Sociomateriality
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Sociomateriality is a theory built upon the intersection of technology, work and organization, that attempts to understand "the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday organizational life."[1] It is the result of considering how human bodies, spatial arrangements, physical objects, and technologies are entangled with language, interaction, and practices in organizing. Specifically, it examines the social and material aspects of technology and organization,[2][3] but also emphasizes the centrality of materials within the communicative constitution of organizations. It offers a novel way to study technology at the workplace, since it allows researchers to study the social and the material simultaneously.
It was introduced after legacies of contingency theory and structuration theory had characterized the field of Information System research in Management Studies. Early papers by Wanda Orlikowski feature structuration theory[4] and practice theory.[5] However, the key papers for sociomateriality stem from the later work of Orlikowski in collaboration with Susan Scott.[1][3][6] The concept adopted the focus on relations from Bruno Latour's[7] and John Law's[8] actor-network theory (ANT) and further opposes the Kantian dualism of subject and object drawing on Karen Barad's[9] and Lucy Suchman's [10] feminist studies. Drawing on Barad, sociomateriality proposes the concept of agential realism. Key aspects of sociomateriality are according to Matthew Jones[11] a relational understanding of the world, the observation of day-to-day technology use at the workplace during practices and the inextricability and inseparability of the social and the material.
Huber[12] made a fundamental point that as more sophisticated technologies are adopted, they will have profound effects on organizational design and decision-making. From the 1990s onward, it was clear that because of a variety of information and communication technologies being adopted in the workplace, consideration of sociality and materiality in tandem would be met with increasing significance and academic attention. As was pointedly expressed by Barad, 'Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. But there is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter.'[13] This critical statement is representative of not only the research most scholars in this field do focus on, but pushes forward what they are missing as a result: matter, or, the material. In directing attention toward the material, the theory of sociomateriality was generated.
Early scholars like Joan Woodward and Charles Perrow were bearing a deterministic point of view in their study, and consider the materiality of technologies to be the sole cause of organizational changes. That first generation of research was conducted at a macro-level, with organizations as their unit of analysis. The following strand started looking at individuals as their subject of analysis, and as such, many informal aspects of organizational studies were also taken into account. That marked the emergence of social aspects appearing in scholarly papers about organizational technology—terms like ‘technology-in use’[14] and ‘socio-technological ensembles’.[15] This stream of thought takes a constructivist position. This position believes that the material features of technology does not matter too much, rather, the way people interpret technology holds the most significance. Both technological determinism and constructivism falls short in describing the whole picture of the relationship between technology and organizations. Then, scholars like Poole and DeSanctis, Monteiro and Hanseth, and Griffith started drawing attention toward technology's material features. Only then did it come to the "materiality" point-of-view, which is to say, the physical properties of technology drove workplace actions. However, the sole use of materiality to describe workplace technology also falls short in describing the whole picture.
Leonardi[16] explains the reason for sociomateriality's existence: '(a) that all materiality (as defined in the prior section) is social in that it was created through social processes and it is interpreted and used in social contexts and (b) that all social action is possible because of some materiality' (p. 32). The emergence of the term “sociomateriality” is a sign of progress over "materiality", in the way that it recognizes that materiality constitutes the social world and the social world also influences technological materiality. Here, “social” could be institutions, norms, discourses, and other human intentions.
Given the growing popularity of materiality and sociomateriality in management and organization theories (e.g. Carlile, Nicolini, Langley, Tsoukas, 2013;[17] Jarzabkowski, Spee & Smets, 2013;[18] Leonardi & Barley[2]), sociomateriality has become "trendy" for theorists and researchers within other areas such as organizational communication. This is because it imparts a deeper understanding of the contextual, and relational, factors that shape, change and organize human behavior.
Traditionally, concepts employed to study technology use at the workplace were adopted from advancements in philosophy and sociology, such as contingency theory, structuration theory and actor-network theory. However, sociomateriality is the first concept to be developed within the field of Information System (IS) studies, a division of management and organization theory. It has been argued that sociomateriality is 'the new black' of IS.[9] Barad explains that human actors and technological objects are understood to emerge in sociomaterial assemblages. Those assemblages are the results of agential cuts, which transform the boundary objects into temporally stabilized agencies.