Sociomateriality

This paper will explore two examples from the design, structure and implementation of the ‘E-learning and Digital Cultures’ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) from the University of Edinburgh in partnership with Coursera.  This five week long course (known as the EDCMOOC) was delivered twice in 2013, and is considered an atypical MOOC in its utilisation of both the Coursera platform and a range of social media and open access materials.  The combination of distributed and aggregated structure will be highlighted, examining the arrangement of course material on the Coursera platform and student responses in social media.  This paper will suggest that a dominant instrumentalist view of technology limits considerations of these systems to merely enabling or inhibiting educational aims.  The subsequent discussion will suggest that sociomaterial theory offers a valuable framework for considering how educational spaces are produced through relational practices between humans and non-humans.  An analysis of You Tube and a bespoke blog aggregator will show how the algorithmic properties of these systems perform functions that cannot be reduced to the intentionality of either the teachers using these systems, or the authors who create the software, thus constituting a complex sociomaterial educational enactment.

In recent years there has been a considerable intensification in practices of producing, analysing, visualising and utilising educational data, though we currently know little about how data practices unfold in the everyday life of schools. This thesis contributes a detailed analysis of the production and performance of educational data practices in one English secondary school and explores how they worked to reconfigure the possibilities for thinking and doing education. In this study I adopted an ethnographic perspective, using aspects of a sociomaterial agential realist approach to understand how material-discursive data practices surrounding pupil performance within a single school produced and constrained ‘education’.

This thesis argues that the thinking and doing of education was being reconfigured through data practices in three ways. First, the curriculum was reconfigured as assessment through algorithmic triage devices that created differential access to some subjects for different groups of students. As a result, the English curriculum was re-organised around a set of disaggregated, content-free skills orientated towards the demands of intensified data practices. Second, teachers’ professional knowledge and judgement were being systematically excluded to produce data as a more ‘objective’ and legitimate way of knowing, and their professionalism re-orientated towards an engagement with data. Third, data practices focused student and staff attention towards pupils’ futures. This, rather than their present, was what mattered most to the school. Three different, incompatible orientations towards data futures were produced: normative, predictive and probabilistic, catching teachers and pupils in the impossibility of reconciling them. Data practices in the school appeared to be a totalising machine, producing education as a cybernetic system that excluded everything outside it from mattering. Yet there were also moments where the production and effects of data practices were interrupted, destabilised and contradictory, suggesting potential openings for constituting education differently.

A perspectiva sociomaterial visa expor, por meio da observação de micropráticas, o que as coisas “fazem” e como elas materializam ações coreografadas que compõem a dança de relações entre sujeitos humanos e objetos não-humanos. Partindo dessa perspectiva, este trabalho investiga a materialidade utilizando o ambiente universitário para explorar as tendências de produção e de consumo de tecnologias, os efeitos concretos de sua presença e as oportunidades desiguais por elas geradas. Apresenta uma investigação empírica em um ambiente educacional durante a pandemia do Covid-19, baseada em evidências a partir de uma aula de pós-graduação ministrada remotamente no Brasil no primeiro semestre de 2020.

In this paper a socio-material perspective on education is proposed that takes the local practices of teachers and learners seriously while still accounting for practices that extend beyond the here and now of a given situation. Through this transsituative shift education is not understood as being confined to local sites of instruction but understood as a nexus of practices conducted at various sites connected to each other via material objects and other material entities. This also reconciles ethnographic research with the institutional dimension of education and allows a micro-sociological account of wider societal implications of education. Throughout the article examples from ethnographic research on the epistemic role of material objects in science and mathematics classes in German secondary schools are used.

Information technology (IT) and space are sociomaterial dimensions of organizations that Human Resource Management (HRM) often take for granted, discounting how workers enact them in practice. With digital technologies rapidly changing the spaces of work, this paper proposes a framework for HRM to appreciate the role of the lived, affective experience of ITenabled (physical and virtual) hybrid workspaces. We integrate the information systems (IS) literature on sociomaterial practices and insights on organizational space to suggest implications for HRM practice and pathways for future research on how virtual and physical spaces are related and lived in the emergence of new hybrid workplaces and practices.

