Talking objects: Towards a post-social research framework for exploring object narratives

Abstract

In this article, we examine how to give objects a voice in organizational narrative. We track our encounter with a 914 Xerox copier, a redundant technological object that was scripted into a desired historical narrative within a corporate exhibit. Despite the 914’s apparent mnemonic and institutional efficacy, we questioned whether it might constitute more than a narrative repository. Might material objects in organizations also participate in narrative production? In this article, we advocate a post-social approach to narrative methodology that recognizes objects—such as the 914—as non-human actors in organizational sense-making. After reviewing post-sociality’s central premises, we propose three domains through which an object narrative can be elicited: object materiality, object practices and object biography. First, we suggest that object materiality can highlight the significant, networks of forces, materials and people—and therefore episodes and actors—that engage with and through objects. Second, we argue that people and objects are enmeshed in sequenced, workplace activities, and therefore through object practice humans define what stories objects can tell while objects reciprocally influence the latitude of human performance. Third, we propose that object biography provides a strategy to map the connections and transitions that occur over the life-course of an object, which can, in turn, unravel a changing web of organizational relations. Our aim is to provide methodological guidance to narrative researchers seeking to augment their organizational analyses by scrutinizing human–object enmeshment.

Introduction

The propositions discussed in this article were inspired during a visit to the Fuji Xerox Eco Manufacturing Centre in Sydney, Australia. This award-winning engineering facility opened in 2000 with the aim of restoring used parts and sub-assemblies to ‘better than new’ condition. Although the intention of our visit was to investigate a world-leading initiative in sustainable manufacturing innovation, it was an encounter with an obsolete product that lingered in our memories long after the experience: the world’s first plain paper copier, the Xerox 914, so named because it could copy originals as large as 9 by 14 inches. As we were guided through the display foyer, we caught sight of this technological relic surrounded by the current suite of product offerings. Sited proudly on a custom-built platform, the 914 lured visitors to contemplate the connections between the past and present. Our guide proudly introduced us to the technology that started it all and recounted its central role in the life of Fuji Xerox. If we wanted to understand 21st-century innovation, it seemed we needed to hear ‘the beginning’ of the story that the 914 tells.

On the surface, the 914 appears to give concrete evidence supporting key organizational narratives. This original copier tells the official story of the company’s rise to prominence on the back of a singular invention. It is also interpreted through a nearby text, narrating the story of Chester Carlson, who conceived the groundbreaking technology released in 1959. The text lauds his visionary capability that set Xerox so far ahead of its competitors. But what struck us so keenly as we stood reverently before the 914 was a sense that it was not merely a prop to these stories. The 914 was also an actor in the historical tale, a key protagonist who had remained on stage to reprise its heroic role in forging the 21st century.

The ideas in this article emerged from our curiosity about how organizational objects like the 914 might be seen as more than evidence in narrative analysis. We questioned, from a methodological perspective, what concepts and techniques could be employed to collect and interpret data from material objects. On turning to the organizational literature, we discovered little guidance about how to gather stories from inanimate objects. It was clear that organizational theorists have been attentive to the symbolic and mnemonic potency of objects within narrative, acknowledging that objects provide tools to make action meaningful, add accessories to the plot or expose new avenues of interpretation (e.g. Boje, 2001; Czarniawska, 2011; Feldman et al., 2004; Gabriel, 2004; Hardy et al., 2005; Nissley and Casey, 2002; Rowlinson et al., 2010; Sheridan and Chamberlain, 2011). However, narrative theorists have tended to treat objects as things to tell stories with or about or to narrate meaning through. We were still left wondering if objects like the 914 might constitute more than triggers or containers for stories; do they also produce and participate in narrative production?

While organizational narrative literature offered some suggestive guidance in resolving our questions, the broader field of organizational studies provided the key direction with its growing attention to the post-social research agenda. The post-social turn in the social sciences calls upon researchers to de-centre the human actor from the heart of analysis and to recognize the constitutive influence of non-human actors, including technologies and material objects. It offers an ‘analytical break’ (Contractor et al., 2011: 141) from dualistic thinking in which the social and object worlds are treated as separate. We turn to this literature in an attempt to advance object narrative research culminating in a framework for collecting narratives that considers three domains: first, what does the physical constitution of objects say to us? We define this as object materiality. Second, what is revealed through the intra-action of objects and people during use? We call this object practice. And third, what is said through the life stories of objects? We call this object biographies. While these domains are inter-related, they are not inter-dependent, and therefore, any one may function autonomously to deepen object narrative research.

As indicated above, our discussion proposes a position, and methodological framework, for examining object-entangled narrative. Notwithstanding contested definitions of the terms ‘method’ and ‘methodology’, we employ Bryman’s (2008) approach where methods are the techniques employed by researchers—including the instruments of data collection and analysis—and methodology is ‘the analysis of the assumptions that lie behind the methods’ (p. 161). Methodology is an examination and exposition of the philosophical positions that underpin methods. On this basis, our primary intention is not to engage in a detailed prescription of narrative technique, but to introduce a methodological stance that privileges a post-social orientation in narrative analysis. We interweave some consideration of tools and techniques at times, but we do so because matters of method are always ‘… entwined with matters of philosophy’ (Bryman, 2008: 161), and the techniques that a researcher selects position them philosophically. Our main objective remains with establishing a framework for narrative in which people are not considered the sole constituents of organizations, allowing for the idea that non-human actors also participate in organizational action and sense-making. (Although we acknowledge the anthropomorphic bias inherent in the terms ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, we use them throughout this article for ease of discussion.) We are therefore concerned with the possibilities for deepening narrative analysis when objects are approached as agents, that is, as entities with the capacity to do something, to make some difference in the state of affairs (Latour, 2007: 53) within organizations.

