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There is increasing interest in the use of ethnography as a qualitative research approach to explore, in depth, issues of culture in health professions education (HPE). Our specific focus in this article is incorporating the digital into ethnography. Digital technologies are pervasively and increasingly shaping the way we interact, behave, think, and communicate as health professions educators and learners. Understanding the contemporary culture(s) of HPE thus means paying attention to what goes on in digital spaces. In this paper, we critically consider some of the potential issues when the field of ethnography exists outside the space time continuum, including the need to engage with theory in research about technology and digital spaces in HPE. After a very brief review of the few HPE studies that have used digital ethnography, we scrutinize what can be gained when ethnography encompasses the digital world, particularly in relation to untangling sociomaterial aspects of HPE. We chart the shifts inherent in conducting ethnographic research within the digital landscape, specifically those related to research field, the role of the researcher and ethical issues. We then use two examples to illustrate possible HPE research questions and potential strategies for using digital ethnography to answer those questions: using digital tools in the conduct of an ethnographic study and how to conduct an ethnography of a digital space. We conclude that acknowledging the pervasiveness of technologies in the design, delivery and experiences of HPE opens up new research questions which can be addressed by embracing the digital in ethnography.

Published version of an article in the journal: International journal of information systems and project management. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.12821/ijispm020203 Open Access Organizations are increasingly implementing Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in particular. Despite the notable studies on the advantages of an EIS, many organizations are not satisfied with the benefits or advantages gained. At the same time, it is assumed that such systems with increasing innovations and technological enhancements would generate abundant business advantages, if organizations exploited these opportunities. The investigation in this work drew on the sociomateriality perspective, using imbrication notion, and focused on a telecomm case study to examine how organizations can exploit the technological possibilities of an EIS to create business benefits. The study findings suggest that business benefits can be achieved when the EIS as a technical system is interwoven with the organizational work in which both dynamically change in practice (not from the technical features of the system), when the system provides interesting and beneficial technological possibilities that attract organizations, and when the firm has the organizational capabilities to translate these possibilities into real business benefits.

This article examines how local, social and cultural knowledges were disrupted by global flows of human and non-human things in an international private Middle Eastern school. The study examined how the interplay of local and globally transient knowledges recursively influenced the sociomaterial actions of teachers in classroom learning. Critical ethnography was employed over three years using participant observation and interviews analysed from a critical orientation. The study’s findings confirm that educational global flows must not be taken as neutral and that their use is recontextualised within a local–global nexus. These findings are significant in our current global world of cultural unrest and dynamic and morphing local–national–global relations, and document social relations of learning in an early childhood context, not previously given much attention in globalisation and education research.

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...

In recent sociomaterialist, materialist and post-human theorizing which foregrounds the importance of objects and bodies, ideas of consciousness and intentionality are seen as potentially tainted e...

This article seeks to examine the neglected sociomateriality of the classroom and investigates how space, matter and human actors are entangled, interact and take part in the ‘space-producing action’. Rather than approaching the classroom as an objective collection of physical units or a stable grid, we see it as something alive, a performance which can only be understood from inside the classroom. To gain insight into the ongoing constitution of the classroom, we have written classroom biographies together with nine primary school teachers. A first analysis of these rich biographies reveals the permanent interplay of human and non-human actors and their multidimensional relationships, from a new teaching aid urging the teacher to resort to traditional classroom organisation, to the rearrangement of classroom furniture in order to implement a new working method, to the manufacturing of seats from washing powder barrels. All of this reveals the classroom as a ‘potential space’–inviting teachers to become an active part in its spatial constitution and thus allowing classroom ownership.

This paper contributes to recent discussions in the field of Participatory Design (PD) that have considered relationality, becoming, non-human and more-than-human to invent alternative, more expansive, responsible, and accountable ways of understanding and doing PD. To add to these PD discussions of sociomaterial relationality and emergence, our aim is to bring PD practices into generative dialogue with feminist new materialist praxis. For this, we consider our past and ongoing participatory research and design engagements related to collaboration with union professionals and creative research-activism with children. Drawing methodological insights from the ways in which sociomaterial relationality and becoming informed these processes, we explore how feminist new materialism can inform PD 1) when setting up participatory practices, 2) when engaging during design events, and 3) when re-thinking designer-researchers’ responsibilities and accountabilities as unfolding from multiplicitous, multiscalar engagements. We tentatively propose the notion of response-able PD to bring these insights together.

One of the key challenges in work-integrated learning (WIL) courses is how to account for learning that takes place away from campus, where the work space, daily routines and emergent actions withi...