A posthumanist practice theory – which grants equal status to humans and non-humans – provides the context for a discussion of the concept of sociomaterial practices. The constitutive entanglement of the social and the material within a practice is illustrated in three different contexts. I start by focusing on the sociomateriality of bodies in the social practice of fathering. I then consider a working practice and its technological change in the case of artificial nutrition. In the last case, I discuss the disruption of social practices that Hurricane Katrina brought about and how it made visible the interconnection between past and present practices. In all the three cases, the materialities of bodies, technologies, discourses could not be separated from the society that formed them, and vice versa the social cannot be considered external or separate from materialities.

The concept conduct of everyday life has lately been discussed with regards to how children are engaged with participating in the manifold practices that constitute their daily living. They coordinate their actions with others (adults and children) in order to increasingly influence the conditions they experience in the various contexts they move through. Using the concept of children’s conduct of everyday life calls for analyzing children’s actions across contexts and in relation to others as well as the material arrangements at hand. Based on empirical material drawn from participant observation, the article shows how the concept is fruitful for investigating how kindergarten children use media technologies for conducting their everyday lives in the mutually shared kindergarten practice. Finally, it argues that the concept needs to be expanded in order to comprehensively grasp the intersubjective and material mediatedness of an everyday life with media technologies.

We are used to considering human agency as the most important aspect of the educational process. Materials and objects tend to be ignored or dismissed as agents. Technologies, as well, have been considered as inert matter, subordinated to human intention and design, as if they did not have a role in the eclectic combination of teaching, learning, and knowing about the world. Their agency is invisible until a breakdown occurs, a material moment which shows their doing. In this paper, we make digital action visible by focusing on emergency remote teaching in higher education during the Covid-19 pandemic breakdown. Data were collected/co-created in a graduate course in Education in the first three months of lockdown in Brazil. Through a queer assemblage of teaching-researching-writing, we present a sociomaterial analysis that shows multiple entanglements of bodies, material things, and pedagogic time-spaces. In this exercise, social inequality issues, power structures and ethical problems come to the surface, while students struggle for quality participation in the digitised classes.

The focus on children’s voices and experiences has been a substantial part of childhood studies. Research with children is closely linked to the idea of children as agents rather than seeing them as passive objects. In this article the authors examine how video ethnography, and the video camera in particular, in an Early Childhood Education and Care (ecec) facility is an actor that actively co-produces agency. The authors explore how agency is distributed in assemblages consisting of children, the researcher and the video camera. The authors argue that approaching agency as manifold and as distributed is helpful in a critical discussion of children and agency and point to the need to study agency as entangled with human and non-human actors in relational activities. Far from being a tool to represent the real world as it is, or merely a tool for “collecting” data, the video camera and the children are mutually constructed.

This thesis examines organizational use of social media. It focuses on developing an understanding of the ways by which social media are used within formal organizational settings. From the vantage point of this thesis such an understanding can be achieved by looking at tensions and incompatibilities that might potentially exist between social media and organization because of their distinct characteristics. It is argued that the distinct characteristics of social media (e.g. openness, transparency, flexibility, etc.) and organization (e.g., hierarchy, formal relationships, standard procedures, etc.) may engender tensions and incompatibilities that affect the ways of using social media and their potential in organizations. The main premise here is that the possibilities, behaviors, and practices afforded by social media are recognizably different in nature from common and established organizational practices, behaviors, norms, and routines.
Through a structurational understanding of organizational use of social media, influenced by Giddens’ theory of structuration and Orlikowski’s practice lens for studying technology use, this thesis offers the perspective of immiscibility to capture tensions and incompatibilities driven by the distinctive characteristics of social media and organization. It basically offers a way of seeing social media use in organizations as a dynamic, in- practice interplay between social media and organization characteristics. One key argument in this thesis is that the immiscible interplay of social media and organization, produces, at least in transition, ‘a bureaucracy of social media’. Social media, it is argued, are used in ways that are essentially bureaucratic, reflecting and also reinforcing established characteristics of formal organizations through the production and reproduction of structures which are driven by the immiscible interplay.
The development of such an understanding was achieved through multiple research studies focusing on the use of the wiki technology for knowledge collaboration and sharing in two large, multinational organizations: CCC and IBM. A number of qualitative methods were used in these studies to collect empirical evidence from the two organizations including interviews, field visits, observations, and document analysis. The overarching contribution of this thesis centers on offering a unique way of understanding organizational use of social media by putting forward tensions and incompatibilities between social media and organization and also by providing an understanding of how such tensions and incompatibilities affect the potential for change by social media.