It is worth noting at the outset that when we imply an object can act and talk in organizational narrative, we do not mean to suggest that objects have intention or the capacity for symbolic action. A computer, for example, does not cause the typing on a keyboard to happen. But objects are more than passive backdrops to narrative action. A keyboard might not determine a user’s typing, but it ‘affords’ (Harré, 2002), allows or renders typing possible, and in so doing plays a role in permitting rapid, highly distributable and instantly reproducible communication. The challenge here is to recognize that humans engage in purposeful, goal-orientated behaviour that affects, and is affected by, material objects (Parmiggiani and Mikalsen, 2013). We do not suggest that the 914 can literally talk, or that it possesses a stable, independent organizational truth that we might uncover if only we knew how to access it. Harman’s (2002, 2011a) object-oriented ontology takes a similar philosophical position, since it aims to embrace ‘things’ in discussion, but holds that things-in-themselves are not directly accessible to us as humans.

According to Harman (2011b), the fact that objects are beyond our grasp is ‘… not because of a specifically human failure to reach them’ (p. 172). Instead he said, ‘… relations in general fail to gasp their relata, and in this sense the ghostly things-in-themselves haunt inanimate causal relations no less than the human–world relation, which no longer stands at the center of philosophy’ (Harman, 2011b: 172). Harman’s object-oriented position therefore offers two pieces of timely advice: first, we should not assume that objects are merely ornaments for human narrative, and second, we should not expect to be able to expose an exogenous ‘reality’ of the object. Certainly, the 914 is more than a prop to the story of Fuji Xerox, past or present, but equally there is not a deeper or more transcendent truth of the 914 that we can discover. If we remain sceptical about separating the world of objects and people, and question the treatment of objects as mere instruments for social or functional performance, we should also query the treatment of objects as independent entities that reveal an autonomous reality.

In the following text, we propose a framework for collecting object-centred narratives that gives objects a louder voice and recognizes their constitutive role in organizational sense-making. The article is structured into six sub-sections. In the section ‘Narratives, objects and organizations: sites of inscription’, we consider how objects have been used to enhance the interpretive power of narrative analysis in organizations. In the section ‘A post-social framework for analysing object narratives’, we introduce the post-social turn in organizational studies in order to position the role of objects as more than functional appurtenances within the workplace. We discuss some of the major philosophical contributions made in post-social, organizational inquiry, and reflect on the potential for post-social thinking to elevate the significance of objects within narratives. In the following three sections we outline a framework comprising three domains for collecting data and interpreting objects in narratives: ‘object materiality’, ‘object practice’ and ‘object biography’. In the section ‘Implications and conclusions’, we review our arguments and consider the implications for theory and narrative practice. The 914 Xerox copier continues to appear throughout the article as a ‘narrative’ theme that stimulates and contextualizes our discussion.

Narratives, objects and organizations: Sites of inscription

We embarked on our journey with the 914 under the assumption that narratives constitute a powerful vehicle through which organizations and experiences can be understood. We recognized narrative as a potent mechanism in the process of human meaning-making (Bruner, 1991; Polkinghorne, 1988) that helps expose how people make sense of their organizational lives. Narratives provide structured, personal accounts of situations, people, places and artefacts (Bruner, 1986; Polkinghorne, 1988), allowing organizational actors to record or make sense of everyday work contexts, share knowledge, solve problems, orient goals and coordinate action (Garund et al., 2010).

Another of our early suppositions was that narratives are situated in, and interpreted through, specific contexts or telling occasions (Herman, 2009). This assumption, however, led to our first problem: how could we understand or generate a telling occasion with the 914? Is it enough to think of an object as a mimetic device, a visual trigger that holds memories and preserves narratives, or as a symbol that conveys shared meanings (Czarniawska, 2011)? When we first encountered the retro geometry of the bulky 914 Xerox machine it was hard to resist the idea that we were indeed standing in front of a mnemonic object rich with narrative symbolism. After all, the hardware had been placed there to function as a corporate museum artefact. The company framed it as a static repository that housed the corporate past and articulated a desired historical narrative. This was eloquently illustrated through the interpretive text placed next to the 914 that lauded its inventor, Chester Carlson. At the very least, this object suggested an organizational biography that provided narrative continuity between the past, present and future.

Much can be said, of course, for taking a museological view of objects, including the opportunity it affords to critique the politics of organizational memory. Corporate exhibits, like the one found at Fuji Xerox, are deliberate constructions, delivering an imposed obligation to remember and even pay homage to an approved history (Casey et al., 2003; Nissley and Casey, 2002). Observing museums as static repositories of artefacts housing a corporate past, Nissley and Casey (2002) wrote, through their displays and accompanying narration, the past, present and future of the organization are given meaning. Yet, the corporate museum may also be understood as history—a narrative that has been sanctioned by the institutional framework of the corporation resulting in ‘the company’s story’ (p. 38).

Political neutrality does not exist in the process of remembering, forgetting and re-imagining the future through artefacts.

In corporate museums, objects are deliberately curated, their biographies manipulated to shape the politics of remembering and forgetting. From this perspective the 914 is a knowledge repository or database where, as Rowlinson et al. (2010) might say, useful histories can be stored, categorized, retrieved and even re-written at convenience. Even though objects are not always ‘historical’ like the 914, they may still be seen as ‘containers for stories’ (Digby, 2006: 182) through which episodes can be recounted and a range of meanings mobilized. However, while repository thinking may reveal the politics of organizational narrative, presenting objects as commemorative artefacts de-emphasizes their active participation within organizations. It also tells us little about how to collect the data putatively housed within the object, beyond the convention of asking individuals or interpretive texts to speak on its behalf.

