Ideological Materiality at Work: A Lacanian Approach
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
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Warwick Business School, Coventry, UK [email protected]
Abstract. While recent theoretical debates have foregrounded sociomaterial studies and the interpenetration between the social and the material, practicebased 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. Keywords: Materiality · Ideology
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Introduction
The key word of this conference is of course “beyond”; what is problematic is not so much the validity or obsolescence of interpretive studies in information systems (IS), but rather the difficulty of initiating new debates within the interpretive scope. Inter‐ pretivism, the research avenue which sees knowledge of reality as a social construction and states that value-free data cannot be obtained, stands in stark contrast with positivist studies, where “objective” data can be used to test a prior hypothesis (Walsham [1]). Although our field absolutely needs an interpretive label externally to define itself visà-vis positivist studies, it also requires a minimal internal flexibility to facilitate a lively debate regarding its own ontological, epistemological and methodological presupposi‐ tions. For instance, Klein and Myers [2] identify hermeneutics as the main form of interpretivism, acknowledging that postmodernism and deconstructionism are funda‐ mentally different forms. Furthermore, IS research, different from both positivist and interpretivist research, can also be classified as critical [3]. Critical research signifies research in which social critique constitutes the main task, which means bringing to light the restrictive and alienating conditions of the status quo [2]. Critical research is eman‐ cipatory [4] and assumes that people, including the researcher, can consciously act to change their social and economic conditions. In this paper I would particularly like to explore the potential of process theorizing, which means a mode of theorizing which is not merely about interpreting its object (technology in organizations), but thinks beyond its object [5], with the value of a critical © 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. 93–107, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-49733-4_6
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E. Pignot
intervention. More specifically, the aim of this paper is to reinvigorate the debate about the meaning of materiality. Shall we complement the corpus of sociomaterial studies with a suitable framework to think be
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