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

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

Sense-making of consumer wellbeing in information technology-enabled services from a relational ontology position

Information technology (IT) built into products and services have become the key drivers for service innovation. How information technology-enabled services (ITESs) affect consumer wellbeing has increasingly become a concern to service scholars. In response to this, transformative service research (TSR) has emerged as a new stream in service research. This paper investigates consumer wellbeing derived from the consumption of ITESs in consumers’ daily lives. A mixed-method approach was employed in our study, including self-reflective reports, in-depth interviews and visual artistic methods. We demonstrated that a relational ontology, drawing on the ‘focal things’ concept (Borgmann, 1984) and sociomateriality (Orlikowski, 2009), could be used as a lens for us to understand consumer wellbeing in ITESs. We used four vignettes to demonstrate how relational ontology can enhance our understanding of consumer wellbeing in ITESs. Theoretically, this paper contributes to TSR by proposing and demonstrating the need to shift or at least extend the extant predominant technology ontology in marketing literature to make sense of consumer experiences and wellbeing in ITESs. In practice, this research encourages ITESs designers to emphasise the relational entanglement of technology with consumer routine practices in their service innovations for the purposes of consumer wellbeing

Unfolding practices with unfolding objects: standardization work in global branding

Although significant efforts have focused on the question how the standardization of global branding works, very little research concerns standardization work i.e. how actors, objects and practices come together in the development and control of standards (see Chabowski et al. 2013). Yet, the development and control of standards involves power relations, negotiation and conflicts between competing visions and outcomes (Lyytinen and King 2006; Nickerson and Muehlen 2006). The complex standardization practice revolves around objects (D'Adderio 2011). Surprisingly, tools and are technologies of standardization are also absent from marketing literature. The current study focuses on the entanglement of global branding and digital artifacts. The project explores how digital objects are co-instituted and co-implicated in the generation, stabilization and control of international marketing practice. Our specific focus is on brand standards; we examine how digital affordances mesh with practices to enable and constrain standardization work

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

Entanglements of creative agency and digital technology : a sociomaterial study of computer game development

Digital technology, with its distinctive characteristics that result from the fundamental process of digitalization that underpins it, is seen as fundamentally altering processes of creativity. However, we currently have limited understanding of creativity in relation to the development of digital technology. Computer game development, with its combination of esthetic, affective and cultural use features and highly sophisticated digital technologies, is a valuable setting for investigating these issues. In this paper, we explore how computer games are shaped through the interplay between the creative intentions of developers and the digital technologies involved in their production and playing. Drawing on in-depth studies conducted at three leading computer game development studios and a leading producer of the software system used in game development, this paper shows how the game developers' creative ideas for imagined novel game-playing experiences relate to a) the development of relevant digital technologies, and b) the emergence of new game development practices. The article goes on to propose a view of creativity as an on-going flow that, following an initial ‘creative impulse’, ripples through the sociomaterial entanglements of a particular setting, reconfiguring them in the process and spreading out in time and space in often unexpected ways