Standing in the Eco Manufacturing Centre foyer, we initially concluded that the 914 needed a spokesperson. We accepted language as ‘the overriding metaphor for narratological frameworks’ (Petterson, 2009: 12), and therefore identified a human narrator in our tour guide. (Although a poststructuralist perspective might recognize the object itself ‘as text’ (Olsen, 2010: 47), and thereby circumvent the notion of a human narrator, the signified is still disclosed and analysed through linguistic interpretation.) With a storyteller recruited, we sought to elevate the 914 from a simple prop into a vehicle for exposing the narratives beneath the museological story. In doing this we found, like Sheridan and Chamberlain (2011), that objects can be used to enhance and even change narratives elicited from people, evoking stories that may have otherwise remained unspoken. Notably, for example, our guide spoke about innovation differently when his focus was on the obsolete 914 rather than the state-of-the-art parts-reassembly facilities. When his attention clustered around the first Xerox copier, he spoke about the boldness of radical innovation, the vagaries of visionary ingenuity and the compelling mystery of a digital technology writ large in analogue handwriting.

Our experience at Fuji Xerox supported Sheridan and Chamberlain’s (2011) claims that an object-focused narrative can affect the data researchers receive from their respondents during narrative collection. Inviting respondents to construct, elaborate and transform narratives by talking about objects can ‘… enrich data, deepen researcher insight and interpretation, and alter participants’ perceptions of themselves and their experiences as they talk’ (Sheridan and Chamberlain, 2011: 316–17). Objects force the emergence of a different story because ‘Focusing on things, and especially on those that hold relevance for the talker, encourages narratives to be extended and elaborated, thus offering greater leverage for interpretation and insight’ (Sheridan and Chamberlain, 2011: 316).

Although Sheridan and Chamberlain’s (2011) advice to focus more deeply on things during storytelling seemed promising, this approach still kept the focus of data collection on the human subject and assumed that the 914 was an exogenous force on narrative development. The nagging question remained about how to shift our anthropocentric bias. Could we expect the complex bonds between human and non-human agents to emerge if we remained dependent on subjects to talk about or through objects? Is it possible to persuade objects to speak about subjects instead? Or, even to speak for themselves?

Of course, it could be argued that objects have no voice other than the one (or ones) we assign them; perhaps we only ever hear our own voices, and examine ourselves under different guises. The study of objects, according to some, is often not about objects at all but about how we make sense of the world through them (e.g. Attfield, 2000; Woodward, 2007). With such a perspective in mind, it occurred to us that although we were ostensibly attending to the 914 copier, we were only uncovering data on how Fuji Xerox employees used the technology to generate symbolic meaning. For Woodward (2007), this is not a problem, since he argued that we talk about objects in order to understand ourselves. Accordingly, he said the ‘narrativisation of objects’ (Woodward, 2007: 152) occurs when people discuss objects and, in so doing, construct and de-construct their own values, beliefs and experiences. We frame objects through our storylines in order to make material culture intelligible. ‘It is stories and narratives that hold an object together’, Woodward (2007) commented, ‘giving it cultural meaning’ (p. 152). Similarly, Harré (2002) wrote, ‘An object is transformed from a piece of stuff definable independently of any story line into a social object by its embodiment in a narrative’ (p. 25).

If we follow the Woodward’s (2007) thinking, organizational objects acquire meaning through our textual accounts, and also reiterate that meaning (our meaning) back to us. However, the problem, as we have come to see it, lies in the assumption that humans exclusively determine narrative content in the first place. Perhaps we are wrong to presume that when we (humans) speak in narrative it is our stories alone that we hear. By adopting a person-centred position, we perpetuate the kind of dichotomy between subject and object that post-social theorists have advised against (e.g. Callon, 1986; Knorr Cetina, 1997, 2001; Latour, 1993, 1988, 2007; Law, 1992). If mutual relations exist between people and objects—that is, if objects have a constitutive influence on us and have reciprocal effects on our perceptions—then we must first accept that they are enmeshed, non-reductive characters within organizational narratives. Consequently, we must find ways to expose these enmeshed relations and account for the role of objects. Here we intersect with post-social theory, which suggests that objects should not be seen as representations of ideas separated from humans but also as complex, vibrant and interactive agents capable of influencing and shaping the human experience.

A post-social framework for analysing object narratives

Faced with the challenge of finding alternative ways to approach objects in narrative analysis, we turned to the broader literature on post-sociality in organizations. Here we uncovered a ‘recent wave of research’ (Constantinides and Barrett, 2012: 291) that undercuts the subject–object dualism implied in conventional narrative perspectives. In Whiteman and Cooper’s (2011) words, ‘This new stream of research concerns how social processes create and, in turn, are influenced by, human artifacts such as tools and other material objects, which are in themselves materially produced through human processes’ (p. 889). It explicitly recognizes how objects—computers, telephones, books, desks and historical artefacts like the 914—actively participate in organizational life and reciprocally shape human sense-making.

Although early organizational analyses of objects assumed that meaning is constructed by human actors, post-social writers have argued for an expanded understanding of organizations accounting for the non-human object world (e.g. Constantinides and Barrett, 2012; Doolin and McLeod, 2012; Jarzabkowski et al., 2013; Leonardi and Barley, 2010; Lowe, 2004; Orlikowski, 2010; Schinkel, 2004; Suchman, 2005). These writers have variously argued for a shift away from the idea that objects are independent entities with defined boundaries and stable properties towards the recognition that objects are entwined in the social fabric of organizations. The implication is not that objects merely influence or interact with humans, but that both objects and people ‘… have so thoroughly saturated each other that previously taken-for-granted boundaries are dissolved’ (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008: 455). These new assumptions necessitate a transition in analytic methods from a preoccupation with discrete entities of people and things towards recognition of ‘composite assemblages’ (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008: 455), imbricated agencies (Leonardi, 2012), entanglements (Barad, 2007) and mangles (Pickering, 1995) of people, processes and objects.

