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Advances in material agency driven by artificial intelligence (AI) have facilitated breakthroughs in material adaptivity enabling smart objects to autonomously provide individualized smart services, which makes smart objects act as social actors embedded in the real world. However, little is known about how material adaptivity fosters the infusion use of smart objects to maximize the value of smart services in customers' lives. This study examines the underlying mechanism of material adaptivity (task and social adaptivity) on AI infusion use, drawing on the theoretical lens of social embeddedness.

This study adopted partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), mediating tests, path comparison tests and polynomial modeling to analyze the proposed research model and hypotheses.

The results supported the proposed research model and hypotheses, except for the hypothesis of the comparative effects on infusion use. Besides, the results of mediating tests suggested the different roles of social embeddedness in the impacts of task and social adaptivity on infusion use. The post hoc analysis based on polynomial modeling provided a possible explanation for the unsupported hypothesis, suggesting the nonlinear differences in the underlying influencing mechanisms of instrumental and relational embeddedness on infusion use.

The formation mechanisms of AI infusion use based on material adaptivity and social embeddedness help to develop the business strategies that enable smart objects as social actors to exert a key role in users' daily lives, in turn realizing the social and economic value of AI.

This study advances the theoretical research on material adaptivity, updates the information system (IS) research on infusion use and identifies the bridging role of social embeddedness of smart objects as agentic social actors in the AI context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the processes whereby organisational actors can seize the opportunities opened up through social media, and the way in which the relative information is managed. This allows these actors to move their occupational boundaries, exploiting the information for performance measurement purposes. The investigation was carried out within an organisational setting, where most occupational dynamics take place. The focus was on the role of artefacts within these occupational dynamics and the analysis drew upon the notion of boundary objects.

The research was based on case studies involving two organisations that make use of social media within and across several departments. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with social media managers, department managers, analysts and financial controllers and senior executives. The results of the qualitative analysis of the interviews were completed with secondary sources of information, company reports, communications, public policies, codes of conduct and social media platform analyses.

This paper has implications for accounting studies, showing how marketing and communications managers entering the field of performance management can take the lead in social media management by collecting information from social media, constructing indicators and gaining ground in several decision-making centres. The findings highlight the role of new artefacts and organisational roles, whose purpose is to build a digital community. This process involves crossing the boundaries between internal functions and the inside and outside environment, with a driving phenomenon becoming visible: hybridisation. Faced with this change, reluctant accountants with a traditional mindset are more likely to observe the process at a distance, focusing more on their routine operations based on conventional data.

This paper shows that information derived from social media is already a reality that has gained significance through the construction of boundary objects. The paper highlights a driving phenomenon that is emerging in the surge to occupy the organisational terrain for controlling social media: that of hybridisation. The concept of hybridisation is not new in management accounting studies, but in this study can be applied to carrying out a joint analysis on both the boundary objects and their organisational trajectory. In the context of social media accounting, hybridisation is of central importance if both actors and objects are to be effectively positioned at its boundary.

By engaging with recent debates between management historians over social constructionism, this paper aims to show the merits of adopting a new realist ontology of the business enterprise. In contrast with ANTi-History, the purpose is to provide a philosophically rigorous conception of social objects and to argue that enterprises are a member of this category.

Insights from Maurizio Ferraris’s documentality theory and Graham Harman’s philosophy of social objects are used to identify the ontological forming ground and developmental pathway of an Antipodean stevedoring company that operated prior to the deregulation of New Zealand’s ports in 1989.

With regard to social entities in general and firms in particular, continental philosophy’s resurgent realist movement provides a history-aware social ontology that incorporates the grain of truth lying within social constructionism. As exemplified by the writings of Ferraris and Harman, realism provides a viable conception of social objects and, in so doing, a more coherent ontological foundation for the business enterprise than the relational ontology embraced by management history ANTians.

By drawing on two realist perspectives hitherto neglected by management historians, this paper resolves disagreements about the ontology of the business enterprise.

This paper re-examines the ontology of documents, especially digital ones, in the context of preservation, which presumes the actual existence of things. It also explores which aspects of documents are retained or lost over the course of time.

This study detangles the complexities of existential dependence relations of documents, by selectively reviewing literature on digital preservation, document theory, John Searle's social ontology, Maurizio Ferraris' documentality, and Amie Thomasson's categorial ontology.

The author argues that (1) existing objects can be documents, insofar as perceivers regard them as such; (2) documents are social objects as they depend on other objects, including creators, perceivers, and other documents; and (3) preserving digital documents entails the curation of dependence relations since they inherently have technologically dependent relations.

A clarification of the existential dependence relations of documents can aid documentary heritage institutions in determining preservation goals and strategies. Future research must address how, and to what extent, such dependence relations can be curated.

This paper clarifies that the preservation of documents entails the curation of dependence relations, and the critical issue in preservation is how to best preserve the dependence relations of documents, especially since digital documents available on the Internet inherently have technological and dynamic dependence relations.

