Sub-theme 54: Rethinking the Social, Technical and Material Foundations of Organizations
Call for Papers
Organizations are social entities and research on organizations has justifiably focused on the study of social phenomena.
Yet, the field has been keenly aware of the bonds tying social action to various embodiments and objectifications. The idea
that organizations are variously entangled with the technologies and the material world in ways other than trivial recurs
in the history of the field. There currently are good reasons to revisit the role that technology and objects more generally
play in shaping work processes and organizational structures. Many contemporary digital technologies are flexible and scalable,
and for these reasons pervasive. They recast people’s skill profiles and permeate the boundaries of organizations, destroy
or construct links between work groups, functional units or hierarchical layers. They are also involved in shaping the environment
of organizations as social networks evidently show. Not by accident, many of these technologies are labelled social technologies
to signal the primarily communicative role they assume in social relations.
Placed against this backdrop,
organizational theorizing needs to readdress the shifting boundaries between the technical, the social and the material and
rethink the foundations of organizations. However, such venture stumbles upon a number of difficult conceptual and empirical
issues. Organizational theorizing does not seem to have at its disposal an adequate conceptual elaboration of the issues which
the massive involvement of digital technology in human affairs occasions. This has often led to the empirical investigation
of technologies without paying due attention to the complex and often time-ridden developments through which they shape skills,
organizational processes and outcomes. While empirical work should remain open to the contingent nature of social life, non-reflexive
empirical research runs the risk of losing sight of the less conspicuous aspects of technologies that do not manifest in
situ.
These observations acquire particular importance by the fact that the operations the software embodies
are logical instructions rather than embodiments of techniques for acting on the material world. Current recognition of critical
linkages between the social and the technological manifest in evocative words such as "co-constitutive" and "entangled". However,
more is needed. One could distinguish, for instance, between "non-material technological objects" and their corresponding
"bearers" – that is, objects such as computers which constitute a substrate for objects such as software. This crucial distinction
allows us to overcome confusions about the material or immaterial nature of digital technologies (recognizing that they are
both, each aspect with unique properties), and to avoid conflating organizational routines, procedures, and everything that
makes up habitus (in Bourdieu's terminology) with technology. A person who knows and can enact routines does not resolve to
a cached set of invariant, reliable logical instructions contained within a bearer. Many differences are apparent such as
the person's holistic, embodied enactment of routines, the possibility for imaginative reconstruction or even abandonment
of routines, and the impossibility to propagate enacted routines across innumerable points in a network as the outcome of
the logical and immaterial constitution of software.
We invite contributions to one or more of the following
issues:
- Theorizing the technical, the social and the material and the ways they implicate or differ from one another
- Empirically investigating how digital technologies redraw the boundaries between the social, the technical and the material and shape particular aspects of organizational life
- Theorizing and investigating the relationship between routines and technologies
- Accounting for the distinctive implications particular social technologies have for organizations
- Recasting technologies not as phenomena that occur within organizations, but as fundamental properties of organizing