Institutions are increasingly redesigning academic learning spaces with the aim of enhancing learning outcomes. Existing research into this phenomenon has shown promise regarding how these new spac...

In March 2020, populations were forced into home quarantine to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Universities moved the majority of their operations to homeworking, with profound implications for...

This article offers a rethinking of a fundamental area of higher education research and practice: the concept of belonging. Extending the considerable international research attending to belonging,...

This article considers how technologies actively shape the topologies of UK higher education. Using the example of lecture capture systems, we examine the relationship between learning technologies and formations of space and time. Combining theories of sociomateriality and social topology, and concepts of assemblage and relationality, we expose the entanglement of interests that influence university spaces and times. Across 3 months coinciding with the onset of COVID-19 we collected over 500 tweets that discussed lecture capture within UK higher education, leading towards 2 central arguments. First, the topology of the lecture is fluid, and, even while being radically technologised, re-spatialised and disrupted, it persists as a lecture and a central pedagogical feature of university life. Second, lecture capture is a rich site of ‘issuefication’, and viewing learning technologies as dynamic issues enables a better understanding of how their meaning, function and influence are contingent on shifting and relational assemblages of human and non-human interests. Lecture capture can be pedagogical, commercial and political, thereby resisting deterministic framings of the relationship between technologies and the temporal and spatial arrangements of higher education.

This paper explores the glitch as a generative problem which is capable of introducing unanticipated possibilities and futures into situations. We understand the glitch as a sociomaterial encounter rather than merely a technical error, and argue that it calls for (re)consideration of here-and-now possible futures through practices of response and repair. Exploring the ways that people seek to respond to glitches, we consider two case studies in which unexpected problems provoke those involved to speculate playfully and practically about new possibilities. In the first case, a malfunctioning ‘Teacherbot’ incites new challenges and pedagogical opportunities in an online learning environment. In the second, Hungarian activists creatively use infrastructural and political problems to make new spaces of protest and to press the government to respond to their concerns. Considering these empirical cases allows us to observe how playful and disruptive dispositions have worked to question the terms of possible futures in the real world, and to unsettle the seemingly given terms of power-relations. Glitches are not a panacea, but they can provide an impetus to act from within situations that are uncertain, and can therefore point to new trajectories and possible futures.

Purpose This study aims to examine the role of devices in assessing the social impact of an organization. The study examines the effects of device and analyst expertise on the contents and conclusions of the report. Design/methodology/approach Six impact reports based on the same data from the same organization were compared to each other, to the charity data and to the devices used. Specific attention is paid to the role of the device’s sociomaterial form and discursive entanglements. Findings The six reports assessed the impact differently from each other and in ways that were consistent with the devices used. The devices performatively reconfigured the charity in impact reports through a series of omissions and misrepresentations which could be traced to the discourses hardwired into the devices themselves. The devices did not simply present the same impact assessment to different audiences or for different purposes, but (mis)represented the charity in specific ways aligned with the discursive entanglements. Research limitations/implications The performativity of sociomaterial impact devices has implications for how researchers approach the study of impact measurement. Practical implications In this study, faithful adherence to an impact device led to greater omissions and misrepresentations than less expert impact assessments. Analysts should be supported to identify biases in their devices and be aware of sorts of omissions and misrepresentations that may result. Faithful adherence may not be the mark of rigorous analysis. Originality/value Performativity of impact measurement devices is explored with a unique data set.

This article engages the politics of technology as it examines how a discourse of time is framed by engineers and project principals in the course of the development of three future internet architecture projects: named data networking, eXpressive Internet Architecture, and Mobility First. This framing reveals categories of a discourse of time that include articulations of efficiency, speed, time as a technical resource, and notions of the future manifest in each project. The discursive categories fit into a time constructs model that exposes how these projects were built with regard to concepts of speed and how different notions of time are expressed as a design ideology intertwined with other ideologies. This time constructs framework represents a tool that can be used to expose the social and political values of technological development that are often hidden or are difficult to communicate in cross-disciplinary contexts.

Erik Rietveld’s lecture describes the creation of architectural works from the point of view of the architects. We are curious about architectural space as a living system: what happens once the architects have left? We introduce the space syntax notion of virtual community, and suggest that this is compatible with Rietveld’s distinction between the field and the landscape of affordances.

