Entanglements in Practice: Performing Anonymity Through Social Media

YouTube’s Yoga with Adriene as a somametamnemata: Exploring experiences of self-care and wellness in times of crisis

Drawing on the Foucauldian technologies of the self, this study explores how individuals re-envision practices of wellbeing outside of traditional organizational contexts during extreme events. Based on a thematic analysis of 7234 comments posted on the Yoga with Adriene YouTube channel in 2020, this study unpacks a technologically mediated practice of self-care, which we conceptualize as somametamnemata. Our findings illustrate three entangled aspects of somametamnemata relating to yoga, a form of bodywork: Caring about self through practicing yoga online; caring about self and others through sharing about yoga in written comments; and caring about self and others through responding to shared verbalizations of yoga. This study distinguishes somametamnemata from known practices of self-care, advancing existing literature on technologies of self by overcoming the dichotomy between negative views of ill-being and positive views of wellbeing. By situating the potentiality of individual wellbeing within ill-being, we shift debates and discussions of “corporate wellness” beyond organizational boundaries.

Effect of integration capabilities with channel distributors on supply chain agility in emerging markets: an institution-based view perspective

Purpose

With emerging markets representing great growth opportunities and serving as indispensable components in the global supply chain, it is unclear how well modern supply chain management theories developed in advanced markets apply to emerging markets. This study integrates the institution-based view with supply chain management literature to examine how integration capabilities can be leveraged to achieve supply chain agility in emerging markets and how the efficacy of integration capabilities is shaped by internal and external institutional contexts.

Design/methodology/approach

This study examines how firms in emerging markets can leverage their platform integration and knowledge integration capabilities with channel distributors to improve the supply chain agility and how such relationships are shaped by both the internal (proxy by ownership structure) and external (proxy by regional openness) institutional contexts in which firms operate. Survey and archival data collected from 207 firms operating in China, one of the largest emerging markets, were used to test the proposed research model.

Findings

The results reveal that platform integration and knowledge integration are two driving forces for supply chain agility in the emerging markets. Moreover, the results indicate that state-owned firms are able to achieve higher supply chain agility from their investments in knowledge integration with channel distributors than non-state-owned firms. While firms in regions with a high level of openness enjoy higher supply chain agility from knowledge integration, firms in regions with a low level of openness can catch up by investing in platform integration with their channel distributors.

Originality/value

The authors extend the extant study on supply chain integration (SCI) research to examine how operational and strategic integration with channel distributors can help the focal firm achieve supply chain agility in emerging markets. The study results also enrich the existing studies in emerging markets by revealing the importance of the institutional context in which firms operate on B2B channel management.

Pandemic sociomaterial bricolage: how vulnerable communities used social media to tackle the COVID-19 crisis

Purpose

This research was conducted to understand how vulnerable communities used social media (SM) tools to face the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Affected by the lack of information and the absence of effective public policies, residents from slums in the city of Rio de Janeiro displayed new and unexpected uses to SM tools to tackle the health and socio-economic impacts of the pandemic.

Design/methodology/approach

The research methodology consisted of a qualitative, exploratory study, combining a series of in-depth interviews with the analysis of various posts, containing videos and texts, extracted from SM during the first six months of the pandemic. The data were collected in the context of 10 different communities in Rio de Janeiro city.

Findings

In the context of the pandemic, people combined different uses of SM not only to inform themselves and communicate with others but also to articulate and execute fundraising and food donation strategies within vulnerable communities. Accordingly, this SM use is characterized by improvisation, learning by doing and building resilience, which are all constructs related to the concept of bricolage. Users had no specific SM knowledge, and adjusted these technological tools to emergent new activities in practice, which is characteristic of sociomaterial process. In addition to emphasizing the importance of context for the emergence of the phenomenon, this work also highlights reliability, validity and authority as characteristics related to the citizen-led participation approach that was observed.

Research limitations/implications

Future research can develop approaches based on pandemic sociomaterial bricolage (PSB) aspects, which could guide governments and practitioners on building innovative solutions for the use of SM by the population, especially in emergency situations.

Originality/value

This study proposes a framework, termed PSB, to represent SM usage promoted by the pandemic context, which emerged from the triangulation of empirical data and an analysis based on the concepts of bricolage and sociomateriality.

