In taking into account the ways in which material and social realms are constitutively entangled within organizations it is rhetorically tempting to say that technologies and social structures reconfigure each other. But what does it mean to reconfigure? How does one 'figure' the other and how do we fully embrace a mutually constitutive relationship when examining fluid relations? This paper delves into these questions by exploring how physical, social, material, technological and organizational arrangements dynamically reconfigure each other in the durée of organizational practice. Using the venue of space exploration, we present three empirical examples from an ethnographic engagement with a NASA mission orbiting an outer planet in the solar system to examine various configurations and sociomaterial relations. In this endeavor we suggest that theoretical and empirical traction can be gained by focusing attention on the dynamic reconfigurations between social and material realms. In so doing, we call attention the various ways that current sociomaterial perspectives have difficulty articulating the shifting, figural, asymmetric and dynamic negotiations between people, social structures, information technologies, and representational objects. This paper contributes to current discussions of sociomaterial relations in information systems research by presenting an empirical treatment of entangled and shifting re-configurations and providing language for engaging with this perspective.

In a study of users' interactions with Siri, the iPhone personal assistant application, we noticed the emergence of overlaps and blurrings between explanatory categories such as "human" and "machine." We found that users work to purify these categories, thus resolving the tensions related to the overlaps. This "purification work" demonstrates how such categories are always in flux and are redrawn even as they are kept separate. Drawing on STS analytic techniques, we demonstrate the mechanisms of such "purification work." We also describe how such category work remained invisible to us during initial data analysis, due to our own forms of latent purification, and outline the particular analytic techniques that helped lead to this discovery. We thus provide an illustrative case of how categories come to matter in HCI research and design.

No abstract

Abstract. In software development, there is an interplay between Software Process models and Software Process enactments. The former tends to be abstract descriptions or plans. The latter tends to be specific instantiations of some ideal procedure. In this paper, we examine the role of work artifacts and conversations in negotiating between prescriptions from a model and the contingencies that arise in an enactment. A qualitative field study at two Agile software development companies was conducted to investigate the role of artifacts in the software development work and the relationship between these artifacts and the Software Process. Documentation of software requirements is a major concern among software developers and software researchers. Agile software development denotes a different relationship to documentation, one that warrants investigation. Empirical findings are presented which suggest a new understanding of the relationship between artifacts and Software Process. The paper argues that Software Process is a generative system, which participants called "The Conversation," that emerges out of the interplay between Software Process models and Software Process enactments.

This article analyzes the role of hype in performing and translating corporate sociotechnical imaginaries of digital technologies, into the context of Danish society. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork of technology events in Denmark, this article proposes “hot air” as a concept to describe how hype for the future performs these imaginaries. This article describes the overlapping sociotechnical imaginaries that dominate these events and the performative effects of hype and its critique, in articulating and translating them. This article makes an empirical and conceptual contribution to the study of sociotechnical imaginaries, in particular, their socio-material performance, the role of corporations in articulating them, and how hype is central to their translation.