The Sociomateriality of Information Systems: Current Status, Future Directions

摘要

Our motivation for putting together this special issue on "Sociomateriality of Information Systems and Organizing" was the mounting interest in the relationship between the social and the material, in the context of our increasingly digital society. The attention to this relationship is manifested in the emergence of studies of technology intended to augment and complement, but also and importantly, to question the received views on technology in social life (see Carlile et al. 2013a; Leonardi et al. 2012; Suchman, 2007). Sociomateriality stands out as a symbol for the interest in the social and the technical, and in particular, the subtleties of their contingent intertwining. Promoted in the IS discipline primarily by Wanda Orlikowski and Susan Scott (Orlikowski 2007,2010; Orlikowski and Scott 2008), this "umbrella" concept, to use their terminology, has fostered an entire stream of new research based on a so-called relational ontology (e.g., Slife 2004; Wagner et al. 2011, Wagner et al. 2010). The assumptions underpinning a relational ontology are different from those underpinning the substantialist ontology that dominates IS and management research (Carlile et al. 2013b; Emirbayer 1997; Introna 2013). While a substantialist ontology assumes that human beings and things-the social and the material-exist as separate and self-contained entities that interact and affect each other, a relational ontology assumes that "the social and the material are inherently inseparable" (Orlikowski and Scott 2008, p. 456). Entities, human beings, and things exist only in relations: they are performed and continuously brought into being through relations (Latour 2005; Orlikowski 2010). This relational underpinning of sociomateriality has many implications for extant notions of technology, agency, society, materiality, morality, and ethics, to name just a few (Carlile et al. 2013b).