When Environment Matters: Inter-Organizational Effects on Sociomaterial Imbrications and Change

摘要

Previous research on sociomateriality, a recently developed perspective arguing that social and material aspects acquire their properties in the process of their mutual imbrications, has mainly focused on an intra-organizational level of analysis. In this paper we take another perspective and investigate how the external environment and inter-organizational relations influence within-organizational processes of sociomaterial imbrications. Based on extensive data including 68 interviews from the field, as well as rich document and archival sources, our case-study looks at communities of social computing developing their routines and technologies over a 16-year period in the market of Internet access providers. This approach helped us to investigate the diversity of inter-organizational influence, from historical, social-class, and indirect institutional influence to tense resource-based competition and institutional interplay. Our findings indicate that inter-organizational influence is an important factor shaping the processes of change in organizational routines and technologies and only partly supports the recent findings of Paul Leonardi about the perception-based nature of these changes as we evidence that this is not applicable in certain types of environments. Based on our findings we develop a process model of inter-organizational influence on sociomaterial imbrications and change and discuss its implications for theory and practice.