Extracts from the original text of Orlikowski.
Materiality, on this view, is a special case, and this is problematic because it loses sight of how every organizational practice is always bound with materiality. Materiality is not an incidental or intermittent aspect of organizational life; it is integral to it.
The other difficulty associated with organizational studies of technology adoption, diffusion, and use is their tendency to focus either on technology effects (a techno-centric perspective) or on interactions with technology (a human-centered perspective). Both perspectives are limited and limiting for a number of reasons. The techno-centric perspective is interested in understanding how technology leverages human action, taking a largely functional or instrumental approach that tends to assume unproblematically that technology is largely exogenous, homogeneous, predictable, and stable, performing as intended and designed across time and place. Yet, as critics have pointed out, this perspective reifies technology, ignores how technology is bound up with historical and cultural influences, and thus produces technologically deterministic claims about the relationship of technology with organizations (Barley 1988; Kling 1991; Suchman 1994; Thomas 1994).
The human-centered perspective focuses on how humans make sense of and interact with technology in various circumstances. Here the technology is not black-boxed but understood to be different based on the different meanings assigned to it and the different ways in which people engage with it. Furthermore, such interpretations, interests, and interactions are seen to vary by time and place, entailing a more dynamic and situated view of the relationship of technology with organizations. While this grounds use of technology in particular socio-cultural and historical contexts, it tends to minimize the role of the technology itself. By focusing primarily on the human side of the relationship, the technology — as commentators such as Button (1993) and Berg (1997) have argued — vanishes from view in the preoccupation with the social.
[A]n alternative view asserts that materiality is integral to organizing, positing that the social and the material are constitutively entangled in everyday life. A position of constitutive entanglement does not privilege either humans or technology (in one-way interactions), nor does it link them through a form of mutual reciprocation (in two-way interactions). Instead, the social and the material are considered to be inextricably related — there is no social that is not also material, and no material that is not also social.
Towards a view of Constitutive Entanglement:
to figure out how to take seriously the recursive intertwining of humans and technology in practice.
A number of particularly interesting ideas for doing so have been emerging in sociology and science and technology studies over the past decade: for example, actor-networks (Callon 1986; Latour 1992, 2005), sociotechnical ensemble (Bijker 1995), mangle of practice (Pickering 1995), object-centered sociality (Knorr Cetina 1997), relational materiality (Law 2004), and material sociology (Beunza et al. 2006).
Latour (1987, 1992, 2005) has long argued that agency is not an essence that inheres in humans, but a capacity realized through the associations of actors (whether human or nonhuman), and thus relational, emergent, and shifting.
Suchman (2007: 261) similarly emphasizes the importance of reconceiving ‘capacities for action … on foundations quite different from those of a humanist preoccupation with the individual actor living in a world of separate things’.
In particular, this requires replacing the idea of materiality as ‘pre-formed substances’ with that of ‘performed relations’, in order to characterize the recursive intertwining of the social and material as these emerge in ongoing, situated practice (Pickering 1995; Latour 2005). As Pels et al. (2002: 2) observe: ‘it is not so much what materials … symbolize within social action that matters but their constitutive agentic effects within the entangled networks of sociality/materiality’.
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The notion of constitutive entanglement departs from that of mutual or reciprocal interaction common in a number of dynamic social theories. Notions of mutuality or reciprocity presume the influence of distinct interacting entities on each other, but presuppose some a priori independence of these entities from each other. Thus, for example, we have tended to speak of humans and technology as mutually shaping each other, recognizing that each is changed by its interaction with the other, but maintaining, nevertheless, their ontological separation. In contrast, the notion of constitutive entanglement presumes that there are no independently existing entities with inherent characteristics (Barad 2003: 816). Humans are constituted through relations of materiality — bodies, clothes, food, devices, tools, which, in turn, are produced through human practices. The distinction of humans and artifacts, on this view, is analytical only; these entities relationally entail or enact each other in practice.
‘This is a thoroughgoing relational materiality. Materials – and so realities – are treated as relational products. They do not exist in and of themselves.’ (Law, 2004:42)
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Instead, seeing organizational practices as ‘sociomaterial’ — to borrow a term given recent currency by scholars such as Mol (2002) and Suchman (2007) — allows us to explicitly signify, through our language, the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday organizational life.
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Law and Urry (2004) argue that contemporary social science is ill-equipped to address issues of ephemerality, multiplicity, dispersion and mobility.
Ephemerality: phenomena that are ‘here today and gone tomorrow, only to reappear the day after tomorrow’. search results of google...
Multiplicity: that which takes different shapes in different places’. results are multiple and shifting acc to conditions and contexts.
Dispersion and mobility: the distribution and movement of ideas across time and space may be manifest in many ways.
to forgo perspectives that treat materiality as either invisible or inevitable, or that abstract, black-box, and separate technology from human affairs. Instead, we need perspectives that are grounded in ontological and epistemological sensibilities that take seriously the sociomateriality of organizing.
Material sociology and science and technology studies offer useful vocabularies and guidelines for exploring the deep intermingling of materiality within practice. These can help us reconfigure our taken-for-granted notions, assumptions, and practices of organizational research, and allow us to recognize and investigate the multiple, emergent, and shifting sociomaterial assemblages that constitute organizations.
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