Curated reading list on the topic of ‘Sociomateriality’ in management and organization studies
A collaboration between the Management Learning journal and the Talking About Organizations Podcast!
The list below is another of our curated collections of episodes and accompanying readings courtesy of the Management Learning journal. The aim of these collections is to pair our episodes with external thematic readings in order to augment gaps in our portfolio, provide quick ‘crash courses’, as well as offer more in depth bibliographies on selected topics.
Sociomateriality is a field of organization studies that looks at the integration and synthesis of technology, work, and organizing. The inter-relations of the social and material in organizational life has emerged as a site of increasing interest. This list features the work of Suchman and Trist & Bamforth as well as research on the multi-sensory relations of learning to help expand our knowledge of the sociomaterial. How does the advances of technology influence (or tear at) the social fabric of the organization? Numerous Management Learning articles and TAOP episodes look at these issues from both classic and contemporary perspectives.
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Other curated reading lists: Care | Emotions | Gender & Feminism | Group Relations | Historical Approaches | Learning in Organizations | Sociomateriality | Return to Resources Page
Resources from the Management Learning Journal
Crevani, L. (2019). Organizational presence and place: Sociomaterial place work in the Swedish outdoor industry. Management Learning, 50(4), 389-408.
The purpose of this article is to explore the relation between organizational presence and the place in which such a presence is enacted. To this end I mobilize Doreen Massey’s processual conceptualization of place as an event consisting of a bundle of trajectories. By following the presentification of a Swedish company, Fjällräven, in the natural environment in the North of Sweden during Fjällräven Classic, I show that the organization is not made present in place, but through place production. I propose the concept of place work to express the work done by representatives of the organization, but also by other humans and nonhumans, to make the throwntogetherness of the place result in a rather coherent and stable construction through which the organization is made present. Place work is therefore work through which organizational presence and place are recursively co-creating. The concept of place work expands what we can learn about the “where” of an organization when building on an ontology of performativity.
Paananen, S. (2020). Sociomaterial relations and adaptive space in routine performance. Management Learning. Management Learning, 1(3), 257-273.
This article examines the various processes through which sociomaterial relations constitute the performance of a routine. The study’s theoretical underpinnings are linked to sociomateriality in understanding the dynamics of routine performance. In this study, adaptive space furthers sociomaterial relations and processes, and their dynamics to constitute the routine performance. The findings are based on ethnographic research that was conducted during an international crisis management exercise. The analysis consists of three field episodes that illustrate the different processes in which the sociomaterial matters in routine performance. The article contributes to the theoretical discussion by showing, first, how adaptive space enables going beyond the sociomaterial dualism and transfers the theoretical emphasis to the fluidity and dynamism of these relations. It also draws attention to the sociomaterial processes that constitute the performance of the routine. Third, it further shows how through sociomaterial relations and processes the organizing of professional knowledge co-constitution is performed and managed.
Katila, S. (2019). The mothers in me. Management Learning, 50(1), 129-140.
The paper aims to evoke readers’ reflective and affective capacities and thereby facilitate understanding of the multisensorial, affective, and relational nature of knowing and becoming. It highlights the role of embodied knowing in becoming by following the journey of an individual faced with sudden trauma. It describes the affective energies crossing time and space in the continuously changing sociomaterial networks of relationships encountered in different organizational settings, be they in academia, health and social services, family, or otherwise. The paper is based on an auto-ethnographic narrative of becoming a mother that connects individual experiences with cultural understandings. The narrative is an outcome of a diffractive analysis of becoming; knowing emerges during the course of a writing process in which theoretical understandings, emotions, concepts, discourses, embodied experiences, and affects come together. The paper brings out the multiplicity of contradictory discourses involved in knowing and becoming. In so doing, it highlights the entangled coexistence of body and mind, reality and imagination, public and private, reason and emotion, as well as past, present, and future.
Vitry, C., Sage, D., & Dainty, A. (2020). Affective atmospheres of sensemaking and learning: workplace meetings as aesthetic and anaesthetic. Management Learning, 51(3), 274-292.
