Don’t throw rocks from the side-lines: A sociomaterial exploration of organizational blogs as boundary objects

Purpose Social media such as blogs are being widely used in organizations in order to undertake internal communication and share knowledge, rendering them important boundary objects. A root metaphor of the boundary object domain is the notion of relatively static and inert objects spanning similarly static boundaries. A strong sociomaterial perspective allows the immisciblity of object and boundary to be challenged, since a key tenet of this perspective is the ongoing and mutually-constituted performance of the material and social. Design/methodology/approach The aim of our research is to draw upon sociomateriality to explore the operation of social media platforms as intra-organizational boundary objects. Given the novel perspective of this study and its social constructivist ontology, we adopt an exploratory, interpretivist research design. This is operationalized as a case study of the use of an organizational blog by a major UK government department over an extended period. A novel aspect of the study is our use of data released under a Freedom of Information request. Findings We present three exemplar instances of how the blog and organizational boundaries were performed in the situated practice of the case study organization. We draw on literature on boundary objects, blogs and sociomateriality in order to provide a theoretical explication of the mutually-constituted performance of the blog and organizational boundaries. We also invoke the notion of ‘extended chains of intra-action’ to theorise changes in the wider organization. Originality/value Adoption of a sociomaterial lens provides a highly novel perspective of boundary objects and organizational boundaries. The study highlights the indeterminate and dynamic nature of boundary objects and boundaries, with both being in an intra-active state of becoming, challenging conventional conceptions. The study demonstrates that specific material-discursive practices arising from the situated practice of the blog at the respective boundaries were performative, reconfiguring the blog and boundaries and being generative of further changes in the organization

Sociomateriality and disabled individuals’ identity work: a critical poststructuralist research agenda

This paper responds to calls to rebalance the role of materiality in identity work. Taking a critical poststructuralist approach to identity work and a relational ontology perspective on sociomateriality, we explore how a ‘disabled’ person’s identity work is shaped by and responds to the influences of embodied practices and material arrangements within the workplace. We achieve this by reviewing the notion of sociomateriality as a "constitutive entanglement" (Orlikowski, 2007: 1437) of the material and the human. More specifically, we discuss how disabled individuals are constituted through sociomaterial relations and practices involving the body, assistive technology and mundane artefacts. This paper, therefore, contributes to the emerging interest, in identity studies, on the role of the material within identity work, and, in Disability Studies, to the entanglement of the social and material in constructions of disability as difference

Understanding sustainability through the lens of ecocentric radical-re?exivity : implications for management education

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate around sustainability by proposing the need for an ecocentric stance to sustainability that reflexively embeds humans in—rather than detached from—nature. We argue that this requires a different way of thinking about our relationship with our world, necessitating a (re)engagement with the sociomaterial world in which we live. We develop the notion of ecocentrism by drawing on insights from sociomateriality studies, and show how radical-reflexivity enables us to appreciate our embeddedness and responsibility for sustainability by bringing attention to the interrelationship between values, actions and our social and material world. We examine the implications of an ecocentric radically reflexive approach to sustainability for management education

“OBJECTion?!”: The Concept of Sociomateriality and its Consequences for museumised Objects

In this essay, I will present the approach of sociomateriality introduced by Kalthoff et al.3 as an interwoven interplay of material things, human actions, and social orders. Sociomateriality is found within the context of new materialism, and favours a non-anthropocentric perspective of re-symmetrising ‘human – thing – action’. I would like to show that there are different forms of sociomateriality in the various spheres of reality (e.g. in day-to-day life, the field of religion, the museum)

Sociomateriality is 'the New Black': Accomplishing repurposing, reinscripting and repairing in context

This paper addresses the trend towards sociomateriality in the social sciences generally and management and organization studies specifically with a critique of two main approaches: affordances and scripts. We suggest that if sociomateriality is to be more than a fashion and become an enduring lens through which to understand social phenomena, it needs to go beyond its current preoccupation with the intentions encoded in the objects or materials themselves to examining activities as they are accomplished with objects in a multiplicity of contexts. To support our discussion of accomplishing activity in context, we examine the notions of repurposing and reinscripting objects inherent in the literature, to which we add a third concept of repairing. These 'three Rs' are advocated as a research agenda for sociomateriality in management studies and the wider social sciences

Infomateriality

This paper argues for the notion of 'infomateriality' as an orientation for IS research and as an alternative to and in distinction from sociomateriality. It sees Orlikowski’s relatively recent exposition of sociomateriality as developing out of her earlier work, which was heavily influenced by Giddens’ structuration theory. Tracing the key philosophical tradition of process studies, through Bergson and Whitehead, and how they can be used and combined in response to Orlikowski’s work, it presents its critique of sociomateriality as a springboard and justification for the idea of infomateriality

Disrupting Complex Systems with Emerging Technologies: A Study on United States Airport Operations

The number of United States domestic commercial flight passengers are growing every year, which means the number of people checking-in, dropping off their bags, and going through TSA within airports is equally growing. With the increasing number of passengers and aging airports, there are several areas of pain points within airports where passengers hit a bottleneck due to the current systems that airports have in place. There are three main areas that we are going to reference. First the check-in process, where customers have to get their tickets, input identification information, and check-in for their flight. Second, baggage-drop off, where customers get their baggage weighed and tagged. Lastly, is Transport Security Administration (TSA). This is where consumers get their carry-on bags scanned as well as their person. In each of these areas, there are some levels of inconvenience imposed on the customer by the current system. With technological advancements being used in other industries, the goal of this thesis is to look at what existing technologies can be modified and used within airport operations to reduce the long lines that customers face every time they travel

Towards a Conceptualization of Sociomaterial Entanglement

In knowledge representation, socio-technical systems can be modeled as multiagent systems in which the local knowledge of each individual agent can be seen as a context. In this paper we propose formal ontologies as a means to describe the assumptions driving the construction of contexts as local theories and to enable interoperability among them. In particular, we present two alternative conceptualizations of the notion of sociomateriality (and entanglement), which is central in the recent debates on socio-technical systems in the social sciences, namely critical and agential realism. We thus start by providing a model of entanglement according to the critical realist view, representing it as a property of objects that are essentially dependent on different modules of an already given ontology. We refine then our treatment by proposing a taxonomy of sociomaterial entanglements that distinguishes between ontological and epistemological entanglement. In the final section, we discuss the second perspective, which is more challenging form the point of view of knowledge representation, and we show that the very distinction of information into modules can be at least in principle built out of the assumption of an entangled reality