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Article
Publication date: 8 July 2014

Nick Hopwood

To explore the methodological implications of sociomaterial theory for qualitative research about practice. The purpose of this paper is to assess the potential and limitations of…

Abstract

Purpose

To explore the methodological implications of sociomaterial theory for qualitative research about practice. The purpose of this paper is to assess the potential and limitations of video stimulus to discussion about practice as embodied and material, and to theorise this in terms of epistemic objects.

Design/methodology/approach

A video based on a residential child and family service in Sydney was used as a stimulus in six focus group discussions with researchers and professionals in child and family health. Three focus groups were held in Sweden, and three in the British Isles, settings where a similar approach to supporting families with young children is established. A sociomaterial perspective, drawing on Schatzki's practice theory and Knorr Cetina's notion of epistemic objects informed the design and methodologically focused analysis.

Findings

The use of video is shown to be successful in facilitating and prompting participants to reflect and comment on practice as embodied and material. However, the analysis also accounts for more problematic nature of this approach, exploring the affective connections and illusion of totality that can be associated with video screenings. An alternative, based on line drawings, is suggested, and the paper concludes by raising further questions about data reduction and stimulus artefacts.

Originality/value

The turn to sociomaterial theory has huge potential, but its methodological implications remain unexplored. This paper contributes original perspectives relating to the use of video in a qualitative study, offering innovative theorisation and discussion of stimulus material as epistemic objects, which offers fresh insights into significant methodological prospects and problems.

Details

Qualitative Research Journal, vol. 14 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1443-9883

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 27 May 2014

Ingo Stolz

This study aims to analyze how organization development (OD) practitioners develop corporate citizenship for the purpose of increasing their organization’s capacity to practice…

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to analyze how organization development (OD) practitioners develop corporate citizenship for the purpose of increasing their organization’s capacity to practice corporate citizenship. Research shows that very few corporations have the organizational capacity to practice corporate citizenship. Evidence exists that ever more corporations adopt programs of corporate citizenship development to increase this capacity. However, there still is a general lack of a strategic understanding of how corporate citizenship development occurs. The potential of OD frameworks and tools for developing corporate citizenship have been highlighted. Nevertheless, how OD practitioners develop corporate citizenship has not been studied empirically so far.

Design/methodology/approach

A sociomaterial case study design was used. The work of six OD practitioners when developing corporate citizenship in one of the largest pharmaceutical corporations was studied over several months, based on interviews, observations and document analyses.

Findings

The findings presented offer model practices of corporate citizenship development, in the form of five core strategies and five core behaviors that increase an organization’s capacity to practice corporate citizenship.

Research limitations/implications

With this study, the notion of corporate citizenship development has become established as a distinct research area. The study might encourage further research in this important niche area.

Practical implications

The findings have direct practical implications for at least seven different stakeholder groups.

Originality/value

The findings shed new light on both the epistemological and practical foundations of the concept of corporate citizenship, and hint to a new role of the fields of OD and human resource development in the twenty-first century.

Details

European Journal of Training and Development, vol. 38 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2046-9012

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 2 April 2019

Tove Lafton and Anne Furu

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how kindergarten, as a learning arena equal to a university college, creates learning spaces that engage or intervene in the professional…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how kindergarten, as a learning arena equal to a university college, creates learning spaces that engage or intervene in the professional learning of student teachers in early childhood education.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is based on narratives from students in work-based education.

Findings

The paper addresses the complexity of education by outlining how the concept of learning is applied in earlier research on work-based learning (WBL).

Research limitations/implications

This earlier understanding is complemented this with two theoretical lenses (sociocultural and sociomaterial thinking) to analyse a constructed narrative from the students.

Originality/value

The two theoretical positions open up to examine knowledge development and potentially enrich the picture of learning spaces in experiential WBL, going beyond the student as an individual learner.

Details

Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning, vol. 9 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2042-3896

Keywords

Open Access
Book part
Publication date: 1 May 2019

Henrik Buhl, Michael Andersen and Hannele Kerosuo

The construction industry is one of the least automated industries. In the aspect of automation, the technical understanding is very dominant. Focus has mostly been on tools…

Abstract

Purpose

The construction industry is one of the least automated industries. In the aspect of automation, the technical understanding is very dominant. Focus has mostly been on tools, robots and industrialisation. sociomaterial design shows us that what may first appear technologically deterministic can be replaced and actually call for reinvisioning the traditional focus. The purpose of this study is to introduce the agency of a sociomaterial designer in construction.

