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This study seeks to comprehend how sociomateriality influences the openness paradox within the context of open strategising.

We adopted a qualitative approach and developed a case study as a research method. The data included 10 semi-structured interviews, direct observation and documentary analysis, including virtual documents, collaborative platforms and communication systems.

We found that sociomateriality influences the transition between openness and closure in open strategy (OS) dimensions, namely inclusion, participation and transparency, once organisational practitioners actively build on social relationships and engage with material elements within this paradoxical context.

The primary limitation was the challenge of managing extensive data, especially tracking all meetings and interactions. Nonetheless, we aimed to provide a comprehensive view and meaningful insights from the data. Future research could employ mixed methods to achieve a more holistic understanding of the phenomenon.

By understanding the role of formalisation and legitimation played by sociomateriality during open strategising, practitioners can navigate the complexities of balancing openness and closure, fostering innovation and engagement while ensuring the legitimacy of strategising. Recognising the coexistence of exclusions in social practices enables society to comprehend this paradox and highlight the need to address it, fostering an inclusive environment and promoting balanced openness in various social contexts.

Our study contributes to the OS literature by highlighting the role of sociomateriality in shaping the openness and closure interplay. Additionally, we emphasise the importance of formalisation and legitimation practices involving materiality in the balance between openness and closure in a context where openness is deemed essential for strategic success.

This paper aims to propose a theoretical framework for workplace research based on sociomateriality. Sociomateriality is a theory to explain the effects of social practice and materiality in an organization. Workplace studies in facility management (FM) can adopt this theory to understand the complex relationships between physical work environments and human factors.

Review of sociomateriality was conducted to understand the connection to existing workplace studies in FM. This study addresses the components of the workplace through the sociomateriality perspective.

The main focuses in sociomateriality theory are materiality and social practice. For workplace concepts specifically in FM, workplaces and their components are a material agency, and work and workers are a social practice agency. By considering both materiality and sociality in workplace environments, researchers can understand office dynamics and interrelationships. Lastly, two statistical analysis methods are suggested to analyze the framework: structural equation modeling and multilevel analysis.

To understand the human–environment relationship, it is essential to consider both materiality and social practice perspectives simultaneously. The proposed framework can be a foundation to explain the complex interactions between the physical environment and human factors of workers in individual organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the theory of sociomateriality to exhibit how the social and material are entangled and (re)configured over time and in practice in a particular organization of study.

The authors conduct an ethnographic case study of the North-South metro line project in Amsterdam and use the methods of participant-observation, in-depth interviewing and a desk study.

The authors showcase the process of sociomaterial entanglement by focussing on the history and context of the project, the agency and performativity of the material and sociomaterial (re)configuration via ritual performance. The authors found the notion of performativity not only concern the enactment of boundaries between the social and material, but also the blurring of such boundaries.

Sociomateriality theory remains difficult to grasp. The implication is the need to provide new lenses to engage this theory empirically.

The authors provide a multi-layered lens for organization researchers to engage sociomateriality theory at a contextual, organizational and practice level.

Insights from a historical and contextual perspective can help practitioners to become aware of the diverse and dynamic ways in which social and material entities are entangled and (re)configured over time and in practice.

The authors provide a unique empirical account to exhibit the entanglement and (re)configuration between the social and material in a particular organization of study. This paper studies a tangible organizational setting whereas prior research in sociomateriality mainly focussed on routines in IT and IS. Finally, the authors suggest the ethnographic method to study sociomaterial entanglement from a historical and contextual perspective.

This paper aims to discuss artifacts and how they influence the performative scheme of the routine and human agency. Artifacts emerge from a heterogeneous network of technical and social elements, which implies assuming that they strongly influence the performance of a routine and the organizing.

This essay starts from an established theoretical framework to develop reflections and propose that the artifacts entangle part of organizational knowledge and that the artifact's role is structured by their enactment in performing a routine, which gives them meaning and a sense of purpose.

The propositions contribute to theoretical and empirical advances by offering new insights for analysing the role of artifacts in routine dynamics. The main arguments presented are about (i) the existence of a potential role and a performed role for artifacts, (ii) that the artifacts' role evolves from knowledge and know-how embedded in routines and their actants and (iii) that artifacts are connected through networks of routines, and they embed a vast repertoire of knowledge and expertise.

Also, it proposes a fruitful research agenda based on the main reflections. Finally, the thoughts presented open a pandora's box to reflect on the intertwining between human and artifacts, not just in organizing but also in everyday social life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Social hackathons are events designed to craft social change using technology that enables citizen empowerment or addresses societal issues by deploying data. Hackathons provide a framework for organizing to help create prototypes and business models through interaction with technology. The relevance of the sociomateriality of the emergent technology (prototype) and organizational structure raises the question if viable and impactful solutions can be developed within such frames.

This study applies an inductive research methodology based on ethnographic participant observation, interviews with participants and event organizers, and qualitative insights from surveys.

Events such as social hackathons are centered around technology and share a vision of creating opportunities for change. The materiality of prototypes may define their interaction patterns. The differentiation of the embodiment and emergent structuration of technology may be a breaking point for in-group dynamics and a barrier to social innovation. The emergent structuration of technology with a longer initial phase of problem definition and ideation within a group was found to have more potential for impactful embodiment with the technological artifact. Some cases reveal that “expert” participants who shared visions of change enabled by technology were constrained by other members.

The paper suggests an extended view on the connection of sociomateriality, organizing and social impact.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The purpose of this paper is to understand the association between the capacity to use enterprise architecture tools and the effectiveness of business model digitalization in companies.

The authors used two research strategies – survey and focus group – to analyze the relationship between maturity in using enterprise architecture (EA) and digital maturity, under the perspective of sociomateriality.

The use of EA is not a strategic competence that contributes to building sustainable competitive advantage, in the process of business model digitalization. On the other hand, top management’s determination and clarity, expressed by its sponsorship to communicating the strategy, contribute to the integration, engagement and adaptability of those involved and are responsible for higher maturity in the digitalization of business models.

The statistical treatment used does not allow understanding the causality between the variables.

It provides executives with important elements for clarifying and operationalizing digital business models.

The study operationalizes a theoretical and measurement model, through a strategy that used simultaneously a survey and a focus group, which allowed to know associations between technological capacities and maturity in digital business models.