There have been several calls by organizational scholars (Leonardi and Barley, 2008; Orlikowski and Scott, 2008; Orlikowski, 2007; Fayard and Weeks, 2007) to take into account materiality - e.g. artifacts, technology, infrastructure and space - when studying organizations. Despite these calls, relatively little attention has been paid in organization theory to questions of materiality and the work that has been done in this area has had only a marginal impact on the field. We argue that the small number of studies taking the material dimensions of organizations into account is due to the lack of a language for talking about physical artifacts and the material environment that avoids the extremes of physical determinism on the one hand and voluntarism on the other and allows us to treat sociamaterial practices as constitutively entangled.The goal of the symposium is to start a discussion about how we can develop a set of understandings, vocabulary, and methods that can help us make sense of, speak to, and empirically investigate the material and social aspects of organizations in a way that treats them as constitutively entangled and thereby avoids the dualities of physical realism versus social constructionism and voluntarism versus determinism.We present five papers discussing the influence of material objects and artifacts in organizations, each taking a different perspective - methodological, theoretical or empirical.

Agenda/Outline:

Bringing Materiality In: Affordances as a Lens to Analyze Socio-Material Practices
Presenter: John Weeks; IMD;
Presenter: Anne-Laure Fayard; Polytechnic Institute of New York U.;

Narrative Networks and Materiality in Routines
Presenter: Brian T Pentland; Michigan State U.;

Office Design Elements That Matter: Examining Partitions, Personalization, and Plants
Presenter: Kimberly D. Elsbach; U. of California, Davis;

The Materiality of Intangible Artifacts:Why Substance and Significance Matter
Presenter: Paul M. Leonardi; Northwestern U.;

Ethnographies of Work and the Work of Ethnographers: The Implications of a Sociomaterial Approach
Presenter: Beth Bechky; U. of California, Davis;