Making sense of teamwork in mobile hybrid teams: a lexical analysis

Purpose

This study aims to investigate the ways mobile hybrid team members make sense of their teamwork.

Design/methodology/approach

Using surveys, this study examined 579 US-based mobile hybrid team members as they discussed their professional team activities. Leximancer software determined, through frequency and co-occurrence analysis of survey-resulting unstructured data sets, the themes mobile hybrid team members use to make sense of their teamwork.

Findings

Participants included the concepts Team, Technology, Communication, Context and Time relative to 25 specific content themes within their talk about teamwork. While thematic clusters such as Team and Communication were densely packed, Technology and Time co-occurred more widely in support of other content themes within the mobile hybrid team member data set. This suggests mobile technologies pervade mobile hybrid team members’ sensemaking about their work.

Originality/value

A first of its kind inquiry into how mobile hybrid team members make sense of work and performance within their teams, this study highlights the need to explore further how mobile hybrid team members frame and enact technological processes as integral to their organizational work and team outcomes.

The Digital Undertow: How the Corollary Effects of Digital Transformation Affect Industry Standards

Digital transformation research shows how waves of digitalization produce strategic changes within and across firms, enabling new forms of value creation. We argue that different but no less important processes of digital transformation are generated by the undertow produced by these waves. Digital undertow, a corollary effect of waves of digitalization, profoundly influences how firms operate by transforming the industry standards that coordinate and regulate their core business activities. This is producing what we refer to as digital displacement, a process that is significantly challenging the capacity of standards to effectively manage industry operations in the digital age.

Dealing with the Social Media Polycontextuality of Work

Practice and Policy Oriented Abstract

This article views social media for work not only as technologies that enable people to do certain things, but also as contexts with emerging norms and roles in which people participated. As they do so, people are confronted with opportunities and challenges that are inherent to social media polycontextuality, that is, with multiple social media–based contexts of relevance to work. This study offers guidance for people on how their participation in multiple social media contexts affects their work positively and negatively and how they can manage the associated opportunities and challenges. It also reveals how people’s engagement with social media polycontextuality may change as their employment status and work experiences evolve. Moreover, this study holds managerial implications by bringing awareness to how employees’ participation in social media contexts bypasses the organization and, thus, their typical purview but is still associated with work rather than leisure. Managers can understand better their employees’ situations and examine how social media contexts affect them within and beyond organizational boundaries and shape what they can or cannot do in their work. A better understanding of social media polycontextuality also brings managers new insights to communicate with employees.

To Engage or Not to Engage with AI for Critical Judgments: How Professionals Deal with Opacity When Using AI for Medical Diagnosis

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies promise to transform how professionals conduct knowledge work by augmenting their capabilities for making professional judgments. We know little, however, about how human-AI augmentation takes place in practice. Yet, gaining this understanding is particularly important when professionals use AI tools to form judgments on critical decisions. We conducted an in-depth field study in a major U.S. hospital where AI tools were used in three departments by diagnostic radiologists making breast cancer, lung cancer, and bone age determinations. The study illustrates the hindering effects of opacity that professionals experienced when using AI tools and explores how these professionals grappled with it in practice. In all three departments, this opacity resulted in professionals experiencing increased uncertainty because AI tool results often diverged from their initial judgment without providing underlying reasoning. Only in one department (of the three) did professionals consistently incorporate AI results into their final judgments, achieving what we call engaged augmentation. These professionals invested in AI interrogation practices—practices enacted by human experts to relate their own knowledge claims to AI knowledge claims. Professionals in the other two departments did not enact such practices and did not incorporate AI inputs into their final decisions, which we call unengaged “augmentation.” Our study unpacks the challenges involved in augmenting professional judgment with powerful, yet opaque, technologies and contributes to literature on AI adoption in knowledge work.