Meaningful and relevant design of humanitarian technology must be informed by a deeper understanding of information practices found within successful humanitarian fieldwork. Existing largely in geographic isolation and through implicit expertise, these practices have yet to be adequately articulated. This research reveals hidden practices of peer-identified, successful International Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement (RCRC) practitioners in order to inform more effective design of humanitarian information and communication technology (ICT). The results draw from the qualitative analysis of 116 practitioner interviews and ethnographic observations across six countries and multiple contexts. From their stories of success and failure, I distill a grounded theory of information practices for successful outcomes within humanitarian resilience work. This paper presents a theoretical framework for depicting relevant information needs of field-level practitioners, and how that information is accessed and applied within a "Wheel of Successful Practice." The outer wheel depicts (1) community trust, (2) community organization, (3) community agency, and (4) long-term impact as four, high-level, information essentials practitioners' identified they "Must-Have" for success. The inner wheels consist of 11 Success Factors and 30 Information-Driven Behaviors repeated across contexts for achieving those Must-Haves. These results uniquely identify (1) social agency as the place where critical information resides, and (2) community discourse and community-practitioner interactions for how that critical information is revealed. Thus, the Wheel of Successful Practice identifies that information needs reside within social interactions. My findings challenge technology developers and designers-in alignment with emerging trends in human-centered design and engineering-to innovate for greater participatory and sociomaterial methodologies to account for the exigencies of humanitarian values within the design humanitarian ICT.

Linguistic theory has failed to reconcile the social and the psychobiological sides of language. The search for evidence has been oriented either towards the individual psyche or towards social invari-ances. The paper addresses this predicament from the tenet that the two sides are from the outset inextricably related – any deliberation of either side in ignorance of the other can produce at best an inconclusive theory of language. As a point of departure, the paper takes the Marxian concepts of praxis and dialectics, which assert that the individual and the social are inevitably interweaved, and mutually constituting each other. A conceptual foundation, comprised of an array of conceptual components, is proposed for articulating praxis and dialectics. Based on this foundation, implications for Marxist theory and philosophy of language are explored. For Marxism, the categories of 'the labour process', 'ob-jectivation', 'objectification', 'alienation', and 'reification' are discussed; all which have implications for the philosophy of language. For linguistics, the main implications are a reconceptualization of the 'first-and second order' constructs of language, and an elaboration of the Integrationism theory of communication. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the proposed approach may open up an alternative way of reconciling the two sides of language.

While recent theoretical debates have foregrounded sociomaterial studies and the interpenetration between the social and the material, practice-based studies have neglected, if not omitted, the place of affect and ideology in work practice. The use of the notion of materiality causes a conflation of different ontological claims, and a conceptual clarification is needed to grasp the polysemy of materiality. This paper provides some key notions for those interested in addressing the materiality of the affective register at work. By drawing on authors such as Lacan, Althusser, Butler and the Essex Lacanian School, this paper suggests that much is to be gained by addressing two difficult but crucial notions: the materiality of the signifier and ideological fantasy.