The organizational turn towards post-sociality has been fuelled by the startling enmeshment of people and technology in the 21st century that has emerged on the back of transformative objects like the 914. Contemporary forms of organizing are increasingly entangled with technology, including synthetic worlds that provide immersive, online environments for workplace collaboration (Orlikowski, 2010). We therefore need to develop research practices that recognize our messy intra-connections with material things. Barad (2003) suggested the term intra-connections in preference to inter-connections, since the latter assumes objects and people are independent entities with defined boarders differentiating them from one another.

As technology embeds more deeply into daily work life, the presumption of separateness between objects and people becomes more problematic. For this reason, researchers must find ways to make room for objects in their interpretive paradigms and become ‘sensitive to the role of objects when seeking to explain organisational phenomena’ (Lowe, 2004: 338). Because organizations are influenced by the relations between humans and technological objects, there is a need to consider ‘contextual and local understandings of organisational life based upon the intimacy of the bonds between people and technology’ (Lowe, 2004: 338). Numerous researchers have pursued a consistent line in exploring the entanglement between people and computer hardware (Turkle, 1995), accountancy systems (Quattrone, 2004), hospital clinical record systems (Bruni, 2005), computed tomography (CT) scanners (Barley, 1986), calculators (Hardie and MacKenzie, 2007) and integrated communications technologies (Lowe, 2004).

Put simply, technological objects have made it impossible to ignore the potency of the non-human world. Of course, technological objects are not the only things we find in the workplace, and post-social researchers have also considered a variety of other non-human actors such as water bottles (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996), keys (Latour, 1991), automatic door closers (Latour, 1988), concrete mixers (Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000) as well as desks, whiteboards, telephones and post-it-notes (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013). The issue at hand is not a particular category of object but the methodological assumptions informing narrative analysis that accompany post-sociality. In the forthcoming sections, we work with post-social accounts of objects in order to construct a theoretical frame suitable for investigating objects such as the 914. Specifically, we look towards the post-social literature to construct a three-domain framework comprising object materiality, object practice and object biographies to tease out rich narratives of enmeshed human–object agencies.

Object materiality

Since it was the materiality of the 914 that first stimulated our engagement with post-sociality, object materiality is the first domain that we advance for examining objects in organizational narrative. In this section, we consider how object materiality can deliver access to the hidden stories, and significant assemblages of forces and people that interact with and change the object over time. We do not define materiality as just the concrete thing itself (the chair, painting, keyboard or the 914 Xerox copier), or even its physical constitution (wood, plastic, metal, glass). Rather, we use the term to refer to the engagement between bodies, tools, materials and substances that occur through physical things (Arroyo-Kalin, 2004). Narratives are exposed through materialities that are co-constructed between object, people, artefacts, events and processes.

Our definition of materiality incorporates a common sense view of objects as physical items that occupy volume in three-dimensional space. Although objects can also be conceptualized as non-physical ‘processes’, ‘systems’, ‘policies’ or ‘problems’, we bracket the idea of objects as abstract concepts in order to attend to the tangible and touchable. Nevertheless, we take the view that concrete objects hold shape in more than literal, concrete ways; things also hold shape in a functional sense, within networks of relations between humans and non-humans (Latour, 2007).

Physical objects embody and measure the relations between elements in a network and as such connections between the human and non-human become embedded in physical matter. An object’s dialogue of repeated use leaves evidence of wear and tear. The 914 Xerox we encountered, for example, was well used. Friction had worn its beige metal chassis, and the edges of its glass case were scratched and indented from the touch of fingers over the years. Constant exposure to light appeared to have ossified the central underbelly of the lid where the light had been most intense and frequent. The wear and tear we noticed on the 914 provides an account of the complex of actors—both human and non-human—that engaged with and physically changed the object. Through these changes to the chassis, it is possible to infer the ‘relational effects’ (Law and Mol, 1995: 275) of intra-action and suggest that a kind of relational capital emanates from its visual and tactile features. Even today the copier rehearses its encounters with other agents by offering evidence of participation in past events.

Some connections may be noted here with the influential thinking offered in Actor–Network Theory (ANT), and post-ANT analysis (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1993, 2007; Law, 1992; Law and Mol, 1995) including the ‘ANT And After literature’ (e.g. Alcadipani and Hassard, 2010; Law, 1999). Our position, for instance, aligns with Law and Mol’s (1995) observation that the materiality of the concrete world reveals the construction of the social world. Proposing the notion of ‘relational materiality’ (p. 176), Law and Mol (1995) argued that ‘when we look at materials, we are witnessing the production of the social’ (p. 274). It follows that in telling stories about materiality, people simultaneously uncover and tell stories about sociality (Law and Mol, 1995). Narrative production regarding the worn metal chassis of the 914, for example, exposes stories about the prodigious output of the equipment over an extended lifespan. By considering the material changes and relations that occur in and through the 914, a range of connections between participants in organizational action may be uncovered. Importantly, the materiality of the 914 does not render events into an ordered chronology. Instead the materiality allows an a-temporal, ‘creative re-description’ (Kearney, 2002: 12) of its constituent intra-acting people, forces, process and frameworks.

Although we do not take a formalized ANT position in this article, we recognize the pivotal contributions made by seminal authors including Callon (1986), Latour (1993) and Law (1992) in offering a new language for talking about organizations and their non-human actors. The major contribution of ANT to organizational narrative, from our current perspective, lies with its progressive recognition that there is no such thing as an independent human actor in storytelling and sense-making. It has helped bring the non-human actors within organizations into the frame.

