A Relational Approach to Materiality and Organizing: The Case of a Creative Idea
In this paper, we propose to go beyond the notion of entanglement that has been proposed in recent years to fill the so-called gap between “the social” and “the material”, especially in organizational studies. While this notion rightly invites us to recon
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Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada {thomas.martine,f.cooren}@umontreal.ca
Abstract. In this paper, we propose to go beyond the notion of entanglement that has been proposed in recent years to fill the so-called gap between “the social” and “the material”, especially in organizational studies. While this notion rightly invites us to reconsider the way we traditionally approach the question of mate‐ riality and organizing, we believe that its formulation tends to implicitly repro‐ duce the gap it claims to fill. In contrast, we propose a view according to which sociality and materiality should, in fact, be considered aspects of everything that comes to be and exist. Throughout the analysis of an episode taken from fieldwork devoted to creative teams, we show that things as abstract as ideas, for instance, in order to emerge, exist, and continue to exist, have to materialize themselves in various identifiable beings. While the sociality of an idea is identified through the various relations that make it what it is, we show that its materiality comes from what precisely materializes these relations. Keywords: Relational ontology · Aspectuality · Communication · Materiality · Organization · Sociomateriality
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Introduction
In keeping with the existent literature on sociomateriality (especially [1]), we refute the distinction between, on one side, a material world, and on the other side, a social world. However, we believe that the concept of entanglement, as proposed by Barad [2] and taken up by Orlikowski [3], unfortunately implies the idea of things – for instance, meaning and matter [2] or sociality and materiality [4] – being wrapped or twisted together, which implies that their ontological distinction is still maintained even if their entanglement indeed makes this distinction difficult to make. This language problem has been mentioned by Orlikowski herself [4], but also by Kautz and Jensen [5] as well as Cecez-Kecmanovic [6]. With the notion of aspectuality, which we propose and explain, we show that mate‐ riality and relationality (a term we prefer, as we will explain, to sociality) should, in fact, be considered aspects of everything that exists, whether we are talking about emotions, ideas, discourses, practices, institutions, computers or rocks. If this position is compat‐ ible with the relational ontology defended by Barad [2] and Orlikowski and Scott [4],
© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing AG 2016. All Rights Reserved L. Introna et al. (Eds.): IS&O 2016, IFIP AICT 489, pp. 143–166, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-49733-4_9
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we believe that it allows us to specify the nature of this ontology by clarifying what we mean by matter and what we mean by relation. Having established our position, we then examine what it implies for the CCO (Communication as Constitutive of Organization) approach [7–9] in its various forms [10], that is, the view according to which organizations and, more generally, reality its
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