Social coordination and affordance perception always take part in concrete situations in real life. Nonetheless, the different fields of ecological psychology studying these phenomena do not seem to make this situated nature an object of study. To integrate both fields and extend the reach of the ecological approach, we introduce the Skilled Intentionality Framework that situates both social coordination and affordance perception within the human form of life and its rich landscape of affordances. We argue that in the human form of life the social and the material are intertwined and best understood as sociomateriality. Taking the form of life as our starting point foregrounds sociomateriality in each perspective we take on engaging with affordances. Using ethnographical examples we show how sociomateriality shows up from three different perspectives we take on affordances in a real-life situation. One perspective shows us a landscape of affordances that the sociomaterial environment offers. Zooming in on this landscape to the perspective of a local observer, we can focus on an individual coordinating with affordances offered by things and other people situated in this landscape. Finally, viewed from within this unfolding activity, we arrive at the person's lived perspective: a field of relevant affordances solicits activity. The Skilled Intentionality Framework offers a way of integrating social coordination and affordance theory by drawing attention to these complementary perspectives. We end by showing a real-life example from the practice of architecture that suggests how this situated view that foregrounds sociomateriality can extend the scope of ecological psychology to forms of so-called " higher " cognition.

Employing sociomateriality, communicative constitution of organization (CCO), critical discourse analysis (CDA), performativity, and ritual, this article offers a discursive explanation of the economy: that discourse organizes the economy. This process-oriented and relational explanation proposes discourse as an entry point for understanding and perhaps foreclosing financial crisis and austerity. An instance of ritual use in a US city's council meetings about municipalizing a power utility (turning the privately owned energy utility into a city-owned energy utility) is analyzed with CDA, revealing how ritual positioned the city council and the economic model in relation to grant economic models agency in shaping decision-making and producing economic effects. A blending of CCO literatures with literature on ritual is recommended, illustrating the striking similarity between the CCO concept of authoritative text and ritual, and suggesting that perhaps rituals are authoritative texts.

Published in 2015 by Critical Discourse Studies Journal.

Szabo, A. (2016). Organizing the (Sociomaterial) Economy: Ritual, agency, and economic models. Critical Discourse Studies, 13(1), 118-136.

Das gesellschaftliche Unbehagen an der Digitalisierung liest sich wie ein Re-Enactment der Bürokratiekritik des 19. Jahrhunderts. Dies ist keine beruhigende Nachricht, denn die historischen Parallelen von Bürokratie- und Digitalisierungskritik zeigen eine verzerrte Sichtweise, die das Digitale angstvoll romantisiert.

A perspectiva sociomaterial visa expor, por meio da observação de micropráticas, o que as coisas “fazem” e como elas materializam ações coreografadas que compõem a dança de relações entre sujeitos humanos e objetos não-humanos. Partindo dessa perspectiva, este trabalho investiga a materialidade utilizando o ambiente universitário para explorar as tendências de produção e de consumo de tecnologias, os efeitos concretos de sua presença e as oportunidades desiguais por elas geradas. Apresenta uma investigação empírica em um ambiente educacional durante a pandemia do Covid-19, baseada em evidências a partir de uma aula de pós-graduação ministrada remotamente no Brasil no primeiro semestre de 2020.

Niemimaa (2016) argues that agential realism (Barad 2003) represents a radical form of sociomaterialit y (Cec ez-Kecmanovic et al. 2014a; Orlik owsk i and Scott 2008) and that critical realism (Bhask ar 1979; Bhask ar 1997) represents a conservative form of sociomateriality and attempts to bring to the foreground the differences in the approaches so as to avoid inappropriate " theoretical mélanges. " This response argues that critical realism is not properly part of the sociomaterial stream of research as it violat es the five basic notions of sociomaterialit y (Jones 2014). It further suggests that given the criticisms of Mutch (2013) and Leonardi (2013) as confirmed by Scott and Orlik owsk i (2013) of Agential Realism represent significant issues that compromise the usefulness of agential realism for IS research. Nevertheless, it is important that whatever paradigm is chosen, it is important to use it faithfully to its meta-theoretical commitments.