However, while we are clearly indebted to ANT and post-ANT thinking, we take a different perspective on how to define the unit of narrative analysis. The focus of ANT is on the relations between things; it aims to study how robust networks of actors are constructed and maintained in organizations (Whittle and Spicer, 2008). It holds that materiality can shine a spotlight on those networks. While we agree to a point, we do not support the more extreme view that actants do not exist in and of themselves, that they are nothing more than the relations of which they are part (Law and Mol, 1995). Although an ANT-informed strategy has been usefully employed in organizational narrative (Bruni, 2005; Constantinides and Barrett, 2012; Pentland and Feldman, 2007) and organizational history (Durepos et al., 2008; Durepos and Mills, 2012), these approaches deal with a certain range of important questions in organizational life. The problem as we see it is that ANT conceptualizes organizational forms as stabilized, heterogeneous networks (Law, 1992), which means that as a formal framework of analysis it best addresses questions of structure and process (although Durepos and Mills (2012) persuasively argued for a critical historiography they term ANTi-history). Describing stable networks cannot provide an account of how resistance develops, how the capacities of actors emerge and change, how networks of actions develop, how reinterpretations of relations come into being or how systems of power are resisted (see Whittle and Spicer (2008) and McLean and Hassard (2004) for relevant critiques). These criticisms have given rise to recent ‘ANT And After’ approaches that forge substantive political critiques of organizational networks (e.g. Alcadipani and Hassard, 2010; Durepos et al., 2008; Durepos and Mills, 2012).

Notwithstanding the value and controversy surrounding ANT, if we were to translate an ANT-informed approach to narrative analysis our focus would rest on the examination of networks that maintain and stabilize the human and non-human actants in the organizational system. (Some examples of this tactic include work by Bruni (2005), Constantinides and Barrett (2012) and Pentland and Feldman (2007).) However, instead of mapping the connections between objects and other actors, we advocate using an object’s materiality as an inductive opening into narrative. Subsequent analysis may extend well beyond descriptions of networks and may, for example, uncover unexpected episodes and events, give voice to those excluded from networks, reveal motives for action, expose the means through which power is established and even highlight what is not occurring. De Laet and Mol’s (2000) article on a water pump used throughout the villages of Zimbabwe offers a case in point. By observing and describing the physical presence of the Zimbabwe Bush Pump ‘B’ type in isolated communities, the authors exposed numerous social, technological and economic narratives. Multiple realities of action were unearthed when the authors examined the materiality of the Bush Pump and considered how it changed shape and component parts over time within a complex network of relations. For example, they noted when the pump breaks down, villagers mend it with whatever materials are at hand; old car tyres may be used instead of leather seals, and makeshift steel rods may replace manufacturer-specified bolts.

The mechanical configuration of the water pump therefore changes as a result of the relations that keep it going, such as the people who use and maintain it and the physical resources available to them. The participants are in turn influenced by social, economic, political and geographical conditions; bolts may not be easy to come by in socially isolated, impoverished communities. De Laet and Mol (2000) also noted that the pump might sit unused if the village women do not want to use it or if important community members, including water diviners, are not consulted in the selection of the site. In this case the pump would not be exposed to forces of use, and its materiality would evidence forces of disuse instead of mechanical wear. A narrative researcher who notices a stiff, rusted water pump may enquire into the reasons for the equipment’s neglect. As a result, he or she may uncover a range of stories about the village social order, its surrounding cultural and economic milieu and the reception of Western aid initiatives. It is subsequently possible to make inferences about a situation based on what did not happen to an object (Joy, 2009), a question that arguably lies beyond the scope of ANT thinking, but within the realm of object materiality and narrative.

Although we make use of De Laet and Mol’s (2000) case here, the authors themselves did not make an argument for materiality. Their intent was to challenge the idea that objects are necessarily stable. However, we suggest that the Bush Pump case also shows how the materiality of an object—that is the changes that are brought about in its physical matter through interaction with forces, people and processes—can help explain those forces, people and processes, and the broader social and political narratives mediating them. Materiality can function as the entry point into a wide range of social, political, economic and community stories. Any organizational object, like the Zimbabwe Bush Pump or the 914 Xerox, is entangled in the organizational networks it participates within, and changes occur within its physical constitution as a result of this entanglement.

Since materiality is concerned with changes in physical matter brought about through interactions with other agents, it can be approached as a unit of analysis that brings a suite of actors and histories to the narrative stage. It follows that physical objects are not mere accessories to narrative that stand-in for meanings. They also act through their material relations to bodies, events and time within the organization. Objects do more than ‘… “express” power relations, “symbolize” social hierarchies, “reinforce” social inequities, “transport” social power, “objectify” inequality and “reify” gender relations’ (Latour, 2007: 72) within an organization. The entanglements between objects and humans are far more complex where an account of materiality can offer narrative traction into these complexities and multiplicities.

Object practice

A second domain for investigating objects in organizational narrative concerns the practices that enmesh objects and people. Most organizational practices involve objects. Even checking email requires the use of technological hardware. Once objects are embedded in practices, they may become silent or taken for granted in the dramas that unfold. Nevertheless, they still influence and extend the performances in which they participate. As Knorr Cetina (1997) noted in her influential theorization of ‘knowledge objects’ (following Rheinberger’s (1992) epistemic things), objects are not the mere infrastructure of practice; they help constitute practice itself and are also shaped by the way people use them. In this section, we describe practices as a mingling of objects and people. We suggest that objects are constitutive agents in organizational activity and we aim to expose how narratives can emerge through object practices. Narratives can emerge through object practices via two interwoven mechanisms: first, an object practice shapes recurrent patterns of action that define the roles and activities of organizational members, and second, practices reciprocally define the narrative meanings that members give to the object in use.

