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This chapter takes a systematic look at how NWS forecasters take stock of the weather and establishes that they have cultivated an omnivorous appetite for information, at times even enlisting personal observations of the weather outside to resolve the ambiguity and complexity of the weather on their screens. To illuminate how forecasters harness diverse information to project themselves into the future, the concept of “collage” is introduced—a heuristic that frames meteorological decision-making as a process of assembling, appropriating, superimposing, juxtaposing, and blurring of information. Weather forecasting as the art of collage underscores the culture of disciplined improvisation that characterizes NWS forecasting operations. And it externalizes into screenwork the cognitive labor of distilling and extrapolating complex atmospheric data into a provisionally coherent prognosis.

This chapter reviews the history of three terms increasingly used by researchers in the fields of organization studies and information systems: “materiality,” “sociomateriality,” and “socio-technical systems.” After this review, the chapter explores ways in which these terms overlap and depart in meaning from one another in scholars' writings. The chapter suggests that materiality might be viewed as a concept that refers to properties of a technology that transcend space and time, while sociomateriality may be used to refer to the collective spaces in which people come into contact with the materiality of an artifact and produce various functions. The chapter suggests that the concept of a sociomaterial practice is akin to what socio-technical systems theorists refer to as the “technical subsystem” of an organization, or the way that people's tasks shape and are shaped by their use of machines. This technical subsystem is recursively organized alongside the social subsystem of an organization, which is characterized by an abstract set of roles, communication patterns, and so on.

This chapter examines the foundations of the emerging sociomateriality perspective via a critical analysis of three of its guiding themes: relationality, interpenetration, and “agential cuts.” The chapter argues that what its proponents have to say about relationality is largely unexceptional, but that their claims about the interpenetration of things are probably not sustainable outside a restricted range of cases. While the chapter accepts some aspects of the notion of agential cuts, the chapter qualifies some of the claims made about the extent to which the object world depends on the practices of “agencies of observation.”

Based on fieldwork in Brazil, this chapter develops the concept of “writing remittances”—the hardware, software, and knowledge about literacy that migrants often remit home to communicate with loved ones. As objects of emotional and economic value, writing remittances demand literacy learning as one condition of their exchange. Because such learning, like money, is fungible, homeland residents often circulate and reinvest it locally, with varying returns. This chapter brings together two fundamental aspects of literacy—its imbrication in economic trends and its materiality—to show how they interact in families’ relationships across borders. It does so by offering snapshots of experiences of writing remittances taken from various angles: an aerial view of writing remittances across social class; a narrative view of writing remittances across one man’s life; historically oriented views across the changing technologies of print and digital writing remittances; and future-oriented views as women and men described the payoffs (or not) of migration-driven literacy learning.

What is special about all our dialogically structured exchanges is their immanent creativity: within them all, sooner or later, something uniquely new is created that is intricately related to the situation within which it is created. The happening of an “organizational moment” thus occurs when that uniquely new something opens up previously unnoticed new ways forward into the future. The creation of such uniquely new events is due, the author argues, to the way in which the spontaneous responsiveness of our bodies works, to an extent, to give “expressive shape” to the movements of feeling occurring within us as we body them forth out into the world. What changes within us in such encounters is not our learning new facts or bits of information, but our learning new ways of relating ourselves to the others and othernesses in the world around us. The author explores the nature of these new kinds of understanding in relation to Karen Barad’s agentive realist account of sociomateriality, and how her account of intra-action, as opposed to inter-action, parallels in much close detail Bakhtin’s (and Voloshinov’s) account of dialogically structured activity in the realm of speech communication.

In artistic perfumery, new perfumes are not based on last year’s top sellers, but on original, often unconventional ideas such as making a perfume that smells like melancholy. While this can sound promising to potential consumers, it poses a real challenge to the actors involved in the product development process: they need to organize their work in such a way that the immaterial, often deeply personal emotion can materialize into a concrete product. The chapter presents data from longitudinal, qualitative research on perfume making in artistic perfumery and outlines how the question of materializing the immaterial is approached by the creative director and two perfumers. Central to the chapter’s findings is a visual concept that serves as a material representation of the emotion. Throughout the process, it takes on different roles in response to the specific situational challenges (boundaries) and relationships in which it is embedded. Together, they define the relational movements that are necessary for the product’s becoming. The authors discuss insights and implications for understanding how materiality comes to matter in organization studies.

A central metaphor in accounts of sociomateriality is that of entanglement—the social and material are not just mutually influential, but inextricably related. These accounts, however, employ several different terms, sometimes interchangeably, to characterize the nature of this entanglement, such as inseparability, interpenetration, relationality, and embodiment, and to refer to what is entangled, for example the social and the material, humans and technology, work and technology. While such variation may be justified on aesthetic or stylistic grounds, treating these terms as synonyms may be seen as conflating different ontological claims. This chapter seeks to identify these claims and to explore their consequences through an analysis of nursing in a critical care unit, a context that is, at the same time, both highly suffused by technology and intensely social. In common with the majority of sociomateriality literature much of the focus of this analysis will be on technology, but the implications for materiality more generally and for process research on organizations are also considered.