Life in society shows that we are made up of several elements that shape us and associate us with the world. Thus, it is necessary to study theoretical perspectives that are able to highlight the role played by a diverse range of actors, configuring themselves as an assembly of things. However, it is quite common to consider that in archival practices, humans are generally perceived in a hegemonic way, whose objects/things, documents, are always passive to the action of these humans. I bring performativity and post-qualitative research to the theoretical debate, because I understand that objects/things must also be included in the analysis of a phenomenon, as they make up the process by which a given phenomenon unfolds. Methodologically I presented post-qualitative research, based on a non-anthropocentric view, unmasking the ways in which we are rooted in humanist ideologies, post-qualitative research offers a way of being in the world that fits and can engage the tangle that the world is. I believe that non-humans can be carriers of practices and have performances, just like humans. We need to show how the things that people do, make people do things. I do not intend to place objects/things above humans, or vice versa, but between them and vice versa. These objects/things can be used by us humans, but they can also use humans and influence, change an archival social practice, which then is no longer particularly human. Społeczno-materialny aspekt praktyki archiwalnej z perspektywy badań postjakościowych Życie w społeczeństwie pokazuje, że składamy się z wielu elementów, któ­re nas kształtują i wiążą ze światem. Konieczne jest zatem badanie per­spektyw teoretycznych, które są w stanie uwypuklić rolę, jaką odgrywają różnorodne podmioty, konfigurujące się jako zbiór rzeczy. Dość powszech­nie uważa się, że w praktyce archiwalnej ludzie są zazwyczaj postrzegani w sposób hegemoniczny, a przedmioty/rzeczy, dokumenty są zawsze bier­ne wobec działań ludzi. Autorka wnosi do debaty teoretycznej performa­tywność i badania postjakościowe, stawiając tezę, że przedmioty/rzeczy muszą również zostać włączone do analizy zjawisk, gdyż są elementami składowymi procesu, w ramach którego dane zjawisko się rozwija. Od strony metodologicznej przedstawiono badania postjakościowe, oparte na nieantropocentrycznym punkcie widzenia, obrazujące sposoby, w jakich je­steśmy zakorzenieni w ideologii humanistycznej; badania postjakościowe oferują sposób bycia w świecie, który wpisuje się w skomplikowany sys­tem, jakim jest świat, i umożliwia angażowanie się w jego działanie. Autorka stwierdza, że nie-ludzie mogą być nosicielami praktyk i odgrywać role, tak samo jak ludzie. Pokazuje, w jaki sposób powstaje interakcja między ludź­mi a przemiotami, które wykonują. Nie stawia przedmiotów/rzeczy ponad ludźmi, ani odwrotnie, ale w relacji pomiędzy nimi. Przedmioty/rzeczy mogą być używane przez ludzi, ale mogą też „używać” ludzi i wpływać na archi­walną praktykę społeczną, która wówwczas nie jest wyłącznie wytworem ludzi.

Companies increasingly embrace the new types of work associated with coworking spaces. Coworking spaces started with the idea of a melting pot of open social interaction, collaboration, entrepreneurship, and innovation for freelancers, new ventures, or solo entrepreneurs. Companies may use coworking spaces to invigorate targets and further motivate and inspire their employees. Fundamental to achieving those targets is the coworking space’s interior design and architecture that incorporates emotional and social values that may benefit companies. Our sociomateriality perspective helps to analyze conditions in coworking spaces and guides suggestions on how companies revitalize by using coworking spaces. The purposeful design of the different social and work areas in coworking spaces can improve communication, collaboration, and innovation in companies.

Funder: Economic and Social Research Council; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000269, Funder: University of Cambridge, This paper engages with the notion of ‘embodied belonging’ through an ethnography of the social and material aspects of accessing mental health care in the UK. I focus on moments of access and transition in a voluntary sector organisation in London: an intercultural psychotherapy centre, serving a range of im/migrant communities. Whilst both ‘belonging’ and ‘place’ are often invoked to imply stability, I explore how material contexts of access and inclusion can paradoxically be implicated in the ongoing production of precarity—of unstable, uncertain, and vulnerable ways of being. A sociomaterial analysis of ethnographic material and visual data from two creative mapping interviews attends to material and spatial aspects of the centre and its transitory place in the urban environment. It demonstrates how these aspects of place became entangled in client experiences of access: uncertainties of waiting, ambivalence towards belonging to a particular client group, and questions around deservingness of care. This engendered an embodied and situated experience of ‘precarious belonging’. I therefore argue that precarity should be ‘placed’, both within the concept of embodied belonging, and ethnographically, within the material constraints, impermanence, and spatial politics of projects to include the excluded in UK mental health care.

This paper explores how automation efforts with the intent to control work in modern work places can unfold. Building on a longitudinal study of a governmental agency’s efforts to implement automated work delivery technology to enforce work guidelines, I show how aspects of work might become more automated but the rationale of automation might fail to manifest as originally intended. Technology and the formal structure inscribed into it to control work might conflict with the demands of work practice. Moreover, the findings show how automated control can be resisted by workers through subversive organizing in teams to reacquire work discretion. Through an analysis of automated control in practice, this paper contributes to discussions of technologies of control and how pragmatic resistance can emerge to counteract such technology.