While organizational storytelling is conventionally seen as an oral or written performance portraying two or more people (Boje, 1991), the notion of an object practice shows how things generate narratives (with people) through use. We define object practices here as sequenced, intentional workplace activities performed through the coordinated action of human and non-human actors. We think of practices as scripts read by organizational members (Barley, 1986), but also consider that both humans and non-humans write, interpret and shape those scripts. Narratives are therefore produced when an object and subject participate in an action, a process or a routine together.

Barley (1986) has previously established a connection between practice and narrative by showing that practices function as organizational scripts or recurring plots that sequence action and define roles. In his seminal article Barley (1986) examined how the introduction of a CT scanner changed the role relations in a radiology department, producing new scripts for behaviour, unexpected episodes and conflicts. He noted that objects shape what we as humans do in organizations. A parallel could be drawn here with the 914 since it also triggered the need for new scripts of organizational action to be formulated. At the time of its introduction, the 914 was a cutting-edge product that disturbed the ingrained patterns of behaviour in offices worldwide. When the first Xerox was released, potential customers did not readily see the need for electrophotographic copying since inexpensive carbon paper alternatives were available. But by the middle of the 1960s, the 914 had become an indispensable participant in everyday office work. New organizational plots emerged as the copier changed who performed copying tasks (office staff saw the potential to become casual, ‘walk-up’ (Suchman, 2005: 384) users) and the consequences of accelerated communication unfolded. What became known as the ‘Xerox’ changed the power and communication dynamics in organizations everywhere by imposing itself upon work practices and by re-shaping working narratives.

As with Barley’s analysis, the introduction of the 914 suggests that objects can constrain the flow of human action. However, as we will argue by drawing on Schinkel’s (2004) work, practices and people reciprocally influence what meanings and potential uses are attributed to an object. Objects do not enter social life with pre-determined meanings. Rather, an object has a horizon of possible meanings and once an object is incorporated into practice ‘… one of these aspects becomes highlighted whilst all others are bracketed, pushed to the background’ (Schinkel, 2004: 401). Meanwhile, alternative ways of being-in-practice are kept ‘at hand’ (p. 405). (Of course, there are only a finite number of ways to use an object if we accept the material boundaries and cultural contexts in which they are used: ‘There are limits to what you can make an object be’ (Schinkel, 2004: 405)).

If an object is an ‘empty form’ (Schinkel, 2004: 401) with a range of potential meanings, we give that object meaning when we engage with it. At the same time we define what stories it can tell. When we use an object, we categorize what it can do, and by association what we as human agents can do with it. For instance, in the foyer of Fuji Xerox the 914 was conscripted into an historical (political) practice where it dutifully played the role of an artefact testifying to organizational tradition, innovation and longevity. Back in the 1930s, however, it was embedded in a different practice in Chester Carlson’s research lab where it presumably participated in procedures of knowledge production. It may have even been an ‘epistemic thing’ (Rheinberger, 1992) or a ‘knowledge-object’ (Knorr Cetina, 1997) that shaped how Carlson conceptualized his research and development problems.

When we use an object in organizational practice, we make it one thing out of many possible things (Schinkel, 2004), and we therefore constrain the narrative potential of the object practice. An essential implication here is that there are always latent stories that could emerge if new practices were to be initiated around an object. We are not restricted to the object narratives that current organizational practices imply. It is always possible to ask what stories an object might tell if applied to alternative uses. For example, what if we approach the Xerox 914 in the Eco Manufacturing Centre as a ‘knowledge object’ (Knorr Cetina, 1997) rather than as an historical object? Could we open its narrative horizon by initiating a new practice around it, by taking it into the lab and studying its use, make and function? Might we discover, as Suchman (2005) did, that by changing object practices we also allow for ontological variations to arise that extend narrative possibilities?

Our questions here were triggered by Suchman’s (2005) study in which she re-framed the 1981 Haloid Xerox 8200 copier from a ‘prosaic piece of office furniture’ and ‘problematic product’ (p. 383) into a ‘scientific-object’ (p. 385). At the time of her study, Xerox saw the Haloid 8200 as a failed commodity, thwarted by what users called ‘operability problems’ (Suchman, 2005: 385). Suchman (2005), however, decided not to study the object as a ‘failed commodity’ that needed fixing, but to re-frame it as a thinking object that could help her understand the relations between the copier and its users. By observing the copier in use, she discovered that users thought they needed to instruct the equipment to perform tasks. Yet, despite the reference to complex instructional materials, users could not make the copier do what they believed they had ‘instructed’ it to do.

Suchman (2005) determined a need to change the role of the copier: it needed to function as an expert at copying and associated tasks, not as a tool or device that deployed the directions of its operators. To re-frame this from a narrative perspective, the interactions between copier and user were originally constructed around a master (user) and slave (copier) dynamic. Xerox needed a new story to be written that re-cast the characters as ‘expert’ and ‘client’. Users did not want to know how to copy or compile documents. Rather, they wanted to tell the technology what they needed and leave the rest to the specialist. This was a revelation to Xerox that changed the way they understood their products. By re-framing the object from ‘supporting cast’ to ‘hero’, Suchman (2005) showed Xerox ‘… how to move the company from being a producer of stand-alone, hardware-based devices to a producer of networked, software technologies and associated consulting services’ (p. 391). When Suchman initiated a series of new uses around the object—moving it first from ‘obsolete’ product to ‘scientific object’, and then from ‘device’ to ‘expert’—she also defined new character roles in the story of practice, and scripted alternative events that enacted responses to change.

In bringing together the arguments in this section, we propose that objects exist in a hermeneutic, narrative space where object and practice define and inform one another. Furthermore, we contend that practices can govern what meanings are attributed to an object, and therefore a change in practice can initiate changed narrative potential. However, objects also reciprocally determine the constitution of practice as they can contour the latitude of potential human performances that occur in an organization, affecting behaviour by constraining or enabling the system of possible actions and allowing a specific suite of scenarios to unfold. The enmeshment between objects and humans allows practice stories to take place on the narrative stage, inviting the narrative researcher to consider stories as continually unfolding shapers of meaning. The domain of practice provides a narrative entry point for improved access to the data wrapped up in organizational objects.

