Abstract
Within the field of organization studies, there has been renewed interest in materiality and how it is implicated in work and organizational practice. This interest is reflected in the recent publication of a number of edited volumes that address the turn to materiality in organization studies (e.g. Carlile et al., 2013; Leonardi et al., 2012; Robichaud and Cooren, 2013). This book is an excellent addition to this literature that will be of interest to scholars and students of materiality in organizations and related research domains. Edited by François-Xavier de Vaujany and Nathalie Mitev, the book focuses on the relationship between materiality and space in organizations. It offers a collection of well-written and thought-provoking contributions on this topic that have their origins in the Second ‘Organizations, Artifacts and Practices’ (OAP) Workshop held at the Université Paris-Dauphine in 2012. The book contains 14 chapters that examine issues and provide insights into different aspects of space, materiality and organizational practices. The chapters are organized into four parts, addressing these themes in relation to key theoretical concepts, work and co-work, managerial control and institutional dynamics. The collection of chapters is bookended by an introduction and conclusion from the editors, and has an epilogue by Lucas Introna. In introducing the book, de Vaujany and Mitev provide an overview of key theoretical approaches for examining a spatial dimension in organizational practices. These approaches are drawn from a range of disciplinary traditions, including economic geography, environmental psychology and sociology, as well as perspectives that have collectively become known as sociomateriality (Dale, 2005; Orlikowski and Scott, 2008). The introduction also previews the content of the subsequent chapters and their respective contributions to the aims of the book. In their conclusion, Mitev and de Vaujany summarize these contributions and assess how they collectively ‘give more space to space’ in studies of materiality and organizational practices.
The first four chapters examine some key concepts in theorizing space, materiality and organization. In Chapter 1, Andrew Pickering reaffirms his challenge to the dominant dualist ontology of people and things. Pickering, whose work on the ‘mangle of practice’ (Pickering, 1995) is an important influence in perspectives on sociomateriality, argues that this dualism collapses if we theorize agency in terms of performance. Using examples as varied as bonsai trees, digital gambling, synthetic dyes and cybernetics, Pickering emphasizes how we are enmeshed in a world in which both people and material artefacts do things in an emergent and ‘open-ended dance of agency’. In Chapter 2, Aron Lindberg and Kalle Lyytinen revisit the concept of affordance to develop the notion of ‘affordance ecologies’—complex and evolving sociomaterial systems comprising mutually constitutive infrastructure, organization and practice domains. Such ecologies are meaningful configurations of related affordances that vary across time and contexts. The authors distinguish between ostensive and performative affordances, focusing attention on the temporal dynamics of the sets of multiple affordances within which digital technologies are enacted in differing contexts. In Chapter 3, Philippe Lorino uses pragmatist philosophy and semiotics to understand sociomateriality as the enactment of a relationship between human actors and material artefacts through and towards some practical meaning. He develops the concept of ‘architectural instruments’ as complex instrumental systems that establish a constraining and enabling framework for collective organizational activities. Lorino argues that architectural instruments carry narrative archetypes or ‘architextures’ that impose on or frame collective activity through structuring forms or socially and culturally established habits of use. He explores this conceptual apparatus through case studies of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implementation and the development of a simple management procedure for evaluating product design modifications. In Chapter 4, Michèle Charbonneau focuses on the human experience of materiality by examining the philosopher Bachelard’s work on poetic imagination and his essays on the four elements—fire, water, air and earth. Charbonneau suggests that Bachelard provides a useful perspective on material imagination that offers conceptual and methodological contributions to studying the issues raised by materiality for management and organization.
The second part of the book comprises four chapters that present an interesting range of case studies that explore space and materiality in everyday working practices. In Chapter 5, Julie Fabbri and Florence Charue-Duboc examine the role of the workspace—a research object with physical and social elements—in facilitating collaboration and innovation. Their case study of the ‘Beehive’, a collaborative workspace for social entrepreneurs in Paris, demonstrates that this is more an interorganizational community than a shared office. The ‘physical settings and social designation’ of the workspace facilitate the connections, creative interactions, knowledge exchange and learning necessary to promote social innovation. Chapter 6 focuses on space as the product of sociomaterial relations and how everyday media work practices are challenged by the changing digital landscape of social media. Comparing the ‘story spaces’ involved in the creation, production and publication of stories in a print magazine and an online magazine, Lotta Häkkinen and Nina Kivinen show how social media create and disrupt boundaries between, for example, work and leisure or the public and the personal, as ‘objects and social relationships leak from one space to another’.
