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This study aims to examine how a collaboration technology is used by three organizational groups. The main focus is on the interplay between the users’ perceptions (of the technology and of the knowledge shared) and the material properties of the collaboration technology.

Two theoretical frameworks (social representations and sociomaterial practice perspective) examine collaboration technology use to better understand the underlying dynamics. The research is conducted as a case study in a US company where a collaboration technology was being implemented.

The findings reveal a process model showing how social dynamics and users’ perceptions of what the collaboration technology can do and cannot do to share the users’ knowledge influence the users’ behaviour. Based on these perceptions, users will twist or amend their interpretation of the reality (the material properties of the technology) to justify their use of the collaboration technology.

This research is conducted as a single case study. However, the significant amount of time spent at the research site allowed for a very rich description of the events and processes involved.

This study offers guidelines on what influences use and adoption of collaboration technologies. It highlights the importance of providing more than just training, as social dynamics and users’ perceptions continuously influence users’ behaviour.

By combining two complementary theoretical frameworks, this study provides a novel and more in-depth explanation of collaboration technology use (or lack thereof).

Coworking-spaces are considered as a new formula to facilitate autonomy, creativity, self-efficacy, work satisfaction and innovation, yet they also might overburden their users who in that course intend to limit social interaction and collaboration in the workspace. Thus, the question is how coworking-spaces shape entrepreneurial ventures.

This study used an inductive research methodology based on data from three different data sources, including observations, archives and interviews from managers and entrepreneurs.

The findings suggest that the materiality in the form of spatial architectures (working, socialization and support structures) shared facilities and infrastructures (utilities, luxuries and specialties), and integrated digital technologies (applications and platforms) influence the flow of communication, internal and external linkages, as well as functional uniformity and distinctiveness. However, there exists an inherent dualism in sociomaterial assemblage in coworking-spaces, which can lead to instrumental and detrimental outcomes for entrepreneurs.

This study explains the role of sociomaterial assemblage on the working of entrepreneurs in shared workspaces.

Most recent service experience research considers customers as sensemakers and sensemaking as a focal process in experience construction. Despite this, the sensemaking theory engendered in organization studies has not been applied in the quest for an in-depth understanding of the service experience. This study introduces a sensemaking perspective to the service experience and develops a conceptualization of how customers construct their experiences cognitively through sensemaking.

The service experience literature is dominated by a focus on firms implementing service experiences for customers. This study, in contrast, investigates service experience and its formation from the customers' viewpoint: how service experiences are formed as a part of customers' everyday life and sensemaking processes instead of under service providers' control.

Service experience is characterized as a mental picture – a collage of meanings created by a customer through the sensemaking processes. A sensemaking framework that characterizes service experience formation and its four seminal dimensions, including the self-related, sociomaterial, retrospective and prospective sensemaking, is introduced.

This article contributes to the service literature by introducing a new theoretical lens through which the service experience concept can be investigated and reframed.

Social media such as blogs are being widely used in organizations in order to undertake internal communication and share knowledge, rendering them important boundary objects. A root metaphor of the boundary object domain is the notion of relatively static and inert objects spanning similarly static boundaries. A strong sociomaterial perspective allows the immisciblity of object and boundary to be challenged, since a key tenet of this perspective is the ongoing and mutually constituted performance of the material and social. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The aim of the research is to draw upon sociomateriality to explore the operation of social media platforms as intra-organizational boundary objects. Given the novel perspective of this study and its social constructivist ontology, the authors adopt an exploratory, interpretivist research design. This is operationalized as a case study of the use of an organizational blog by a major UK Government department over an extended period. A novel aspect of the study is the use of data released under a Freedom of Information request.

The authors present three exemplar instances of how the blog and organizational boundaries were performed in the situated practice of the case study organization. The authors draw on the literature on boundary objects, blogs and sociomateriality in order to provide a theoretical explication of the mutually constituted performance of the blog and organizational boundaries. The authors also invoke the notion of “extended chains of intra-action” to theorize changes in the wider organization.

Adoption of a sociomaterial lens provides a highly novel perspective of boundary objects and organizational boundaries. The study highlights the indeterminate and dynamic nature of boundary objects and boundaries, with both being in an intra-active state of becoming challenging conventional conceptions. The study demonstrates that specific material-discursive practices arising from the situated practice of the blog at the respective boundaries were performative, reconfiguring the blog and boundaries and being generative of further changes in the organization.

Smartphones play an integral part in many children's lives. Their constant presence in various contexts and the multitude of affordances they present have a tremendous effect on how childhoods are lived today. One important aspect is the way children's interaction with smartphones can affect relationships and particularly generational relations. In this explorative study, we investigated Azerbaijani children's interaction with smartphones in the family and at school using the sociomaterial and relational approaches. Thinking relationally, we followed children's stories to unravel how smartphones can mediate different types of behavior and assist children in negotiating their place in generational order with the adults in their lives. Analyses suggest that smartphones can both present children with bargaining power to negotiate pleasure and fun as well as means to reinforce the generational order by children themselves. The findings point out that children often transfer social norms and expectations placed on them to the ways they use smartphones.