This work was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship - RF-2016-078. While matter clearly matters to organization theory, its absence from the study of organizational ethics is striking. Despite the obdurate materiality of the workplace, critical scholarship on organizations and morality sees ethics as interpersonal, subjective and embodied. Organizations, meanwhile, are characterised by moral anomie and dysfunction. This paper advances our understanding of the material entanglements of organizational morality, drawing on the science and technology studies inflected study of markets to show how moral orders arise in dialectic between the social and the material. It argues that moral orders are entangled in the material infrastructures of organizations. Its empirical case is the founding and development of a small-company focused stock exchange, OFEX, launched in London in 1995, accessed through elite interviews and documentary work. The paper seeks to develop our understanding of morality in critical organization studies, to further defend the Weberian notion of ‘ethics of office’ by emphasising the sociomaterial dimension of organizational morality, and to contribute to an ongoing renaissance of the study of morality as a sociological phenomenon. There are implications for managers and engaged scholars alike. Publisher PDF

The term ‘quarantine’ is derived from the Italian quarantena, from quaranta, referring to the forty days of isolation traditionally imposed during the era of the Black Death in Europe. This paper examines this and related contemporary terms, in order to consider the complex and contradictory nature of enforced sites of isolation, with reference to the historical literature. The centrality of spatial practices in the current pandemic is emphasised, with a focus on the normally unobserved, micro practices of individuals under ‘lockdown’. The paper reports on an interview study conducted at a large UK Higher Education institution during the Covid-19 ‘lockdown’, and analyses the accounts of six academics, focusing particularly on their embodied and sociomaterial practices, with reference to the etymological analysis. The paper considers the extent to which their reported experiences reflect the various meanings of the term sequestrato, going on to propose that their working practices, particularly focused on screens and video calls, are characterised by a need to ‘perform the university’. I speculate on how the ontological nature of the university itself has been fundamentally altered by the closure of the campus and lockdown, proposing that the site of the university is now radically dispersed across these sequestered bodies. I conclude by calling into the question the accuracy of the term ‘online teaching and learning’, instead suggesting that in a fundamental sense, none of these practices is in fact ‘online’ or digital.

Artificial intelligence is a central technology underpinning the fourth industrial revolution, driving dramatic changes in contemporary cyber-physical systems and challenging existing ways of theor...

The reproduction of the human form has been a universal practice amongst human ecologies for millennia. Over the past 200 years, popular culture has considered the imaginary consequences of the danger to humanity and human-ness of replicating the autonomous human form too faithfully. Today, the seductive allure of technologically advanced simulated human bodies and advances in robotics and artificial intelligence has brought us closer to facing this possibility. Alongside the simultaneous aversion and fascination of the possibility that autonomous simulated human forms may become indistinguishable from human beings is the deep-rooted uncanniness of the automaton in its strange familiarity – not only to ourselves but to our pleasant childhood imaginings of playing with dolls. As such, simulated human bodies are often enrolled in medical and nursing education models with the assumption that making the simulation teaching spaces seem as close to clinical spaces as possible will allow students to practise potentially harmful clinical skills without causing any harm to human patients. However similar the simulated human bodies may appear to a living, breathing human, a tension between the embodiment of particularly human attributes and their replication persists. How can computerized human patient simulators be enrolled to teach people to develop the necessary attributes of compassion and empathy when caring for human beings? This article explores the uncanny ecologies of simulated human patients in nursing education by presenting a posthuman analysis of the practices of nurse educators as they enrol these digital objects in their teaching. Guided by a selection of heuristics offered as a mode of interviewing digital objects, the analysis enrolled ‘Gathering Anecdotes’ and ‘Unravelling Translations’ to attune to the ways in which these uncanny posthuman assemblages become powerful modes of knowing to mobilize learning about human attributes within uncanny posthuman ecologies.

The paper focuses on the relationships between power and technology in the field of organization studies, shedding light on the conceptual juxtapositions arousing from the debate. It discusses the many concepts of power and the relationship between digital technologies and power. Then it focuses on the role of digital technologies with respect to automation processes and control dynamics and deepens the transformations of jobs and professions in relation to digital technologies' adoption. The contribution calls for overcoming the dualistic nature of debates, so to understand sociality and materiality, power and technology as a form of continuum.

