The sociomateriality of organisational life: considering technology in management research

By Wanda J. Orlikowski. 2010

988 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Drawing on a specific scenario from a contemporary workplace, I review some of the dominant ways that management scholars have addressed technology over the past five decades. I will demonstrate that while materiality is an integral aspect of organisational activity, it has either been ignored by management research or investigated through an ontology of separateness that cannot account for the multiple and dynamic ways in which the social and the material are constitutively entangled in everyday life. I will end by pointing to some possible alternative perspectives that may have the potential to help management scholars take seriously the distributed and complex sociomaterial configurations that form and perform contemporary organisations. Copyright The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d5311a6a8b2e8a11a0913ac51a2644450f17989

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Citations in the corpus

Preparing Workplaces for Digital Transformation: An Integrative Review and Framework of Multi-Level Factors (2021, background): “…studied for several decades (Davis, 1989; Orlikowski, 1992) and has its origins in information systems, psychology, and sociology (Venkatesh et al., 2003), alongside contributions from organizational behavior, management and communications (Huber, 1990; Dewett and Jones, 2001; Orlikowski, 2010).”
What is an Information System? (2015, background): “nize the relevance of material aspects of practice and ongoing sociomaterial performances that produce and reproduce IS-supported processes [71].”
Digital Business Strategy: Toward a Next Generation of Insights (2013, background): “Furthermore, products and services increasingly have embedded digital technologies, and it is becoming increasingly more difficult to disentangle digital products and services from their underlying IT infrastructures (e.g., El Sawy 2003; Orlikowski 2009).”
Understanding the Role of Objects in Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration (2012, background): “We stand, of course, in a long line of authors who addressed these issues (see Orlikowski 2010; Rafaeli and Pratt 2006 for a discussion).”
Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality (2013, background): “By far, the most widely accepted route to an answer to this question comes through the writings of Wanda Orlikowski (Orlikowski, 2007, 2010; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008)who has drawn upon theworks of science studies authors such as Latour (1987, 1992, 2005) and Barad (1996, 2003, 2007) for…”
The Next Generation of Research on IS Use: A Theoretical Framework of Delegation to and from Agentic IS Artifacts (2021, background): “…Davidson 2005; Hanseth et al. 2006; Lamb and Kling 2003; Scott and Wagner 2003), IS scholarship on sociomateriaity (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al. 2014; Orlikowski 2010; Orlikowski and Scott 2008; Orlikowski and Scott 2015), agent-based computing (Brenner et al. 2012; Miller and Parasuraman 2007;…”
Research Commentary - Seeking the Configurations of Digital Ecodynamics: It Takes Three to Tango (2010, background): “In fact, less than 3% of research articles in leading management journals have directly studied the relationship between IT and organizations (Orlikowski 2010, Zammuto et al. 2007).”
Embodiment and presence in virtual worlds: a review (2010, background): “The sociomaterial lens that seems to be gaining some traction in IS research (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008), provides an alternative ontology that is much more appropriate to the study of virtual worlds (Orlikowski, 2010).”
What Happens When Evaluation Goes Online? Exploring Apparatuses of Valuation in the Travel Sector (2014, background): “…studies where researchers have begun to take more seriously the productive role of technology (or materiality more generally) in organizational life (Barley, Myerson and Grodal 2012; Leonardi and Barley 2010; Iedema 2007; Nyberg 2009; Orlikowski 2007, 2010; Orlikowski and Scott 2008; Pinch 2008).”
The Sociomaterialty of Information Systems: Current Status, Future Directions (2014, background): “Promoted in the IS discipline primarily by Wanda Orlikowski and Susan Scott (Orlikowski 2007, 2010; Orlikowski and Scott 2008), this “umbrella” concept, to use their terminology, has fostered an entire stream of new research based on a so-called relational ontology (e.g., Slife 2004; Wagner et al. 2”
Research on information systems failures and successes: Status update and future directions (2014, background): “P r o ce ss i ss u e s J o /j ob s k ill s c h a ng e w o r k l o a d l ac k o f f it “ factor research ” (Mohr 1982) has, however, been widely discussed and criticized in IS research (for a recent discussion see Orlikowski 2010).”
Entanglement HCI The Next Wave? (2019, background): “Motivated by the epistemological troubles, the ontological uncertainties and the ethical conundrums, I turn to what Orlikowski [2010] called entanglement theories which, despite their heterogeneity, have in common that they acknowledge the intimate inter-dependencies within socio-material (and…”