Object biography

We now introduce a third and final domain for entering the world of objects as they arise in organizational narratives: object biography. When we attribute an object with social agency as per the post-social agenda we acknowledge that it has a biography comprising the sum of its social relationships. In this section, we examine objects through what we call the multiple and past lives they have shared with their human users. We further cultural anthropologist Kopytoff’s (1988) seminal proposition that it is possible to write an object’s biography in the same way as we do an individual’s biography. We consider the biographical layers that accumulate over time in longevous organizational objects, including the multiple lives of the 914 Xerox copier.

In ‘The Cultural Biography of Things’, Kopytoff (1988) suggested that objects are culturally constructed entities with social lives. Every person has numerous biographies, including ‘psychological, professional, political, familial, economic and so forth—each of which selects some aspects of the life history and discards others’ (Kopytoff, 1988: 68). Biographies of things are similar and may emphasize a physical, technical, economic or social narrative. As a result, ‘What one glimpses through the biographies of both people and things … is, above all, the social system and the collective understandings on which it rests’ (Kopytoff, 1988: 89).

In crude terms, an object’s biography includes a birth when it is produced, a lifetime as the object is involved in a unique set of relationships, and a death when it is no longer entangled in those relationships (Holtorf, 1998). We can disaggregate the life of the 914, for example, by examining its conception (arguably when Chester Carlson filed a patent for electrophotography in October 1937, or produced series of prototypes), followed by its physical birth on the assembly line, its involvement in relationships and events over 17 years of production and its eventual death as a consumer product when it was superseded by the 710. According to Kopytoff’s (1988) reasoning, we cannot fully understand the 914 at only one of these points in its existence. Rather, the 914 needs to be considered across the duration of production, manufacture, exchange, use and re-cycling if we are to properly study its dynamic participation in the social world. Moreover, we must consider how the object was experienced and understood at each stage, and how conceptions of it have changed over time.

Kopytoff’s (1988) ideas differ from the life-history approach to objects (as pursued in archaeology), which generally seek to explain macro-scale, long-term changes to technology and artefacts but tend to miss the dynamic interplay between people and objects (Joy, 2009). In contrast, the biographical lens recognizes that as people and objects move through time, ‘… they are constantly transformed, and these transformations of person and object are tied up with each other’ (Gosden and Marshall, 1999: 169). Biography therefore ‘… provides a method to reveal the relationships between people and objects’ (Joy, 2009: 540). That method can be pursued, according to Kopytoff (1988), by asking questions ‘… similar to those one asks of people’ (p. 66) (such as where does it originate, who created it, what is its career, what are its recognized ‘ages’, how does it use change over time and what happens when it is no longer useful?), in order to reveal changes in the way people interact, use and think about an object over its lifetime.

Since the publication of Kopytoff’s (1988) essay, anthropological studies have pursued the idea that objects can have lives analogous to human lives (e.g. Hoskins, 1998), made up of relations with people (Joy, 2009; Strathern, 1988) and other objects. It has also been acknowledged that an object biography may involve a series of lives and deaths as the object circulates through different social networks (Joy, 2009). The 914 we encountered, for example, appeared to be living out a sacralised afterlife in which a new set of relations had been activated. Since it has taken pride of place in the Eco Manufacturing Centre, we can consider the possibility that it has been ‘reincarnated’ (Moreland, 1999) and therefore that it also has a past-life. As a static and enduring object, anthropologists would say that the 914 accumulates histories as reinterpretations ‘gather around’ it (Joy, 2009: 541; see also Moreland, 1999), in contrast to moveable or fixed objects that build biographies through exchanges between people (Peers, 1999).

The biographical approach recognizes that the biographies of people are tied up in, and revealed through, objects, and vice versa. Objects and people have multiple and ‘mutual biographies’ (Gosden and Marshall, 1999: 173), so that an object’s many life stories reveal its entanglement with people over time. Some researchers see objects as extensions of the self (Belk, 1988) that function in service of the individual (Hoskins, 1998) and ‘… act as proof of the narratives through which we fashion the self and the past’ (Albano, 2007: 16–17). However, if we accept that even when a ‘… biography is focused on a single life, such a story cannot be told without reference to a large supporting cast’ (Peers, 1999: 291), then we acknowledge that the biographies of people and objects are entwined.

We believe that in organizational studies an object biography can help explain the bonds between people and objects over time. For instance, over the course of its existence, the 914 copier has moved through a wide range of object categories, each implicating a different set of relations with other people and things. The copier has been subject to re-contextualisation over the course of its existence, fundamentally altering the way members use it to make work life intelligible. In this way, the 914 reveals the multiple and mutual biographies of objects and people. According to Fuji Xerox (1999) publications, the device tells several stories ‘… about the man who invented it, the company that made it work, and the products it yielded for the benefit of mankind’ (p. 1).

Putting promotional intent aside, let us speculate that the 914 copier has passed through three lives: first as a product offering for Xerox, second as a technological device for customers and third as a lauded, historical artefact. In its first life as a Xerox research asset, the 914 was designed to create and then fill a need in the marketplace and to generate profit for the struggling Haloid Company. The product represented significant commercial risk being based on a technology that numerous companies had rejected, and had required 12 years of further research and development before it was released to a market that did not yet demand it. In its first life, the 914 lived within a network of research and development labs where access was governed by patent legislation and ultimately deployed with the support of business and sales activities. As a business model, this set of relations has since ‘… become part of the organizational DNA, and not only define the organization within the marketplace but determine its future directions and capabilities’ (Rowland-Campbell, 2008: 1).

