed, 2004; Duclos & Criado, 2020; Martin et al., 2015; Murphy, 2015). Reflecting on our experiences of organizing and participating in the salon, with the stated purpose to explore ‘ecologies of care’ as an embodied socio-material practice (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), we move from care ‘out there’ in STS research to care ‘in here’. We follow threads spun by and out from the group to rethink our own academic care practices and how to do the academy otherwise.

Reconfiguring food materialities: plant-based food consumption practices in antagonistic landscapes

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to conceptualize and discuss how plant-based food consumption is accomplished in an environment pre-configured by meat-based food practices. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with thirteen consumers, and using a socio-material practice approach, the paper demonstrates how plant-based shopping, cooking and eating practices are enabled and shaped by material reconfigurations. The paper shows how developments such as an expanding range of plant-based food products, the increased use of social media, and the re-appropriation of shops and kitchens all entail the continuous reconfiguration of the materials involved in shopping, cooking and eating practices. Together, these material reconfigurations form a socio-material landscape that is mutable and changing, thus enabling plant-based food consumption. In addition, the paper also suggests that these material reconfigurations are not something that can be managed due to having evolved as a collective process in which multiple actors take part, all guided by their own interests. In doing so, the paper illustrates that, in order to understand plant-based consumption, as well as its emergence, performance, and complexities, we must take into account the practical and material aspects involved, not just the cultural or cognitive mechanisms.