Most studies on AC (absorptive capacity) are based on assumptions that are characteristic of viewing knowledge from an epistemology of possession (knowledge is possessed by individuals and is transferrable). However, the literature on managing knowledge (or better knowledge work) acknowledges also an epistemology of practice (knowledge is unpredictable and dynamic and constituted in and through practice). Moreover, the literature on AC is relatively silent on the relationship between knowledge and power. In this paper we argue that the AC construct should be interpreted in light of the possession and the practice perspectives of knowledge and power. Our analysis includes a systematic literature review of AC that supports our claims and based on this we suggest an interpretation of the construct that takes into account knowledge-power relationships. Our review and theorizing contribute to a richer and processual view of AC.

In order to extend its scope, depth and effectiveness, critique should shift from its reliance on humanistic assumptions and be reconceptualised as a sociomaterial practice through which realities are enacted differently as multiple and tensional. This kind of critique counters the ways regimes of power are materially entrenched. This article explores such an alternative conception of critique by drawing on Butler’s notion of performativity, the agential realism of Barad and the ontological politics of Mol. It explores the particular ways in which actor-network theory could be understood as a resource of critique. Because of its central role in the enactment of reality, Education is an important field within which critique is developed further in relation to ontological and epistemological assumptions behind different learning spaces and the incoherences and tensions of different ontics.

The report begins by defining terms and theoretical definitions of sociomateriality. Then deep dives into a review of current literature spanning across 45 academic journal articles discussing three central concepts: 1. sociomateriality as a theoretical lens to study online communities 2. connectivity as a core concept in online communities 3. constitutive entanglement as a form of connectivity The literature review explores how connectivity can be utilised to further IS literature research by exploring the theme of connectivity to capture common attributes each community shares to foster interactions through a process defined by sociomaterialists as continuous assemblage.

This paper contributes to an emerging discourse on the meaning of technology in today’s networked society by exploring connectivity as a hallmark of the networked society. Based on an empirical study of professionals, arguably the forerunners of the networked society, the paper seeks to answer how connectivity matters. Rich narratives from in-depth interviews reveal the diverse ways materiality of connectivity is experienced and performed in the work practices and private lives of professionals. These findings challenge existing conceptual treatments of connectivity as a technical, social, or socio-technical phenomenon, and offer empirical grounding for a novel theoretical view of connectivity. The proposed sociomaterial theoretical framework identifies four different modes of connectivity that explain how connectivity matters to individuals: as materially experienced and enacted in specific sociomaterial practices. As a novel and refined view of connectivity the sociomaterial frame...

The rise of online education has prompted Universities to think about the flexibility of their provision. Within such discussions, spaces such as campuses are frequently framed as problems to be overcome, and technology as the solution. However, sociomaterial analyses of teaching and learning show how important campuses, classrooms, libraries and so on remain for students. Even so, most students will spend considerable amounts of time away from such spaces during their studies. This is especially true for doctoral students, who have a relatively individual experience rather than spending most of their time in a cohort. Indeed, some doctoral students identify as distance learners in spite of being classified as full-time and on-campus by their institution. The question then arises, what kinds of infrastructure should an institution provide to support this kind of distributed experience? What kind of resources and experiences can be offered to doctoral students, and how can they be supported in building a coherent experience through this?

In this talk, we will review previous work that provides a sociomaterial account of study practices. Focusing on one institution, we will describe the complexity of students’ patterns of study, and then describe an online programme designed to support them as they work towards their doctorates. Lessons learned from the first two years of the programme will be presented and discussed.

This article presents a study of what affects professional knowledge creation when journalism students have their periods of internship in legacy, yet highly digitized newsrooms. 16 Norwegian j-students are interviewed and 30 internship reports analysed in order to analyse the different actors – both humans and non-humans – that matter when students learn through practice in such newsrooms. Through this analysis, the paper aims at understanding some of the tensions between legacy and digital culture that many newsrooms today are marked by, and how these tensions affect professional knowledge creations for the journalists of tomorrow. The study is framed by sociomaterial perspectives on learning and journalistic practice, and argues that two types of materiality are especially important for j-students' professional knowledge creation during periods of internship: The structure and lay out of the newsroom and the software applications in use at the newsroom.