The construct of identity play, which involves the exploration and experimentation with possible future selves, is underexplored in organizational literature. To extend theory on identity play, we take a narrative inquiry approach and examine qualitative interview data in the context of virtual environments. Using a sociomateriality perspective, we contribute to theory on identity play in three ways. First, we reveal how identity play unfolds via the sociomaterial intertwining of not just human agency, but also material agency, situated work practices, and self-representations. Second, we offer a new definition of identity play that goes beyond the exploration of possible selves and uncover identity play narratives on the possible self, the improbable self, and the impossible self. We demonstrate how identity play, particularly with impossible selves, shapes others’ experiences and thus has implications beyond the self. Finally, three identity play affordances emerged: plasticity of appearance, plasticity of behavior, and plasticity of perspective.

The aim of this article is to address the Business Analytics (BA) practice based on the sociomateriality approach within the Revenue Management (RM) context of an airline. The study proposes that BA is an active engagement process which is set between analysts and business managers according to their sociomaterial imbrication with analytical data and tools, which areused to generate new insights. The discussion is substantiated by the theoretical articulation of BA as applied to RM based on the sociomateriality approach, which acknowledges the synergetic interaction between human and material dimensions by keeping their distinction from intentionality. The empirical investigation followed a qualitative design supported by non-participatory observation, interview and document research, which were the data collection techniques. The collected data was analyzed through spiral analysis associated with a practices’ description and analyses framework. Results have supported the BA proposition by evidencing the human/material dimension entanglement to produce BA-practice specificities. RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo é compreender a prática de Business Analytics (BA) pela ótica da sociomaterialidade no contexto de Revenue Management (RM) em uma companhia aérea. Ele se baseia na proposição de que BA é um processo ativo de engajamento entre os analistas e gestores de negócios, em uma imbricação sociomaterial com os dados e as ferramentas analíticas usadas para descobrir novos insights. A discussão se sustenta em articulações teóricas sobre BA aplicada no RM, em uma abordagem da sociomaterialidade que reconhece a interação sinérgica entre agências humana e material, mantendo suas distinções em relação à intencionalidade. A investigação empírica se deu em uma perspectiva qualitativa, tendo a observação não participante, a entrevista e a pesquisa documental como técnicas de coletas de dados, que foram analisados por meio da análise em espiral em conjunto com o framework de descrição de práticas e atividades. Os resultados sustentam a proposição sobre BA ao revelarem o imbricamento entre humanos e os artefatos materiais produzindo especificidades na prática de BA.

Sociomaterial perspectives in research are those that encourage researchers to focus their inquiry on the relationships between people (social) and things (material), rather than focusing solely on people. The unique possibility of sociomaterial perspectives is increasingly recognized in health professions education scholarship. In an effort to support those who may be interested in engaging with the principles of sociomaterialism in their own work, the authors have developed a primer on this paradigm of research. This Invited Commentary-one of several exploring different philosophies of science-offers an overview of the ontological, epistemological, axiological, and methodological foundations of sociomateriality. The authors then put these ideas into action, highlighting the philosophical foundations of sociomaterial perspectives in a sample case study that tells the story of Lee, a resident involved in a medical error.

Purpose This paper aims to propose a theoretical framework for workplace research based on sociomateriality. Sociomateriality is a theory to explain the effects of social practice and materiality in an organization. Workplace studies in facility management (FM) can adopt this theory to understand the complex relationships between physical work environments and human factors. Design/methodology/approach Review of sociomateriality was conducted to understand the connection to existing workplace studies in FM. This study addresses the components of the workplace through the sociomateriality perspective. Findings The main focuses in sociomateriality theory are materiality and social practice. For workplace concepts specifically in FM, workplaces and their components are a material agency, and work and workers are a social practice agency. By considering both materiality and sociality in workplace environments, researchers can understand office dynamics and interrelationships. Lastly, two statistical analysis methods are suggested to analyze the framework: structural equation modeling and multilevel analysis. Originality/value To understand the human–environment relationship, it is essential to consider both materiality and social practice perspectives simultaneously. The proposed framework can be a foundation to explain the complex interactions between the physical environment and human factors of workers in individual organizations.

External stakeholder support is critical to the success of megaprojects, necessitating strategic engagement, often using Information and Communications Technology (ICT). We conducted 30 semi-struct...

As personal digital devices have become increasingly embedded in schools, what they do tends to silently fall into the background and generally be taken for granted. In order to scrutinize the sile...

