Observing Materiality in Organizations

Abstract

Research on materiality has grown rapidly over the past 10 years, highlighting the influence of physical artifacts and spaces in organizations, which had been overshadowed by discursive approaches. This body of research enriches our understanding of organizations in many areas including technology, decision-making, routines, learning, identity, culture, power, and institutions. However, researchers sometimes struggle to select methods suited to study materiality, as previous works have not been explicit in that respect. This article calls organizational researchers interested in physical environments – that is, artifacts and spaces – to integrate observation into their data collection. The first section presents a tripartite definition of the physical environment including activities, conceptions, and lived experiences. Ontological debates are introduced, and observation is proposed as a relevant method for studying materiality in organizational research. The second section presents observation techniques based on three approaches: observing materiality in actions, observing beyond seeing, and making participants observe. Each approach is mainly associated with one of the three components of materiality. The final section discusses the scope of observation techniques, suggests how to combine approaches, and flags difficulties associated with visual techniques.

The Corporate Accelerator: A New Kind of Strategic Factor Market to Access Strategic Resources

“…In the long run, the formalization of an innovation strategy through the creation of the accelerator, which leads to innovation strategy branding and enhanced awareness among stakeholders, also fosters the development of human capital (skills that lead to sources of knowledge) and the introduction of new management practices, thereby boosting the development of innovation and innovation-oriented processes (Fréchet & Goy, 2017;Kohler, 2016;Shankar & Shepherd, 2019). Innovation as an outcome of corporate accelerators resonates with the existing literature (Kupp et al, 2017;Shankar & Shepherd, 2019), which clearly states that businesses may either use the accelerator to access new innovation (resources) or to learn how to innovate (capabilities) by interacting with startups (Weiblen & Chesbrough, 2015).…”

Observation as photography: A metaphor

“…They had to make this absence, this void, visible. The photographic style became a key part of the process, with an exacerbated neutrality that underlined the artificiality of these places ( Figure 20) (for another example of this strategy, see Royer, 2020).…”

“…This article is an invitation to take photography as a metaphor for observation. Of course, many forms of inquiries truly use photographs as a tool for observation (for a discussion of some practices, see Royer, 2020). These inquiries will be included within the scope of this article, but I will not specifically focus on them.…”