The sociomateriality of organisational life: considering technology in management research

A Heideggerian paradigm for project management: Breaking free of the disciplinary matrix and its Cartesian ontology

“…Heidegger 's Being and Time (1962) offers an ontological alternative to Cartesian subjectobject dualism that, since Descartes, has not only underpinned the majority of positivist research (Laverty 2008;Orlikowski 2009), but has also dominated Western thinking at-large (Grof 1983;Seigel 2005). The potential application of Heidegger's thinking has already been raised in the project management literature.…”

Exploring collaboration technology use: how users’ perceptions twist and amend reality

“…To study the IT impact on the individual, work practices, or the organization, some researchers have posited that the technology needs to be seen as a sort of ''black box'' that moves on a linear trajectory from invention to diffusion and adoption (Orlikowski and Iacono, 2001). This view has been strongly questioned in the last two decades by a variety of scholars (e.g., Orlikowski, 2010;Wagner et al, 2011;Leonardi, 2011) who have argued that such a perspective ignores the reciprocal influence between technology and its social context of emergence. This shift towards a social way of studying the relationship between IT and organization has two important consequences: that technologies are subjective and adaptive.…”

“…In particular, users' practical appropriation of a technology, which is strongly influenced by an organization's values and institutional characteristics, affects whether the "technology-in-use" becomes collaborative or not (Orlikowski, 2010).…”

Design and design research as contextual practice

“…In the literature on action design research, for instance, it has been argued that ''IT artifacts are ensembles shaped by the organisational context during development and use'' (Sein et al 2011, p 37). Sociomateriality stresses that artefacts (i.e., 'the material') and social activity (i.e., 'the social') co-constitute each other and cannot suitably be separated (Orlikowski 2007(Orlikowski , 2010. The aim of this ontological position is to show that our world is inherently sociomaterial in that the 'things' that we use in private and business life are co-defined by the social activity in which they are used.…”

“…At the same time, the artefact co-constitutes the very practice it is implicated in (Riemer and Johnston 2013). An ontology able to capture this understanding is necessarily non-dualistic in that entities, social and material, co-constitute each other relationally (Orlikowski 2010), or, put differently, are defined by their place in the holism of social practice (Riemer and Johnston 2013).…”