A B S T R AC TBorrowed from ecological psychology, the concept of affordances is often said to offer the social study of technology a means of re-framing the question of what is, and what is not, 'social' about technological artefacts. The concept, many argue, enables us to chart a safe course between the perils of technological determinism and social constructivism. This article questions the sociological adequacy of the concept as conventionally deployed. Drawing on ethnographic work on the ways technological artefacts engage, and are engaged by, disabled bodies, we propose that the 'affordances' of technological objects are not reducible to their material constitution but are inextricably bound up with specific, historically situated modes of engagement and ways of life. K E Y WO R D Saffordances / body / disabilities / sociomateriality / technology Introduction S ocial science, Dennis Wrong (1961) has argued, tends to oscillate between 'undersocialized' and 'oversocialized' conceptions of 'man' (sic). 1 According to many commentators, the sociology of technology is currently caught up 415 Sociology

In recent years, the topic of trust has become the focus of renewed attention in organizational theory and research and, in particular, where electronic distribution and associated `virtual' forms of organizing are prevalent. The question of trust, always an issue in financial transactions, is exacerbated the more the physical element is removed. The paper focuses on the issue of trust as it currently appears in the newest of these distribution channels, online and Internet financial services, and smart cards. In both theory and practice, notions of trust are often opposed to concepts such as power or control, and are deployed as part of a dualistic either/or proposition. Drawing on ongoing research in the financial services sector, the paper attempts a more nuanced exploration by focusing on attempts to `manage' trust, the problems such attempts encounter, the various techniques employed in their resolution and the power relations in which they are embedded

In the era of an increasingly 'light' and 'liquid' modernity (Bauman, 2000) airports appear to be privileged and distinctive sites of organization, constitutive of what Castells calls a 'space of fl ows' that is helping to extend and integrate the so-called 'network age' of global economy and 'glocal' culture. This paper draws on original empirical research at Fulchester International Airport and studies the movement of various subjects and objects (including passengers, bags and aeroplanes) as they are assembled and disassembled by 'modes of ordering' to facilitate the fl ows of exchange and interaction that for Castells binds the physically disjointed positions of social actors in contemporary global organization. Our study explores the ways in which digital information and communications technology creates 'spectral' and uncanny phenomena that feeds back into the here-and-now of mundane, organizational reality.

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This article focuses on science fiction and actor network theory as ways of writing displacement which are relevant to organization studies. Recent work within organizational theory and related (sub)disciplines has suggested that the articulation of organization as a privileged site of presence is made possible by that which is Othered and excluded (or rather deferred) as representing disorganization and disorder. Organizations in this view constitute `incomplete and transient' accomplishments always under threat from various forms of intrusion and displacement. By way of illustration, two examples of displacement! intrusion and their associated organizational `dramas of proof' are examined as a way of exploring how the Other, the alien and out of place, is realized in representation.