The main aim of this study is to investigate the effects of sociomateriality in the strategy for artisanal production of organic cachaça—a well-known Brazilian beverage—by means of the case study method. In addition to enabling reconstruction of the trajectory of the studied organisation and its insertion in the institutional context, this method was suitable for investigating sociomaterial practices, enabling identification of the effects of agency (material, biological and human) on the strategy for artisanal production of organic cachaça. The field research conducted was grounded on the postulates of the realist-constructivist ontology and the theory of strategy as practice, in combination with the sociomateriality approach. It was observed that the strategy for artisanal production of cachaça involves a sociomaterial entanglement and reciprocal agencies that encompass equipment, natural resources, knowledge, experience, learning, traditional knowledge, living beings and chemical elements. This study helps redefine the manner of thinking about and conducting studies on strategy as sociomaterial practices, especially by focusing on the interactivity between the social dimension of this practice and the material and technological framework that supports it.

Human Resource (HR) algorithms are now widely used for decision making in the field of HR. In this paper, we examine how biases may become entrenched in HR algorithms, which are often designed without consultation with HR specialists, assumed to operate with scientific objectivity and often viewed as instruments beyond scrutiny. Using three orienting concepts such as scientism, illusio and rationales, we demonstrate why and how biases of HR algorithms go unchecked and in turn may perpetuate the biases in HR systems and consequent HR decisions. Based on a narrative review, we examine bias in HR algorithms; provide a methodology for algorithmic hygiene for HR professionals., NA

This chapter is a response to a provocation piece in the Learning Design Voices edited volume. Written by Sukaina Walji, this chapter responds to Sue Bennet’s provocation on “What might learning design become in the post-COVID university?” This piece helps to think about Learning Design as field, praxis and identity in a South African context. Learning design has emerged as an area of work or practice, a space for research, and a marker of professional identity. How is learning design seen? How is learning design viewed in different contexts? How do we, or should we, support the development of learning design? These are pertinent questions relevant in the field which Sukaina helps us answer, in part through a socio-material lens.

Työelämään ja organisaatioihin ovat viime vuosina vaikuttaneet monet eri muutokset. Yksi voimakkaimmista muutoksista koskee sitä, missä töitä tehdään eli työnteon tiloja. Tutkimuksissa on tarkasteltu muun muassa tilojen roolia ihmisten välisen vuorovaikutuksen edistämisessä, työntekijöiden oppimisen tukemisessa sekä inklusiivisuuden ja monimuotoisuuden vahvistamisessa. Viime aikoina huomiota on kiinnitetty erityisesti siihen, miten tilat vaikuttavat ihmisten toimijuuteen eli kykyyn ja mahdollisuuksiin toimia tai vaikuttaa erilaisiin työhön liittyviin tilanteisiin. Tässä puheenvuorossa keskityn siihen, miten tilojen ja ihmistoimijuuden välistä suhdetta voidaan tutkia niin kutsutusta sosiomateriaalisesta näkökulmasta erityisesti organisaatioiden ja muuttuvan työelämän kontekstissa. Esitän, että parempi ymmärrys tilojen vaikutuksesta ihmistoimijuuden muotoutumiseen on keskeinen osa tasa-arvoisemman, oikeudenmukaisemman ja sosiaalisesti kestävämmän työelämän rakentamista tilanteessa, jossa lähes kaikki yhteiskunnan tilat voidaan nähdä mahdollisina tietotyön tiloina.

School spaces, technologies, and educational activities shape each other reciprocally. This mixed-methods study (i) developed a methodological framework for tracing the interdependence between school spaces, digital instruments, and teachers’ practices in their use, and (ii) created practice-based knowledge about the relations of teachers’ perceptions of educational activities to school spaces in order to acknowledge architects and educational practitioners in designing learning environments that support educational renewal. We participated in the construction process of a new general upper-secondary school building in Finland, taking into consideration the school’s operating culture and teachers’ pedagogic needs (social aspects), as well as the mediation of school spaces by digitalization and national curriculum reformation (material aspects). The data were collected through a teacher survey (n = 31), teacher interviews (n = 10), and the analysis of group notes that teachers (n = 39) generated in a participatory workshop. The results revealed that teachers consider it critical in the design of new learning environments to foster a collaborative and multidisciplinary school culture that emphasizes learners’ wellbeing and inclusion, as well as utilizing readily-available digital instruments with basic-level functionality. The developed methodological framework appeared suitable for visualizing (with radar charts) the sociomaterial interdependence of school spaces, digital instruments, and teachers’ personal and collective pedagogical activities. We argue that teachers’ perceptions of school spaces, digital instruments, and pedagogic practices entanglement consolidates learning environments design from an educational point of view and should be taken into consideration when constructing new school buildings.