Watchers, Watched, and Watching in the Digital Age: Reconceptualization of Information Technology Monitoring as Complex Action Nets

Despite increasing studies of information technology (IT) monitoring, our understanding of how IT-mediates relations between the watcher and watched remains limited in two areas. First, either traditional actor-centric frameworks assuming predefined watcher-watched relationships (e.g., panopticon or synopticon) are adopted or monitoring actors are removed to focus on data flows (e.g., dataveillance, assemblages, panspectron). Second, IT monitoring research predominantly assumes IT artifacts to be stable, bounded, designed objects, with prescribed uses which provides an oversimplified view of actor relationships. To redress these limitations, a conceptual framework of veillance applicable to a variety of possible IT or non-IT-mediated relationships between watcher and watched is developed. Using the framework, we conduct a conceptual review of the literature, identifying IT-enabled monitoring and transformations of actors, goals, mechanisms and foci and develop an action net model of IT veillance where IT artifacts are theorized as equivocal, distributable and open for diverse use, open to edits and contributions by unbounded sets of heterogenous actors characterized by diverse goals and capabilities. The action net of IT veillance is defined as a flexible decentralized interconnected web shaped by multidirectional watcher-watched relationships, enabling multiple dynamic goals and foci. Cumulative contributions by heterogenous participants organize and manipulate the net, having an impact through influencing dispositions, visibilities and the inclusion/exclusion of self and others. The model makes three important theoretical contributions to our understanding of IT monitoring of watchers and watched and their relationships. We discuss implications and avenues for future studies on IT veillance.

Role of Social Media in Social Protest Cycles: A Sociomaterial Examination

Contemporary social media fueled social protest is self-organized, rapidly dynamic, and decentralized, constitutes vast populations, and is shaped by multiple and concurrent channels of information flows. Such protest activity is captured in the concept of social protest cycles, which are short periods of intense and contentious protest activity characterized by temporal dynamics, a large repertoire of protest action, confrontation and potential violence, and possible institutional action. Social protest cycles are the microfoundations of long-term social movements. They contain the seeds of potential societal transformation because their intense collective action can be constructively harnessed toward change. This paper examines the role of social media in social protest cycles. Drawing from the theoretical concept of sociomaterial assemblages, we conceptualize the social media enabled social protest cycle as an assemblage having social (e.g., people, elected leaders, police, judges) and technical (e.g., social media applications, online petition applications) components. We analyze how the social protest cycle transforms through performative intra-actions. The empirical context for the study is a social media enabled social protest cycle that emerged after a fatal rape incident in New Delhi, India. Data pertaining to the social protest cycle over the period December 17–25, 2012, were collected from social media activity on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, online blogs, and newspaper websites. Through mixed methods analysis we identify three intra-actions, consolidation, expansion, and intensification, and theorize how they transform the social protest cycle over time. The paper contributes to the information systems literature that studies social media–enabled social protest action. As theoretical contributions, it develops (1) the notion of intra-actions as organizing mechanisms and (2) a relational ontology for social media–enabled social protest action. Through these contributions, we suggest that the power of social media lies in its socially produced and emergent relationships with other entities in the social protest cycle.

Identifiability, Risk, and Information Credibility in Discussions on Moral/Ethical Violation Topics on Chinese Social Networking Sites

One heated argument in recent years concerns whether requiring real name supervision on social media will inhibit users’ participation in discoursing online speech. The current study explores the impact of identification, perceived anonymity, perceived risk, and information credibility on participating in discussions on moral/ethical violation events on social network sites (SNS) in China. In this study, we constructed a model based on the literature and tested it on a sample of 218 frequent SNS users. The results demonstrate the influence of identification and perception of anonymity: although the relationship between the two factors is negative, both are conducive to participation in discussion on moral/ethical violation topics, and information credibility also has a positive impact. The results confirmed the significance of risk perception on comments posted about moral/ethical violation. Our results have reference value for identity management and internet governance. Policies regarding users’ real names on the internet need to take into account the reliability of the identity authentication mechanism, as well as netizens’ perceptions of privacy about their identity and the necessity of guaranteeing content and information reliability online. We also offer some suggestions for future research, with a special emphasis on applicability to different cultures, contexts, and social networking sites.

Understanding the role of employees in digital transformation: conceptualization of digital literacy of employees as a multi-dimensional organizational affordance

Purpose

Much of recent academic and professional interest in exploring digital transformation and enterprise systems has focused on the technology or the organizations' external forces, leaving internal factors, in particular employees, overlooked. The purpose of this paper is to explore digital literacy of employees as an organizational affordance to capture contextual factors within which digital technologies are situated and are used.