Design/Methodology/Approach

This is a conceptual paper with an empirical example. To understand the sociomaterial complexity and dynamics of automation, practice theories are applied. To test this approach, the authors give an example from a Danish (global) supplier engaged in a development project about technical aid (tools) in mounting and assembling gypsum walls.

Findings

The sociomaterial-designer can help to understand and make innovation happen when doing automation in construction; as the centre of innovation in construction processes, she works all day with practice, together with practitioners, focusing on material arrangements as located not only in practice, but also in the artefacts. She can help the supplier of construction materials in understanding different professional practices and the transformation to use smarter tools.

Research Limitations/Implications

This research is within a new practice domain “sociomaterial-design” and it has to follow up with an empirical study that covers a development project with a sociomaterial-design approach.

Practical Implications

Developing competences (agency) as a sociomaterial-designer when linking the sociotechnical understanding of Automation with practice.

Originality/Value

This research showcases how sociomaterial perspectives can inform automation in construction.

Details

10th Nordic Conference on Construction Economics and Organization
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83867-051-1

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 20 June 2016

Deniz Tunçalp

The author join Orlikowski (2007) in seeking the “reconfiguration of our conventional assumptions and considerations of materiality.” In her sociomaterial approach, Orlikowski…

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Abstract

Purpose

The author join Orlikowski (2007) in seeking the “reconfiguration of our conventional assumptions and considerations of materiality.” In her sociomaterial approach, Orlikowski combines what is social and what is material into a “sociomaterial assemblage” in considering material and social aspects of technology. However, the author thinks this conflation creates a number of analytical and phenomenological problems for the understanding of technology in organizing. Rather than considering materiality with a primacy, the author argue that the proposed approach may reduce what is material into a social essence and makes materiality of a technology impossible to perceive separate from the social aspects. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

Empirical examples of “Information Search” and “Mobile Communication” in Orlikowski (2007) are further employed to discuss the grounds of the criticism.

Findings

The author propose a critical realist perspective to technology both as social and material recursively.

Research limitations/implications

The analysis is primarily ontological and meta-theoretical. In future, extensive reviews can be performed on what questions have been asked and what questions have been omitted by researchers employing different versions of sociomaterial perspective.

Practical implications

The perspective offered by this paper enables asking new questions and necessary empirical leverage to analyze how one technology becomes materialized and successful in the social realm and not the other. The author also discusses strategic conditions of how one successful technology can be replaced by another.

Social implications

Understanding the state of the art in theory in understanding material and social aspects of technology would help us develop novel strategies to contest, complement and adapt to material and social issues of technologies.

Originality/value

This paper is among the few critical papers that meta-theoretically question the relatively recent sociomaterial turn in organization studies and information systems fields.

Details

Management Decision, vol. 54 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0025-1747

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 27 January 2023

Fernando Pinto, Marie Anne Macadar and Gabriela Viale Pereira

This research was conducted to understand how vulnerable communities used social media (SM) tools to face the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Affected by the lack of information…

Abstract

Purpose

This research was conducted to understand how vulnerable communities used social media (SM) tools to face the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Affected by the lack of information and the absence of effective public policies, residents from slums in the city of Rio de Janeiro displayed new and unexpected uses to SM tools to tackle the health and socio-economic impacts of the pandemic.

Design/methodology/approach

The research methodology consisted of a qualitative, exploratory study, combining a series of in-depth interviews with the analysis of various posts, containing videos and texts, extracted from SM during the first six months of the pandemic. The data were collected in the context of 10 different communities in Rio de Janeiro city.

Findings

In the context of the pandemic, people combined different uses of SM not only to inform themselves and communicate with others but also to articulate and execute fundraising and food donation strategies within vulnerable communities. Accordingly, this SM use is characterized by improvisation, learning by doing and building resilience, which are all constructs related to the concept of bricolage. Users had no specific SM knowledge, and adjusted these technological tools to emergent new activities in practice, which is characteristic of sociomaterial process. In addition to emphasizing the importance of context for the emergence of the phenomenon, this work also highlights reliability, validity and authority as characteristics related to the citizen-led participation approach that was observed.

Research limitations/implications

Future research can develop approaches based on pandemic sociomaterial bricolage (PSB) aspects, which could guide governments and practitioners on building innovative solutions for the use of SM by the population, especially in emergency situations.