The introduction sets out the conceptual framework and main subjects of the book. It acquaints readers with a feminist sociomaterial approach, which analyzes technology and society, particularly its gendered aspects, as an integrated whole, by insisting on the need to analyze internet practices in context. It also explains why Latin American feminist and queer counterpublics are ideal sites for the evaluation of global trends in digitally enhanced activism. This has been the Global South region at the forefront of internet adoption, as well as one where long-standing, vibrant, and diverse gender- and sexuality-based organizing has achieved notable successes in terms of political representation, legal reform, and identity recognition. The introduction also delves into why counterpublics are a key “information ecology” in which to study the mutual constitution of internet and society. It then covers the field research upon which the analysis is based, and offers an overview of the remaining chapters.

Studying language and communication at work implies that we connect them to the very processes, activities, and practices that constitute organizations or organizational phenomena. This chapter demonstrates that language and communication at work can mean many things and that there are a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches that can be used for such analysis. Four characteristic features of such studies are highlighted: (1) interest in the communicative constitution of organization, (2) focus on discursive or communicative practices, (3) emphasis on temporal aspects and dynamics, and (4) placing language and communication in its sociomaterial context. Not all studies can focus on all these aspects, but these features are central in this nascent stream of research.

Design is an important organizational practice garnering increasing attention in organization studies. This chapter focuses on design activity associated with organizational space, showing design to be a complex sociomaterial practice. Making sense of this messy activity is aided by seeing communication as constitutive of organization (CCO), a conceptual move that encourages an examination of the production of “authoritative texts” that represent assemblages of heterogeneous elements, and depicting these assemblages as the site of organizing and the source of organizational agency. Framing organization in this way portrays spatial design as the simultaneous production of order and disorder, suggesting that organizing is an ongoing accomplishment shaped by contests over “authoring” the authoritative text. Illustrations drawn from a study of the design of a laboratory building of a large US government research organization demonstrate the insights available from our CCO-inspired framework, and allow us to articulate three contributions to the study and practice of organizational design.

Scholars have described how rankings can be consequential in shaping the economy. The prevailing argument is that they wield influence through encouraging ‘mechanisms of reactivity’ amongst market actors. The chapter investigates whether there are additional agential aspects of rankings beyond such ‘social’ accounts. It suggests that ‘sociomateriality’ is also a significant aspect of a ranking’s influence. The chapter develops our discussion of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, and similar ranking devices such as the ‘Forrester Wave’, to show how the ‘format and furniture’ of a ranking can mediate and constitute markets. One constraint was rooted in the visual format. For a Magic Quadrant to help its audiences discriminate between offerings in the market, a certain number and distribution of vendors is needed. This was described to us as ‘the beautiful picture’: with too many it became hard to discriminate; with too few established providers there was little need to resort to analysts.

This chapter explores methodological approaches to the study of gig economy work through the deployment of the researcher’s smartphone. Set within the context of a covert ethnography of a delivery platform in London, the phone became a site to both experience work and record empirical findings in the workplace. Specifically, this chapter considers the sociomaterial construction and performance of the smartphone at work to highlight how its capacities and affordances shaped the empirical output. Critical reflections on the limits of the smartphone work alongside reflexive considerations of the researching self to position the researcher and phone as active agents in the research process; in which methodological decisions bear impacts on the nature of the empirical material produced. Of particular significance is the deployment of various apps, tailored to the needs of the field site and research to create diverse, multi-modal datasets, in addition to their synthesis into a coherent and curated ethnographic field diary for subsequent analysis.

Emotional–affective aspects of riskwork are integral to risk management in many fields, particularly in human service organizations; yet rational notions of risk management often obscure these emotional–affective aspects. In this chapter, we discuss the case of high-risk mental healthcare (for people with personality disorders), characterized by both formal and informal risk management systems. Drawing on sociomaterial perspectives, we explore empirically how affective dimensions of routine clinical riskwork flow between these formal and informal risk management systems, affecting intersubjective relations and experiences. We show how affect can ‘inflame’ incidents, producing heated interactions that escalate and ‘overflow’ through the risk management technologies, devices, and systems intended to contain and manage them. The chapter draws conclusions on dynamics of affective flows and overflows that are present—if less visible—in other areas of riskwork.

Paul R. Carlile and Karl-Emanuel Dionne take a sociomateriality approach to provide guidance in how unconventional research can have greater impact in organization studies. Given that unconventional research doesn’t generally conform to existing research practices it has a liability of newness that can hinder its intelligibility in a research community. To address this challenge they focus on five underlying dimensions of materiality that all research can focus on to increase its potential impact: outcomes, accumulations, layers, relative durability and consequences. To show the value of each of these dimensions they use Steve Barley’s 1986 unconventional CT Scanning study and Black et. al’s 2004 unconventional retelling of Barley’s work. They demonstrate that despite the novelty associated with unconventional research, these dimensions of materiality can guide the development of research as a boundary object that sits meaningfully and consequentially between the conventional and unconventional research efforts.