Beyond Entanglement: (Socio-) Materiality and Organization Studies

Abstract

Although we have to welcome the renewed interest in socio-materiality in organization studies, I claim that we are yet to understand what taking matter seriously really means. The mistake we especially need to stop making consists of automatically associating matter to something that can be touched or seen, that is, something tangible or visible, an association that irremediably leads us to recreate a dissociation between the world of human affairs and the so-called material world. To address this issue, I mobilize a communication-centered perspective to elaborate that (1) materiality is a property of all (organizational) phenomena and that (2) studying these phenomena implies a focus on processes of materialization, that is, ways by which various beings come to appear and make themselves present throughout space and time. In the paper I conceptualize the contours of these materialization processes and discuss the implications of this perspective on materiality for organizational theory and research.

From ‘Pretty’ to ‘Pretty Powerful’: The communicatively constituted power of facial beauty’s performativity

“…Namely, subjection uncovers some artists resisting corporealization by omitting some of TUL's "ten steps" and rejecting subjectivization by both refusing to recognize themselves as an "Ella girl" and by starving the authoritative text of the social media conversations and texts necessary for its materialization to progress (Cooren, 2020). Corporealization details how the authoritative text of facial beauty exercises performative power over employees' admittance and initiation into Ella May, as it assumes greater materiality through a conjoining of conversation and text (Taylor et al, 1996).…”

“…Rather, the power of an authoritative text develops on and through bodies as actors engage in affirming it through a series of 'citational practices' (Butler, 2011, p. xii) (via instruction manuals, Facebook posts and reactions, and makeup application). The findings show how a normative facial convention materializes to varying degrees (Cooren, 2020), taking on substance-like qualities and lustres of power.…”

“…We now discuss how examining facial beauty through blending Butlerian and CCO performativity perspectives can further understandings of norms' performative power. (Kuhn, 2008) that becomes more and/or less powerful through its materializing (Cooren, 2020) within conversation-text dialectics (Taylor et al, 1996). In this section, we discuss how our findings advance understandings of how an authoritative text's power is a reiterative, citational and authored process that continuously undergoes textual-performative affirmations to embed certain organizing ideals, in our case the notions of "beautiful" and "confident" artists.…”

How Artefacts Do Leadership: A Ventriloquial Analysis

“…What is at stake here is our anti-reductionist position, which consists of never erasing the difference something or someone makes in a given situation. This stance is where we clearly depart from traditional forms of social constructivism (where everything is reduced to people’s action or sensemaking activities) and where we side with a relational perspective (Cooren, 2020; Kuhn et al, 2017). Adopting a relational perspective means that we acknowledge the differences humans and non-humans make in a given situation, knowing that these differences always interact with each other.…”

Biomateriality and Organizing: Towards an Organizational Perspective on Food

“…Although there has been an increased interest in materiality in organization studies (e.g. Boxenbaum et al, 2018), the matter at hand in the idea of a ‘constitutive entanglement of meaning and matter’ (Cooren, 2020, p. 2) has for the most part been of non-living, non-biological, inanimate origins: ‘things’ such as objects, technologies and spaces. Notable exceptions include Callon’s (1986) scallops in the St. Brieuc bay, where scallops are agents in a process of translation.…”