Materiality and Organizing Social Interaction in a Technological World

This book asks how the materiality of technologies, ranging from computer-simulation tools and social media, to ranking devices and rumours, is actually implicated in the process of formal and informal organizing. It builds a new theoretical framework to consider the important socio-technical changes confronting people's everyday experiences in and outside of work. Leading scholars in the field contribute original chapters examining the complex interactionsbetween technology and the social, between artefact and humans. The discussion spans multiple disciplines, including management, information systems, informatics, communication, sociology, and the history of technology, and opens up a new area of research regarding the relationship between materiality andorganizing.

Paul M. Leonardi is the Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Junior Professor of Design at Northwestern University where he teaches courses on the management of innovation and organizational change in the School of Communication, the McCormick School of Engineering, and the Kellogg School of Management. His research focuses on how companies can design organizational structures and employ advanced information technologies to more effectively create and share knowledge. He is the author of Car Crashes Without Cars: Lessons about Simulation Technology and Organizational Change from Automotive Design (MIT Press, 2012).

Bonnie Nardi is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, the University of California, Irvine. An anthropologist, she has studied the uses of digital technologies in offices, schools, homes, libraries, hospitals, scientific laboratories, and virtual worlds. Her theoretical orientation is activity theory. She is the author of many scientific articles and books. Her latest books are My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft (University of Michigan Press, 2010) and Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (co-author, Princeton University Press, 2012).



Jannis Kallinikos is Professor and PhD programme Director in the Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management at the London School of Economics. His research covers a wide range of topics on the interpenetration of technology with the administrative and institutional arrangements of contemporary societies. Recent books include The Consequences of Information: Institutional Implications of Technological Change (Edward Elgar, 2006), and Governing Through Technology: Information Artefacts and Social Practice (Palgrave, 2011).

I. Setting the Stage
1. The Challenge of Materiality: Origins, Scope, and Prospects, Jannis Kallinikos, Paul M. Leonardi, and Bonnie A. Nardi
II. Theorizing Materiality
2. Materiality, Sociomateriality, and Socio-Technical Systems: What Do These Terms Mean? How Are They Different? Do We Need Them?, Paul M. Leonardi
3. On Sociomateriality, Philip Faulkner and Jochen Runde
4. Form, Function, and Matter: Crossing the Border of Materiality, Jannis Kallinikos
III. Materiality as Performativity
5. Ranking Devices: The Socio-Materiality of Ratings, Neil Pollock
6. Great Expectations: The Materiality of Commensurability in Social Media, Susan V. Scott and Wanda J. Orlikowski
7. Digital Materiality and the Emergence of an Evolutionary Science of the Artificial, Youngjin Yoo
IV. Materiality as Assemblage
8. Inverse Instrumentality: How Technologies Objectify Patients and Players, Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie A. Nardi
9. Space Matters, but How? Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Place, Anne-Laure Fayard
10. Socio-material Practices of Design Co-ordination Across a Large Construction Project, Jennifer Whyte and Chris Harty
V. Materiality as Affordance
11. Theorizing Information Technology as a Material Artifact in Information Systems Research, Daniel Robey, Benoit Raymond, and Chad Anderson
12. The Materiality of Technology: An Affordance Perspective, Samer Faraj and Bijan Azad
13. Pencils, Legos, and Guns: A Study of Artifacts Used in Architecture, Carole Groleau and Christiane Demers
VI. Materiality as Consequence
14. Materiality: What are the Consequences?, Brian T. Pentland and Harminder Singh
15. Why Matter Always Matters in (Organizational) Communication, Francois Cooren, Gail Fairhurst, and Romain Huet
16. The Materiality of Rumor, Jenna Burrell
VII. Epilogue
17. Matter Matters: Materiality in Philosophy, Physics, and Technology, Albert Borgmann