Introduction: How Can Materiality Inform Institutional Analysis?

Abstract

In recent years, scholars of organizations and management have embraced the “material turn” in the social sciences (Boxenbaum et al. 2018; Leonardi et al. 2012; Carlile et al. 2013a, b; de Vaujany and Mitev 2013; Robichaud and Cooren 2013). The material turn seeks to investigate and theorize the unique roles that materiality, including bodies, artifacts and technologies, plays in social and organizational dynamics, such as their enabling and constraining influences on a variety of organizational phenomena. The attention to materiality is adding a novel and exciting layer of analysis to scholarship in organization and management theory, which—like the social science more broadly—has been dominated by cognitive and verbal perspectives for several decades (Barad 2003; De Vaujany and Mitev 2015). The integration of materiality is helping to shed light on many organizational and managerial phenomena that were previously neglected because our theories and methods were ill-equipped to capture them. In recent years, several branches of organization and management theory have started to engage with the material turn. Some scholarly communities were created around a shared interest in formulating theoretical accounts and developing empirical methods to decipher how materiality interacts with cognition, discourse and/or behavior in organizational dynamics (Carlile et al. 2013b; de Vaujany et al. 2014; Leonardi et al. 2012; de Vaujany and Mitev 2013).