Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World

Abstract

The book is a collective meditation on the role of materiality in social affairs. The recent and growing interest in the concept of “materiality” certainly has diverse origins. Yet, it is closely associated with the diffusion of technological objects and artifacts through society and many have questioned how human choice and social practice are conditioned by the characteristics of such devices and systems. Many traditional technologies are easy to call “material” — they are made up of wood, steel, and other physical substrates that afford and constrain particular uses. Other technologies, such as software and rhetorical tropes, are not made up of such physical substrates, but they still have implications for human action in many of the same ways as the more traditional technologies. Thus, it is unclear how to talk about the materiality of technology in a way that includes both physical and nonphysical artifacts while still accounting for their effects. The book gathers together a group of scholars from various disciplines who approach the issues materiality raises from various angles, making evident that there is no single answer as to how the concept can be used to approach the perennial question of the ways technologies and humans bear upon one another. The book contributes to untangling the various meanings of materiality and clarifying the positions or perspectives from which they are produced.