Materialising Materiality

This paper examines the recent claim that “technologies remain largely understudied in organizational research”. The core contention is that the materiality of the IT artefact has been ignored, thus contributing to an impoverished understanding of the relationship between technology, people and organisation. While accepting much of the criticism directed towards the “isolation of technology”, this paper sets out to develop a basis from which the concept of materiality may be fruitfully developed by outlining a structure of mediation based on the work of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek. In discussing the role of mediation, the paper claims that much of the literature on Clinical Information Systems has failed to address the ‘substitution of bodies’ and the ‘de-centred patient’, thus providing a fertile environment for a promising research agenda in Information Systems Materiality

Materialising memories: exploring the stories of people with dementia through dress

In this article, we use clothes as a tool for exploring the life stories and narratives of people with dementia, eliciting memories through the sensory and material dimensions of dress. The article draws on an Economic and Social Research Councilfunded study, ‘Dementia and Dress’, which explored everyday experiences of clothing for carers, care workers and people with dementia, using qualitative and ethnographic methods including: ‘wardrobe interviews’, observations, and visual and sensory approaches. In our analysis, we use three dimensions of dress as a device for exploring the experiences of people with dementia: kept clothes, as a way of retaining connections to memories and identity; discarded clothes, and their implications for understanding change and loss in relation to the ‘dementia journey’; and absent clothes, invoked through the sensory imagination, recalling images of former selves, and carrying identity forward into the context of care. The article contributes to understandings of narrative, identity and dementia, drawing attention to the potential ofmaterial objects for evoking narratives, and maintaining biographical continuity for both men and women. The paper has larger implications for understandings of ageing and care practice; as well as contributing to the wider Material Turn in gerontology, showing how cultural analyses can be applied even to frail older groups who are often excluded from such approaches

Re-materialising the religious tourism experience: a post-human perspective

Using ethnographic research into Christian Orthodox religious tourists’ performances in Tinos, Greece, this paper traces the complex pathways of human and material entanglement in creating religious experiences. While religions stage material performances by ascribing sign and use value to objects, affect through doing allows for different modes of understanding and performance, in which the material nature plays an essential role. This paper contributes in recognising the importance of materials’ thingness in the religious experience, allowing for alternative performances and expressions of belief. Understanding the way materials can enable or even overshadow the sense of religiousness is important for the successful management of the spatial distribution of objects in religious sites

Materializing digital collecting: an extended view of digital materiality

If digital objects are abundant and ubiquitous, why should consumers pay for, much less collect them? The qualities of digital code present numerous challenges for collecting, yet digital collecting can and does occur. We explore the role of companies in constructing digital consumption objects that encourage and support collecting behaviours, identifying material configuration techniques that materialise these objects as elusive and authentic. Such techniques, we argue, may facilitate those pleasures of collecting otherwise absent in the digital realm. We extend theories of collecting by highlighting the role of objects and the companies that construct them in materialising digital collecting. More broadly, we extend theories of digital materiality by highlighting processes of digital material configuration that occur in the pre-objectification phase of materialisation, acknowledging the role of marketing and design in shaping the qualities exhibited by digital consumption objects and consequently related consumption behaviours and experiences

Designing meaningful products in the digital age: How users value their technological possessions

© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. Devices such as phones, laptops and tablets have become central to the ways in which many people communicate with others, conduct business and spend their leisure time. This type of product uniquely contains both physical and digital components that affect how they are perceived and valued by users. This article investigates the nature of attachment in the context of technological possessions to better understand ways in which designers can create devices that are meaningful and kept for longer. Findings from our study of the self-reported associations and meaningfulness of technological possessions revealed that the digital contents of these possessions were often the primary source of meaning. Technological possessions were frequently perceived as systems of products rather than as singular devices. We identified several design opportunities for materialising the associations ascribed to the digital information contained within technological products to more meaningfully integrate their physical and digital components

The role of Intellectual Capital Reporting (ICR) in organisational transformation: A discursive practice perspective

Intellectual Capital Reporting (ICR) has garnered increasing attention as a new accounting technology that can engender significant organisational changes. However, when ICR was first recognised as a management fashion, the intended change it heralded in stable environments was criticised for having limited impact on the state of practice. Conceiving ICR through a lens predicated on the notion of discursive practice, we argue that ICR can enable substantive change in emergent conditions. We empirically demonstrate this process by following the implementation of ICR in one organisation through interviews, documents and observations over 30 months. The qualitative analysis of the data corpus shows how situated change, subtle but no less significant, can take place in the name of intellectual capital as actors appropriate ICR into their everyday work practices while improvising variations to accommodate different logics of action. The paper opens up a new avenue to examine the specific roles of ICR in relation to the types of change enacted. It thus demonstrates when and how ICR may transcend a mere management fashion and the intended change it sets in motion through altering organisational actors’ ways of thinking and doing within the confines of their organisation

Feral objects and acts of domestic piracy: sculpture, secular magic, and strategies of feminist disruption

This practice-­led doctoral project is a material investigation of the potential for sculptural artworks to perform disruptive, dissenting and resistant narratives of women and girls’ intersubjective relationship with the material culture of feminine domesticity. I argue for the entanglement of objects, ideas, bodies and artwork as a material-­led encounter and ask, what might a feminist new materialism look like when the focus is on domestic objects, and how can we draw meaning from these objects when they perform as sculpture? I propose a category of material culture I call ‘feral objects’, the overlooked and undervalued materiality of consumer culture as identified by Attfield (2000), objects that perform in the threshold spaces of society and culture (Crewe and Gregson, 2003). I analyse feral objects in their role as sculpture to argue for a feminist new materialism that disrupts subject/object hierarchies (Boscagli, 2014). Developing Eckstein and Schwarz’s (2014) identification of piracy as a boundary practice, I introduce the term ‘domestic piracy’ to identify material-­led strategies of feminist disruption as activism materialised as sculptural artworks. Drawing upon Bennett’s (2010) vital materialism and Pil and Galia Kollectiv’s (2010) proposition that sculpture and installations made from found objects are performative in and of themselves, I argue that the embodied encounter with sculpture and installation made from found domestic objects materialises the agency of objects to perform an inter-­relationality that is agentic of corporeal feminism (Meskimmon, 2019). I analyse poltergeist phenomena as ‘secular magic’, the sleight-­of-­hand of conjuring (During, 2002), proposing that secular magic materialises feminine domestic disruption as the embodied encounter between (feminine) subject and (domestic) object. I argue that the trickery or sleight-of-­hand required to construct sculptural artworks performs feminist strategies of domestic dissent enacted by women and girls through feminine material culture (Owen, 1989)