In this paper, the attitude of general sociology towards nature and objects is criticized. Usually, the social is so defined that it excludes objects, “things” in general. But this limiting definition of the social has led to a proliferation of the concept of “society”, which excludes first of all certain people – those not a part of a conscience collective – and second, it excludes objects from the social and thus from the realm of study of the social sciences. Yet objects, it is maintained here, have a very constitutive impact on social life. In order to clarify this, the paper aims to show two things: that there is a vocabulary with the help of which humans and non‐humans can be sociologically described in a similar way; that objects cannot be sociologically explained away in the way a “radical” social constructivism would do.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how social representation theory (SRT) can be used to understand the concept of resistance to change. SRT is a growing theory in social psychology research. SRT is about how individuals co-construct representations of various objects in different social settings. These social representations govern the attitudes and actions of individuals and groups. In spite of the growing interest in SRT in various fields, no studies have used SRT to understand resistance to organizational change.

This study reviews the relevant literature on resistance to change and SRT to develop a conceptual framework for understanding resistance from the standpoint of SRT.

The authors develop a model that illustrates how three interrelated objects, i.e. the organizational process and the pre-and post-change situation, are co-constructed in social contexts. Also, the authors discuss how representations of these objects can co-exist (cognitive polyphasia). Our study illustrates the complexity of resistance to change by deconstructing the concept.

Application of SRT to analyze resistance to organizational change is a novel approach that provides several new insights. For example, where most publications regard advocates of change as sense-givers in the change recipient’s sense-making process, the authors argue for a more constructionist approach. Thus, all actors involved in the change process will affect each other and together co-construct the social representations. These social representations govern attitudes to change.

The purpose of this study is to operationalise and measure the effects of negative customer engagement (CE) in conjunction with positive CE. Both valences are explored through affective, cognitive and behaviour dimensions, and, in relation to the antecedent of involvement and outcome of word-of-mouth (WOM). It also explores the moderating influence of service context by examining engagement within a social service versus a social networking site (SNS). Engagement with the dual focal objects of a service brand and a service community are also examined.

Structural equation modelling is used to analyse 625 survey responses.

Involvement is a strong driver of positive CE, and positive CE has a strong effect on WOM. These findings are consistent across the “brand” and “community” object, suggesting positive CE is mutually reinforced by different objects in a relationship. Positive CE is also found to operate consistently across the service types. Involvement is a moderately negative driver of negative CE, and negative CE is a positive driver of WOM. These relationships operate differently across the objects and service types. Involvement has a stronger inverse effect on negative CE for the social service, diverging from assumptions that negative CE is reflective of highly involved customers. Interestingly, negative CE has a stronger effect on WOM in the social service, highlighting the active and vocal nature of customers within this service context.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to quantitatively measure positive and negative valences of engagement concurrently, and examine the moderating effect of dual objects across contrasting service types.

This article aims to explore how objects function in integration efforts in health and social care contexts.

The article draws on boundary object theory and empirical data collected from a range of health and social care integration initiatives in Wales to illustrate the value of the focus on objects and to identify the potential implications of this approach for studies in other national contexts.

Attention to objects can shed light on the dynamics of integration, its potential and limits, offering insights that conventional analysis might otherwise miss.

The data drawn on in this paper are illustrative. Exploring the role of objects in integration requires more focused studies.

The results suggest that integration designers and managers need to pay closer attention to the attachments that practitioners develop to objects.

This is a highly original paper in view of its innovative use of boundary object theory in the context of integration, and its contribution to theory, research and practice.

This paper delineates the proprietary contest developed around a highly valued prestige item: a silver roofed tankard owned by a Romanian, Gabor Roma man.

The author applies “methodological fetishism” (Appadurai, 1986, p. 5), the perspective of things-in-motion, as well as the biographic method to interpret data collected during 31.5 months of multi-sited anthropological fieldwork carried out in the Transylvanian Gabor and Cărhar Roma groups.

As the tankard in question crossed the borders of three Transylvanian Roma groups, and thus went through the processes of de- and re-contextualization three times, it is characterized by a transethnic/transcultural biography. This paper pays special attention to the agency associated with the tankard (the social and economic practices, processes and emotions it caused or influenced), the transformations concerning its symbolic properties, and its movement between various social contexts and value regimes. Furthermore, it examines how the analysis of these issues contributes to a deeper understanding of prestige relations and consumption, morality and business ethics, and measures of success in two Transylvanian Roma groups.

This paper reveals how subjects create, manipulate, and represent their identities, and social and economic differences through the construction of commodity biographies and ownership histories interpreted as symbolic pantheons. By combining the terms of Marcus (1995) and Fowles (2006), it argues that analyses based on multi-sited fieldwork focusing on commodities crossing cultural or social boundaries, and their transnational/transcultural biographies, should be defined as multi-sited commodity ethnographies.