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

Boundary objects, power, and learning: The matter of developing sustainable practice in organizations

This article develops an understanding of the agential role of boundary objects in generating and politicizing learning in organizations, as it emerges from the entangled actions of humans and non-humans. We offer two empirical vignettes in which middle managers seek to develop more sustainable ways of working. Informed by Foucault’s writing on power, our work highlights how power relations enable and foreclose the affordances, or possibilities for action, associated with boundary objects. Our data demonstrate how this impacts the learning that emerges as boundary objects are configured and unraveled over time. In so doing, we illustrate how boundary objects are not fixed entities, but are mutable, relational, and politicized in nature. Connecting boundary objects to affordances within a Foucauldian perspective on power offers a more nuanced understanding of how ‘the material’ plays an agential role in consolidating and disrupting understandings in the accomplishment of learning

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

SOCIOMATERIAL ETHNOGRAPHY: TAKING THE MATTER SERIOUSLY

Ethnographic research is a form of qualitative inquiry that creates deep and rich understanding of a studied naturalistic phenomenon. Traditionally, ethnographic research has focused on uncovering the meanings and interpretations of those studied. In other words, ethnographies have focused on uncovering the social construction of the world that reflects underlying interpretive stance. However, recent theoretical developments within Information Systems (IS) and management research emphasize that it is not only social constructions but \u27matter\u27 that matters. Research that aims at taking matter seriously in their theorizing are referred to as sociomateriality. Despite that empirical sociomateriality research seems to prefer ethnography as research approach, explicit reflections on the applicability of ethnography for sociomaterialist studies lack. This paper aims at contributing by arguing for the applicability of ethnography for sociomaterialist studies, building especially on agential realist worldview. Applying sociomaterial stance for ethnographies emphasize (1) studying the entanglement of social and material in lieu of social constructions; (2) sensitivity to performativity over representations; and (3) viewing researcher as part of, in lieu of, within, the phenomenon studied. The study contributes to the discussions on sociomateriality by lowering the barrier to conduct sociomaterialist empirical work. Conclusions are draw

MCIS 2014 Proceedings

Ethnographic research is a form of qualitative inquiry that creates deep and rich understanding of a studied naturalistic phenomenon. Traditionally, ethnographic research has focused on uncovering the meanings and interpretations of those studied. In other words, ethnographies have focused on uncovering the social construction of the world that reflects underlying interpretive stance. However, recent theoretical developments within Information Systems (IS) and management research emphasize that it is not only social constructions but &#39;matter&#39; that matters. Research that aims at taking matter seriously in their theorizing are referred to as sociomateriality. Despite that empirical sociomateriality research seems to prefer ethnography as research approach, explicit reflections on the applicability of ethnography for sociomaterialist studies lack. This paper aims at contributing by arguing for the applicability of ethnography for sociomaterialist studies, building especially on agential realist worldview. Applying sociomaterial stance for ethnographies emphasize (1) studying the entanglement of social and material in lieu of social constructions; (2) sensitivity to performativity over representations; and (3) viewing researcher as part of, in lieu of, within, the phenomenon studied. The study contributes to the discussions on sociomateriality by lowering the barrier to conduct sociomaterialist empirical work. Conclusions are drawn.</p

Performative ontologies. Sociomaterial approaches to researching adult education and lifelong learning

Sociomaterial approaches to researching education, such as those generated by actornetwork theory and complexity theory, have been growing in significance in recent years, both theoretically and methodologically. Such approaches are based upon a performative ontology rather than the more characteristic representational epistemology that informs much research. In this article, we outline certain aspects of sociomaterial sensibilities in researching education, and some of the uptakes on issues related to the education of adults. We further suggest some possibilities emerging for adult education and lifelong learning researchers from taking up such theories and methodologies. (DIPF/Orig.

The Sociomateriality Of Boundary-Spanning Enterprise IS Design

The paper uses and extends upon a sociomaterial view of organizational IS by relating this to modalities of sensemaking across boundaries and levels of framing in managing the meaning of IS performativity. Data from a field study of Enterprise IS redesign at a US University are analyzed from an actor-network perspective to reveal a genealogy of IS design evolution. Three modalities of sociomaterial design - boundary objects, bridging operations and conscription devices – are examined at multiple levels of design-framing, to understand the emergence of enterprise IS redesign, its political alignment and associated business processes. The result is a conceptual framework which explains how the meanings attached to an enterprise IS emerges are temporally emergent in practice, demonstrating interactions between levels of sensemaking which create unexpected consequences for IS users and exposing backstage negotiations that enable the meaning of an IS design to be managed in practice

The emergence of information systems: a communication-based theory

An information system is more than just the information technology; it is the system that emerges from the complex interactions and relationships between the information technology and the organization. However, what impact information technology has on an organization and how organizational structures and organizational change influence information technology remains an open question. We propose a theory to explain how communication structures emerge and adapt to environmental changes. We operationalize the interplay of information technology and organization as language communities whose members use and develop domain-specific languages for communication. Our theory is anchored in the philosophy of language. In developing it as an emergent perspective, we argue that information systems are self-organizing and that control of this ability is disseminated throughout the system itself, to the members of the language community. Information technology influences the dynamics of this adaptation process as a fundamental constraint leading to perturbations for the information system. We demonstrate how this view is separated from the entanglement in practice perspective and show that this understanding has far-reaching consequences for developing, managing, and examining information systems

Enacting Accountability in IS Research after the Sociomaterial Turn(ing)

Sociomateriality represents an emergent philosophical stance that instantiates an ontological turn towards relationality and materiality in information systems (IS) research. As an emergent perspective or way of seeing, sociomateriality has significant implications for researchers and the practices they employ. If we accept that the ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions we enact in our research shape the realities we perceive and create, questions around researchers’ accountability for the realities they produce need to be addressed. The sociomaterial turn(ing) in IS challenges our deeply held assumptions about what constitutes reality. What are these challenges, and how are they being addressed in sociomaterial research? And what implications for accountability in IS research more generally does a turn towards relationality and materiality hold? The objectives of this editorial are: (1) to sensitize IS researchers, irrespective of their ontological and epistemological persuasions, to the field’s turn(ing) toward relationality and materiality; (2) to provide insight into the practices of data generation, analysis, and presentation through which this turn(ing) is being enacted in sociomaterial theorizing; and (3) to contemplate the implications of this turn(ing) for the accountability of IS research more generally

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