In Chapter 7, Nathalie Raulet-Croset explores the role of geographic and material space in constituting organizational practices through two case studies of ephemeral organizations that arose to provide a collective response to ‘urban incivilities’ in a Paris district. Raulet-Croset outlines the notion of spatial agency and its interaction with human agency in the coordination of these organizations. She highlights how various actors appropriate and use the open square of a large building complex (that had become a ‘no go’ area for the residents) and a building lobby (subject to unwanted loitering) as focal points in the coordination of social action at a community level. In the following chapter, Bhumika Gupta and Emmanuel Baudoin analyse how employees use space to engage with organizational e-learning programmes. The authors discuss how the employees experience space in terms of physical organization, biological needs and social rules, and how they appropriate and adapt the available spaces to facilitate their self-training.
The third part of the book focuses on how material artefacts and space are implicated in managerial control. Spatial and material arrangements have traditionally afforded a means of control over the working environment. In Chapter 9, Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte examines how mobile information systems disrupt these traditional arrangements and introduce a new spatiotemporal order in organizations. Using four case studies, she highlights the significance of mobile technologies and the temporal boundaries they construct in constituting symbolic and virtual spaces when organizational space no longer has physical boundaries. In such spaces, control is exercised through a time-based form of disciplinary power, in an extension of Foucault’s (1977) panoptic metaphor from physical architectures to symbolic spaces. In the next chapter, Stewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha and Arménio Rego analyse distributed ideological, material and human agencies in the perpetration of genocide in Cambodia in the late 1970s. They argue that the imbrication of these agencies creates a sociomaterial agent capable of and willing to torture and execute other human beings. In Chapter 11, Stéphan Pezé discusses identity regulation as a mode of organizational control. He focuses on a managerial training programme and the practices (some involving material artefacts) that link identity regulation with participants’ identity work.
The last four chapters in the book are thematically organized around institutional dimensions of space and materiality. In Chapter 12, John Urry explores how mobilities are performed through contingent sociomaterial assemblages. In doing so, he demonstrates how travel, meetings and social networks involve the organization of movements across space in a material world. In the next chapter, Aljona Zorino and David Avison explore the contextual interconnectedness of the internet industry infrastructure with the imbrication of human and material agencies in the evolution of public broadband networks in Minsk, Belarus. They demonstrate how this infrastructure was a critical factor in the enactment of sociomaterial agencies in the ongoing development of the organizational routines and technologies in their case study. In doing so, the authors argue for an understanding of agency as a process in which the imbrication of human and material agencies unfolds in relation to a dynamic extra-organizational environment. In the final chapter, Pierre Laniray explores the complex entanglement of occupational identity, technological artefacts and work practices in a case study of train drivers issued with a new mobile device. Laniray argues that the drivers’ interpretation of the technology in question was constructed in relation to their work-based identity and used in ways consistent with that identity.
A number of the chapters in this book address the difficulties involved in conducting a sociomaterial analysis without resorting to dualist accounts of human and material agencies. Readers will benefit from the exposition of the different approaches taken to resolving this issue under the umbrella of sociomateriality research in organization studies. In an epilogue to the book, Lucas Introna tackles this issue head-on, arguing for the need to replace the socio-/material bifurcation inherent in an ontology of ‘being’ with the openness and heterogeneity of an ontology of ‘becoming’. Put simply, this involves moving from a consideration of pre-existing beings that act and relate with others, to an understanding that a particular being becomes such through the performance of those actions and relations. Introna extends this ontological argument to space, pointing out that ‘what we take as “space” is a performative accomplishment’. It is a fitting end to a book that makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the heterogeneous assemblages performed through space and materiality in organizational practices.