The focus of this chapter is quantum dialectical storytelling and its contribution to generate anticipatory knowledge of the future through the intra-play between the ante-narrative and the anti-narrative. The theoretical framework on quantum dialectical storytelling is based upon Boje’s triad storytelling framework interfused with Hegelian dialectics and Baradian diffraction. Through the inspiration of Judith Butler’s performative theory, Riach, Rumens, and Tyler (2016) introduce the concept of the anti-narrative as a critical reflexive methodology. By drawing on Hegel’s work on the dialectical phenomenology of critical reflexive self-consciousness, a dialectical pre-reflexive and reflexive framework emerges as intra-weaving modes of being-in-the-world toward future.

This paper aims to examine the professional learning of rural police officers.

This qualitative case study involved interviews and focus groups with 34 police officers in Northern Scotland. The interviews and focus groups were transcribed and analysed, drawing on practice‐based and sociomaterial learning theories, by members of the research team.

The two key skills for effective rural policing were mobilising available human and material resources in the moment, and learning how to police and live in a rural community. The professional learning of rural police is spatial, emergent, embodied and deeply enmeshed in specificities, and is developed through interactions between human and non‐human actors.

This paper argues that, in order to understand professional learning, it is imperative to examine how work practices are fully entangled in social and material relations.

Applying sociomaterial approaches to issues of professional learning can illuminate previously obscured actors and gives a fuller picture of how professional practice is developed, sustained and modified. Learning is conceived as attuning to available knowledge resources and drawing on the knowledge strategies that are the most productive in the moment. The issues raised in this paper pertain to other professionals working in rural areas, and more generally to the theoretical framing of professional practice.

This paper investigates the experiences of school teachers of supporting pupils and their apprehensions of how pupils search and assess information when search engines have become a technology of literacy in schools. By situating technologies of literacy as sociomaterial the purpose of this paper is to analyse and discuss these experiences and understandings in order to challenge dominant views of search in information literacy research.

Six focus group interviews with in total 39 teachers working at four different elementary and secondary schools were conducted in the autumn of 2014. Analysis was done using a sociomaterial perspective, which provides tools for understanding how pupils and teachers interact with and are demanded to translate their interest to technologies of literacy, in this case search engines, such as Google.

The teachers expressed difficulties of conceptualizing search as something they could teach. When they did, search was most often identified as a practical skill. A critical perspective on search, recognizing the role of Google as a dominant part of the information infrastructure and a co-constructor of what there is to know was largely lacking. As a consequence of this neglected responsibility of teaching search, critical assessment of online information was conflated with Google’s relevance ranking.

The study develops a critical understanding of the role of searching and search engines as technologies of literacy in relation to critical assessment in schools. This is of value for information literacy training.

This paper aims to introduce, explain and illustrate the concept of “sites of emergent learning” (SEL), which pinpoints particular instances of learning in everyday practice. This concept is located within contemporary practice-oriented and sociomaterial approaches to understanding workplace learning.

This conceptual development has been resourced by a secondary analysis of data from three workplace learning studies. These were: an ethnographic study of a residential parenting service; a case study of learning among engineers working on a railway construction site; and a case study of a multicultural unit that aims to enhance health services for a diverse community. All were based in the Sydney metropolitan area. The secondary analysis was undertaken by identifying regular practices within each setting where professionals discuss past and future work. These were then subjected to theoretical scrutiny, identifying common and distinctive features.

SEL were identified within the handover, site-walks and catch-up meeting practices. They arise through and are constituted in relationships between social practices and the materialities of work. SEL involve negotiating, exploring and questioning practice and knowledge associated with it; they are instances within work practices in which work is done about how work gets done, developing new understandings of the past to reshape visions for the future. Alongside these commonalities, each site of emergent learning displayed distinctive features shaped by the particularities of the practices and materialities of each site.

This concept is presented as a valuable tool to assist researchers of workplace learning. It elucidates particular learning-intensive features of practice, extending sociomaterial conceptualisations of professional and workplace learning.

Engineering work is a specific form of sociomaterial practice, drawing on and combining social and material resources to accomplish desirable effects, often combining technological and social resources. A study of an electrical engineering development project suggests that the work unfolds as a process whereby technological artefacts are verified on the basis of testing procedures and whereby events concerning technological failure, what has been called the “back‐talk” of technology, are handled using joint problem‐solving. The purpose of this paper is to report on a study of a new product development project at a multinational telecommunications company.

An ethnographic case study of a new product development project at a major multinational telecommunications company was undertaken.

Engineering work is based on distributed know‐how and joint collaborations, emerging as a patchwork of activities where one single person may know a lot, but not everything, about the technology‐in‐the‐making. The paper concludes that joint concern for the technology, manifested as its gradual advancement, is what serves as the glue holding the community of engineers together.

The paper presents an original study of the work of a team of electrical engineers and inquires into how engineers combine technical and social resources when attempting to make the technology work.