This article examines the various processes through which sociomaterial relations constitute the performance of a routine. The study’s theoretical underpinnings are linked to sociomateriality in understanding the dynamics of routine performance. In this study, adaptive space furthers sociomaterial relations and processes, and their dynamics to constitute the routine performance. The findings are based on ethnographic research that was conducted during an international crisis management exercise. The analysis consists of three field episodes that illustrate the different processes in which the sociomaterial matters in routine performance. The article contributes to the theoretical discussion by showing, first, how adaptive space enables going beyond the sociomaterial dualism and transfers the theoretical emphasis to the fluidity and dynamism of these relations. It also draws attention to the sociomaterial processes that constitute the performance of the routine. Third, it further shows how through sociomaterial relations and processes the organizing of professional knowledge co-constitution is performed and managed.

Attracting contingent workers, teleworkers, small start-up teams and the self-employed, co-working spaces have grown from corner coffee shops and internet cafes, to business empires with thousands of members in urban locations. Yet the rise of co-working in the twenty-first century has received only limited attention in CSCW, despite co-workers' copious use of distributed collaborative tools. CSCW has more frequently addressed the challenges of working together, apart - that is, how we might support or otherwise transpose rich collocated interactions into distributed environments. This paper explores the challenges of working alone and apart, yet together, based on observational study and interviews at three large co-working spaces in New York City. Using a sociomaterial approach, we identify and explore core tensions visible in the site between participation in a distributed work team and in a distinct, collocated community, which we label the co-working paradox. This includes local configurations of digital and physical materials that shift locus of participation, that blend work and home, and manage employer visibility. We use these themes to suggest a generative return to certain core concepts in studies of distributed work - namely, common ground, workspaces, and placefulness - to further study and design for the growth of these unique environments.

This article examines the selection process in a pilot project aimed at distributing computers to disabled people to allow for digitalization. Particular attention is paid to the complexities generated by an allocation assessment form, designed to help these people improve their social interactions through electronic media. There is a paucity of discussions on forms in the organization studies literature but, when studied, an over-reliance on semantics such that their enactment in embodied sociomaterial performances is easily glossed over. Our problematic revolves around how forms and their surrounding sociomaterial performances constitute, but are also transformed by, subjects, objects and organizational relations. The contribution of this article is, therefore, to address the embodied enactments and sociomaterial practices that are embedded within these allocation processes. So, for example, assessors in the project deviated from a strict interpretation of the questions on the form and sometimes ignored clients’ responses so as to prevent formal allocations of computers from being seen as illegitimate, and potentially disruptive to the organization’s objectives of distributing digital devices. This enabled us to focus on the sociomaterial and embodied relations that are enacted within the selection process and how these place limits on, but also possibilities for, those allocating and those seeking to be allocated computers. The case study shows how distributing computers to disabled people is a complex sociomaterial process that is conditioned by the embodied performances and textual devices deployed. At the same time, the process was informed by humanistic and normalizing assumptions about sociability that are inscribed on the assessment form as criteria for allocating the computers. One implication, we found, was a tendency to reinforce the marginalization of disabled people.

Action research in its various forms highlights the interactional and relational ways in which research and knowledge become socially produced with people, with intentions of positively transforming realworld relations. In parallel, there is a growing interest in organisational research informed by the field of Science and Technology Studies, about the potential significance of matter to understanding how processes of researching interact with the world. By experimenting with connections to debates about sociomateriality, this paper explores what implications there might be for understanding and performing action research, especially given that action researchers are often values-oriented and attached, and acknowledge that they want to change material issues.

The purpose of this article is to explore the relation between organizational presence and the place in which such a presence is enacted. To this end I mobilize Doreen Massey’s processual conceptualization of place as an event consisting of a bundle of trajectories. By following the presentification of a Swedish company, Fjällräven, in the natural environment in the North of Sweden during Fjällräven Classic, I show that the organization is not made present in place, but through place production. I propose the concept of place work to express the work done by representatives of the organization, but also by other humans and nonhumans, to make the throwntogetherness of the place result in a rather coherent and stable construction through which the organization is made present. Place work is therefore work through which organizational presence and place are recursively co-creating. The concept of place work expands what we can learn about the “where” of an organization when building on an ontology of performativity.

