Making Organizational Facts, Standards, and Routines: Tracing Materialities and Materializing Traces

Abstract

“One area where we are looking to cut waste and costs at the moment, is ink usage” described Peter, the Managing Director (MD) of a newspaper printing factory.¹ He explained how ink usage had stood out as a particular issue when he was reviewing the monthly group figures that are centrally produced: “I noticed that others [other factories in the group] were performing better than us on ink usage. We needed to find ways of reducing costs and waste in this area, so I got Matthew to look at it in more detail”. In addition to raising questions about how certain issues become seen as a “matter of concern” within this organizational setting — a problem to be solved — it also draws our attention to how we might study these issues in terms of the practices and process of organizing. While reducing ink usage is just one example of the complex and heterogeneous practices and relations which underlie newspaper printing, it provides an ideal case to study the process of fact, truth, and decision-making within such a setting and how certain issues become translated into ideas of “good” and “bad” practices. Furthermore, through the concept of material memory traces, we can begin to rethink the ideas of materiality, space, time, and action in relation to the practices of organizing by unpacking and enhancing our sensitivity to these fact-making processes.