At the point of commercialization, we propose that the 914 copier developed a second life and became subject to a new system of access as a technological device in the offices of Xerox customers (and the maiden product for Xerox). It changed the way business was done at Xerox and beyond, revolutionizing the distribution of information. By delivering unlimited plain paper copies at the push of a button, new organizational ideals of knowledge reproduction and distribution emerged. Access to information, questions of authorship and operational speed became new imperatives as plain paper copying became an active part of the way people communicated in organizational life. The pace of the information highway accelerated, and the age of the information worker was unleashed. Creating previously unknown organizational needs for speed and accuracy of duplication, the 914 and its successors forced transformations in copyright and intellectual property rights across the globe. It also revolutionized the way high cost manufacturers did business because it impelled Xerox to come up with the idea of leasing the equipment, charging a per-page fee, since the cost of buying the 914 was so high.

Conventional product life-cycle models would suggest that the 914 died when its successor took its place. However, the 914 lives on in what we call its third life or its afterlife. Fuji Xerox Australia proudly affirms the lingering significance of the spirit of the 914: ‘Certainly, Xerox has changed greatly in size and scope since the historic 914 copier was introduced in 1959. But we also believe that the basic personality of Xerox has never changed’ (Xerox, 1999: 1). The defunct technology now functions as a primary source of historical data, and a force within Fuji Xerox’s organizational identity.

The (current) third life of the 914 exposes how significance emerges with the changing lives of an object. In its tertiary existence, the copier could be called a longevous (Edensor, 2005) or ensouled object (Nelson and Stolterman, 2003) capable of creating binding connections with people from the past, notably Chester Carlson. In this sense, the copier is also a relic, all that physically remains of its pioneering inventor and the previous organizational personalities and structures that participated in its first and second lives. Social memory consequently survives through an object’s biographical landscape, preserving the relations of the past in the present.

Objects do not tell our stories merely through archiving memories on our behalf. The biographies of objects and the relationships they cultivate with users impart a unique narrative that transforms objects into meaningful artefacts. A biography is more than a linear reconstruction of the passage from birth to death. Greater narrative depth is possible if we start from two key assumptions: first, that objects have multiple lives, and second, that objects share our biographies. In other words, ‘Biography is relational and an object biography is comprised of the sum of the relationships that constitute it’ (Joy, 2009: 552). By unravelling object biographies, it is possible to reveal relationships between people and objects (Gosden and Marshall, 1999) as they change over time. It is also possible to expose tacit relationships with other objects as we observe the connections, both structural and functional, between the 914 and its contemporary cousins in the Eco Manufacturing Centre foyer.

Implications and conclusion

Our experience with the 914 copier provoked some discomfort with the way objects are investigated as part of narrative methods. It became obvious to us that insufficient consideration had been given to knotted, object-infused versions of narrative. The result was an imperative to bolster the depth and richness of narrative analysis in organizations by offering a structure for addressing objects as co-creators of narrative. As a result, we have made recommendations about how to address the object–human complex through narratives, acknowledging the entangled and symbiotic relationship the two create in their narrative co-construction. Accessing the object narrative begins with the theoretical assumptions of post-sociality, which acknowledges the constitutive influence of non-human actors (including technologies and material objects) in organizations. We have aimed to provide a supplemental method for organizational narrative researchers in the form of a framework. Our framework comprised three domains: object relations, object practice and object biography, which can expand the narrative horizon. Although clearly inter-related, any one domain may be pursued to expose entanglements between objects and people.

In employing a post-social lens where human actors form composite assemblages with material objects, we have argued that object-based narratives offer potential for rich, complex and multidimensional data. Objects offer a wedge by which deep and rich accounts of organizational action and sense-making can be leveraged. Our theoretical concern has therefore centred upon the way objects co-construct and articulate meaning with their users through narratives. Our interest has been not only on the ways in which people work with and on objects but also on the ways in which objects work with and on people. We have proposed that object-based narratives can capture this mutually constituting effect.

The post-social framework we have outlined has implications for the design and method of narrative analyses. A post-social object narrative perspective introduces a relational dynamic between the object and its user. Objects establish relations with users through their materiality, participate in practices with people and forge layers of biographical strata that are interwoven with our own life stories. Under this conception, texts, talk and objects reflect and constitute social reality, which means that the deep challenge lies with exposing the plurality of these media without being canalized by the hegemonic narratives of dominant brokers more interested in museological drama.

Although we argue that post-social object narratives add depth and vibrancy to organizational narrative research, we do not mean to imply that their inclusion provides any greater claim to social reality, ‘truth’, or access to some kind of more authentic or essential experience. Objects are not mirrors of reality, and as Harman (2011b) noted, we cannot expect to expose an exogenous ‘truth’ of the object. Tempting as it is to objectify narratives in terms of material, almost tangible artefacts, they remain fluid, personal, subjective and enmeshed. Meaning does not necessarily accompany an object. Post-sociality implies that organizational members understand and make sense of their environments and experiences with objects rather than exclusively through or because of them.

The use of narrative methods in organizational studies offers a vehicle for digging into the features of organizations and the plurality of perspectives its member’s experience. Narrative analyses expose the sophisticated and nuanced aspects of the way organizations act as formative social actors, each possessing a unique sense of identity where they are more than the sum of parts, people and things. Beyond the technical and functional, organizations rely on their political, social, and sociomaterial practices (Orlikowski, 2007) in order to work. Object narratives bolster data richness because they provide a way of thinking about objects as units of narrative analysis where materiality, practice and biography interplay. Object narratives have proven insightful because they give voice to the sensitivities that reside underneath mechanistic structures, sidestep the political singularities that emerge from leadership declarations and venture beyond the deterministic assumptions emanating from company strategy.