The aim of this article is to explore sensemaking and learning processes with and through affective atmospheres. We engage with recent research within the ‘affective turn’ across the social sciences and humanities to conceptualize the significance of quasi-autonomous affective atmospheres that emanate from, and also condition, collectives of humans and non-humans. Drawing on this atmospheric scholarship, we propose and elaborate an atmospheric analysis of sensemaking and learning processes to examine how such atmospheres aesthetically transform, and anaesthetically constrain, the potential of bodies, including our own as researchers, to affect and be affected to sense and learn. Through empirical engagement with workplace meetings in a UK housebuilding firm, our analysis contributes by explaining how such atmospheres condition sensemaking that both registers the disorganizing novelty of events and reduces such ambiguity and equivocality to enable purposeful action. While extant research has suggested how the interplay of these two dimensions of sensemaking enables learning, our analysis contributes by drawing attention to how the production, maintenance and transformation of specific atmospheres in workplace meetings imbues affects that condition these two dimensions of sensemaking. Such atmospheres thus constitute vital, yet seldom discussed, phenomena in conditioning learning within organizational life.
Hawkins, B., Pye, A., & Correia, F. (2017). Boundary objects, power, and learning: The matter of developing sustainable practice in organizations. Management Learning, 48(3), 292-310.
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.
Willems, T. (2018). Seeing and sensing the railways: A phenomenological view on practice-based learning. Management Learning, 49(1), 23-39.
This article explores the role of embodied, sensible knowledge in practice-based learning. Despite recent efforts to conceptualize how practitioners become skillful through corporeal and sensible learning, it still seems under-theorized and hard to understand what this exactly entails. The aim of this article is to account for the inherently embodied and sensible nature of knowledge by drawing on a 2-year ethnographic study of train dispatchers in a railway control room. Embodied and sensible knowledge is developed through the work of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, as phenomenology is a way to theorize the body beyond being an object to, instead, account for embodiment as lived and experienced. The data show that such knowledge can be understood as a matter of ‘attunement’: dispatchers become progressively skillful in bringing their bodies and senses in tune with practical situations and perturbations in the environment. The article contributes to a richer understanding of embodiment, especially in the relation between knowledge and practices, in organization studies and management learning.
Additional resources
Provocation: Gherardi, S. (2017). One turn . . . and now another one: Do the turn to practice and the turn to affect have something in common? Management Learning 48(3): 345–358.
Methodology: Pritchard, K., & Symon, G. (2014). Picture perfect? Exploring the use of smartphone photography in a distributed work practice. Management Learning, 45(5), 561-576.
Book review: Ganesh, S. (2020). Book review: The work of communication: Relational perspectives on working and organizing in contemporary capitalism. Management Learning, 51(3), 353-354.
Episodes from the Talking About Organizations Podcast
- 96: Informating at Work – Shoshana Zuboff
We discuss Shoshana Zuboff’s “In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power” that examines several cases of organizations introducing information technologies in the workplace hoping to improve organizational performance, transparency, and collaboration but instead dehumanized the workplace and ushered in new ways of managerial surveillance. In Part 1, we discuss the major themes of the book, her telling of the histories of both blue- and white-collar work, and her incredible case studies. - 34: Sociotechnical Systems – Trist and Bamforth
We discuss important article by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth, “Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting,” published in the journal Human Relations in 1951. Eric Trist was a British social scientist best known for his contributions to the field of organization development and one of the founders of the Tavistock Institute. Ken Bamforth was a miner and industrial fellow of the Tavistock Institute. The article’s subtitle is an examination of the psychological situation and defences of a work group in relation to the social structure and technological content of the work system, and explores how a technological change in the coal-mining industry tore apart the social structure of the workers who were supposed to have benefitted from the change. The technological change in question was the mechanization of the process of mining and extracting coal along a very long face, as opposed to the previous ‘hand-got’ methods where small teams would dig out coal from smaller faces. - 22: Human-Machine Reconfigurations – Lucy Suchman
We discuss Lucy Suchman’s book “Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Action” that studied the interaction of humans with a state-of-art photocopier designed to be more user friendly and more helpful in solving user problems. Yet videos showed that people found it complicated and difficult. Suchman shows that these interaction problems are greatly due to the underpinning assumptions about users’ behavior, more specifically, due to the idea that humans’ actions are based on the following of plans, which she refutes. - 18: Gig Economy, Labor Relations and Algorithmic Management
We discuss an article by Sarah O’Connor exploring the impact of gig economy and algorithmic management on the employees – what their experience is like, how their work is structured, and whether being a gig economy employee is everything it panned out to be. Gig economy, as well as its benefits and limitations, has been subject to much debate in social policy and labour relations.