Sociomateriality
Sociomateriality is a theory built upon the intersection of technology, work and organization, that attempts to understand "the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday organizational life." It is the result of considering how human bodies, spatial arrangements, physical objects, and technologies are entangled with language, interaction, and practices in organizing. Specifically, it examines the social and material aspects of technology and organization, but also emphasizes the centrality of materials within the communicative constitution of organizations. It offers a novel way to study technology at the workplace, since it allows researchers to study the social and the material simultaneously. It was introduced after legacies of contingency theory and structuration theory had characterized the field of Information System research in Management Studies. Early papers by Wanda Orlikowski feature structuration theory and practice theory. However, the key papers for sociomateriality stem from the later work of Orlikowski in collaboration with Susan Scott. The concept adopted the focus on relations from Bruno Latour's and John Law's actor-network theory (ANT) and further opposes the Kantian dualism of subject and object drawing on Karen Barad's and Lucy Suchman's feminist studies. Drawing on Barad, sociomateriality proposes the concept of agential realism. Key aspects