O objetivo deste trabalho foi compreender como os aspectos sociomateriais sao revelados na estrategia de marketing de uma organizacao produtora de cachaca artesanal. A abordagem da estrategia como pratica e da sociomaterialidade foram utilizadas. Um estudo de caso foi realizado em uma organizacao de producao de cachaca artesanal. Foram realizadas oito entrevistas com diferentes atores organizacionais, visitas constantes a organizacao, analise de documentos e analise de fotografias. Foram observadas as seguintes praticas sociomateriais: envasamento, rotulagem, registro da marca Joao Mendes, artesanato, expositores nas margens da rodovia, inovacoes em embalagens, uso de uniformes, associacao de cachaca com consumo de outros materiais e alimentos e tecnologia. Todas essas praticas revelaram mais do que apenas um material acessorio para o produto da cachaca, mas evidenciaram uma relacao social dos atores organizacionais com o contexto local, o passado organizacional e a vida no campo. Palavras Chave: Sociomaterialidade. Estrategia como Pratica. Cachaca. ABSTRACT The objective of this work was to understand how the sociomaterial aspects are revealed in the marketing strategy of an organization producing artisanal cachaca. The approach of strategy as practice and sociomateriality was used. A case study was carried out in an organization producing artisanal cachaca. There were eight interviews with different organizational actors, constant visits to the organization, analysis of documents and analysis of photographs. The following sociomaterial practices were observed: potting, labeling, registration of the Joao Mendes brand, craftsmanship, exhibitors at the edges of the highway, innovations in packaging, use of uniforms, association of cachaca with consumption of other materials and food and technology. All these practices revealed more than just an accessory material to the cachaca product, but they evidenced a social relation of the organizational actors with the local context, the organizational past and the life in the field. Key words: Sociomateriality. Strategy as Practice. Cachaca.

Blockchain technology has a potential for construction logistics, also within Sweden. In this paper, a proposal of a blockchain system and its practical implementation is presented (the BLogCHAIN prototype). Its was preliminarily tested during the early construction of a school in Sweden, in November-December 2020. Methodologically, we reviewed studies on blockchain for construction logistics, interviewed the BLogCHAIN testers (suppliers and contractor’s operatives), and understood the test’s practical outcomes through sociomateriality. Our results include the confirmation of envisioned benefits when implementing BLogCHAIN (e.g. reducing accounting rework), but also a simplification from its initial conceptualization, mainly due to rigidly established work practices.

This paper investigates the sociomateriality of collective creation in the context of a design studio project. Grounded in a relational approach that has influenced a multitude of studies in various fields, the notion of sociomateriality accounts for the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in practice. How this entanglement occurs or what exactly is subjected to it, however, remains largely unarticulated, especially in studies where the handling of materials lies at the heart of the research process. By adopting a relational approach operationalized through qualitative network analysis, we traced the sociomaterial trajectories of a studio project to identify the moments in which various actors were entangled. The resulting network visualizes these moments and assists in explicating how they enabled the instantiation of intersubjective design ideas.

Introduction The OSCE is a sociomaterial assemblage—a meshing together of human and material components producing multiple effects. Materials matter because they shape candidate performance, with potentially calamitous career consequences if materials influence performance unjustly. Although the OSCE literature refers to materials, few papers study the sociomateriality of OSCEs. Therefore, we explored OSCE stakeholders’ talk about sociomaterial assemblages to better understand their importance for candidate performance. Methods We conducted 15 focus groups with OSCE candidates (n = 42), examiners (n = 20) and simulated patients (n = 17) after an Australian postgraduate nursing OSCE. Sociomateriality informed our team‐based framework analysis of data. Results Participants identified a multiplicity of OSCE materials (objects, technologies and spaces) thought to matter for candidate performance. Candidates’ unfamiliarity with materials and missing or malfunctioning materials were reported to yield numerous negative impacts (eg cognitive overload, negative affect, time‐wasting), thereby adversely affecting candidate performance. Both examiners and candidates made micro‐adjustments to sociomaterial assemblages during the OSCE in order to make it work (eg candidates saying what they would do rather than doing it). Sometimes, such tinkering extended so far that sociomaterial assemblages were ruptured (eg examiners ignoring rubrics to help pass candidates), potentially influencing OSCE standardisation. Discussion Our novel empirical study extends previous conceptual work by illustrating wide‐ranging sociomaterial assemblages influencing OSCE candidate performance. Further research is now needed employing sociomaterial approaches to further elucidate sociomaterial entanglements in diverse OSCEs. We encourage OSCE stakeholders to become more attuned to the productive nature of materials within all stages of OSCE design and implementation.

This chapter draws on a case of materiality in the digital age, a case of mobile consulting, in order to shed light on the ways in which new sorts of work/non-work boundary-tensions emerge, overlap and become laminated. It reports on consultants, referred to via the pseudonym MobileCom, who had no head office and organized themselves via Instant Messaging (IM) on their mobile phones. Whereas working with mobile phones is no longer necessarily considered as ‘new’, the case demonstrates the way in which relations come together in IM practice to produce new sorts of boundary-tensions, which in turn has material consequences for new ways of organizing.