Originality/value

This study proposes a framework, termed PSB, to represent SM usage promoted by the pandemic context, which emerged from the triangulation of empirical data and an analysis based on the concepts of bricolage and sociomateriality.

Details

Information Technology & People, vol. 37 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0959-3845

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 29 March 2024

Njod Aljabr, Dimitra Petrakaki and Petros Chamakiotis

Existing research on how professionals manage after-hours connectivity to work has been dominated by studies on the strategies/practices individuals develop. In these studies…

Abstract

Purpose

Existing research on how professionals manage after-hours connectivity to work has been dominated by studies on the strategies/practices individuals develop. In these studies, mobile technology is perceived as a tool or an enabler that supports otherwise human-centric connectivity decisions. This view sees technology as separate or external to the organisation, missing out on its nuanced role in shaping connectivity decisions. Our study aims to bring technology back into the sociomaterially imbricated context of connectivity and to unpack its parameters.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on data collected from documents and semi-structured interviews, we adopt the framework of “sociomaterial imbrications” (Leonardi, 2011) to understand the social and material parameters that influence connectivity management practices at two different academic institutions in Saudi Arabia.

Findings

The study identifies a set of social and material parameters (organisational, individual, technological and situational) that imbricate to shape, collectively and not individually, professionals’ connectivity management practices. Connectivity decisions to change practice (such as decisions of where, when or why to connect) or technology (how to connect) are not as distinct as they appear but originate from, and are founded on, imbricated sociomaterial parameters. Our study further suggests that connectivity decisions are shaped by individuals’ perceptions of sociomaterial imbrications, but decisions are not solely idiosyncratic. The context within which connectivity decisions are taken influences the type of decisions made.

Originality/value

Connectivity management emerged from sociomaterial imbrications within a context constitutive of four interacting parameters: organisational, technological, situational and individual. Decisions around the “how” and the “what” of connectivity – i.e. the practice of connectivity and its underpinning technology – originate from how people perceive sociomaterial imbrications as enabling or constraining within a context. Individual perceptions account for changes in practice and in technology, but the context they find themselves in is also important. For instance, we show that professionals may perceive a certain technology as affording, but eventually they may use another technology for communications due to social norms.

Details

Information Technology & People, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0959-3845

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 23 February 2010

Tara Fenwick

The purpose of this paper is to compare theoretical conceptions that reclaim and re‐think material practice – “the thing” in the social and personal mix – specifically in terms of…

3612

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to compare theoretical conceptions that reclaim and re‐think material practice – “the thing” in the social and personal mix – specifically in terms of work activity and what is construed to be learning in that activity.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper is theory‐based. Three perspectives have been selected for discussion: cultural‐historical activity theory (CHAT), actor‐network theory (ANT), and complexity theory. A comparative approach is used to examine these three conceptual framings in the context of their uptake in learning research to explore their diverse contributions and limitations on questions of agency, power, difference, and the presence of the “thing”.

Findings

The three perspectives bear some similarities in their conceptualization of knowledge and capabilities as emerging – simultaneously with identities, policies, practices and environment – in webs of interconnections between heterogeneous things, human and nonhuman. Yet each illuminates very different facets of the sociomaterial in work‐learning that can afford important understandings: about how subjectivities are produced in work, how knowledge circulates and sediments into formations of power, and how practices are configured and re‐configured. Each also signals, in different ways, what generative possibilities may exist for counter‐configurations and alternative identities in spaces and places of work.

Originality/value

While some dialogue has occurred among ANT and CHAT, this has not been developed to compare more broadly the metaphysics and approaches of these perspectives, along with complexity theory which is receiving growing attention in organizational research contexts. The paper purports to introduce the nature of these debates to work‐learning researchers and point to their implications for opening useful questions and methods for inquiry in workplace learning.

Details

Journal of Workplace Learning, vol. 22 no. 1/2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1366-5626

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 August 2017

Elizabeth Daniel, Elizabeth Hartnett and Maureen Meadows

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…

Abstract

Purpose

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.

Design/methodology/approach

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.

Findings

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.

Originality/value

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.

Details

Information Technology & People, vol. 30 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0959-3845

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 13 July 2015

Alina Dulipovici and Dragos Vieru

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…

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Abstract

Purpose

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.

Design/methodology/approach

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.

Findings

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.

Research limitations/implications

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.

Practical implications

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.

Originality/value

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

Details

Journal of Knowledge Management, vol. 19 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1367-3270

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