Design/methodology/approach

We used the evidence-based practice for information systems approach, and undertook a systematic literature review of 30 papers coupled with brainstorming with 11 professional experts on the neglected topic of digital literacy and its assessment.

Findings

This paper draws upon affordance theory, and develops a novel framework for conceptualization of digital literacy of employees as an organizational affordance. We do this by distinguishing digital literacy at the individual level and organizational level, and by assessing digital literacy through Information/Cognitive and Social Practice/Articulation affordances.

Research limitations/implications

The current paper contributes to the notion of organizational affordances by examining the effect of interactions between employee-technology through digital literacy of employees in using digital technologies. We offer a novel conceptualization of digital literacy to improve understanding of the role of employee in digital transformation and utilization of enterprise systems. Thus, our definition of digital literacy offers an extension to the recent discussions in the IS literature regarding the actualization of affordances by bringing a lens of employees into the process.

Practical implications

This paper operationalizes digital literacy at organizational and individual levels, and offers managers a high-level tool to assess digital literacy of their employees. By doing so, managers can achieve the fit between employees' capabilities and digital technologies that will improve affordance actualization and support their digital transformation initiatives.

Originality/value

The study is one of early attempts to apply and extend affordance theory on digital literacy at organizational level by not limiting the concept to the individual level. The proposed framework improves the communication among researchers and between researchers and practitioners.

Protecting a whale in a sea of phish

Whaling is one of the most financially damaging, well-known, effective cyberattacks employed by sophisticated cybercriminals. Although whaling largely consists of sending a simplistic email message to a whale (i.e. a high-value target in an organization), it can result in large payoffs for cybercriminals, in terms of money or data stolen from organizations. While a legitimate cybersecurity threat, little information security research has directed attention toward whaling. In this study, we begin to provide an initial understanding of what makes whaling such a pernicious problem for organizations, executives, or celebrities (e.g. whales), and those charged with protecting them. We do this by defining whaling, delineating it from general phishing and spear phishing, presenting real-world cases of whaling, and provide guidance on future information security research on whaling. We find that whaling is far more complex than general phishing and spear phishing, spans multiple domains (e.g. work and personal), and potentially results in spillover effects that ripple across the organization. We conclude with a discussion of promising future directions for whaling and information security research.

Does Identity Disclosure Help or Hurt User Content Generation? Social Presence, Inhibition, and Displacement Effects

How will disclosing users’ identities affect their content-generation activities? Will this identity-disclosure policy in one section also change users’ behaviors in the other section? We answer these questions by using a natural experiment where a large corporate online community chose to disclose users’ identities in one section (the focal section) but not the other (the neighbor section). Our analyses show that in the focal section, disclosing identity increases social presence and inhibits users’ willingness to generate content, resulting in greater effort spent per content but smaller content volume. Moreover, identity disclosure in the focal section has a strong displacement effect: users generate more pieces of content but decrease their effort per content in the neighbor section, where they remain anonymous. The intensity of these effects depends on users’ pursuit of volume- and effort-based image. For the managers of online communities, disclosing users’ identity information inevitably changes their content-generation activities, and the unintended displacement effect cannot be overlooked. Practitioners can adjust these effects by changing reward systems and how users earn image from content generation. Given that many websites rely on users’ voluntary content generation, the effects of relevant policies should be comprehensively evaluated.

The Town Square in Your Pocket: Exploring Four Metaphors of Social Media

In this paper we explore the use of four metaphors as a means to illuminate particular dimensions of social media logic—the norms, strategies, and economics underpinning its dynamics. Our objective is to utilise metaphor to instigate critical reflection about the nature of social media use behaviour and the role of habitual social media use in our experiences of reality. The first metaphor, social media as a town square, draws attention to the centrality of social media platforms in their users’ lives, fear of missing out, augmented reality and digital dualism. Through the second metaphor, social media as a beauty pageant, we explore self-presentation or image crafting, social comparison and self-evaluation. The third metaphor, social media as a parliament, emphasises the role of social media platforms as spaces for online deliberation and we consider social media capital, homophily and polarisation as themes. Finally, we explore anonymity, deindividuation and deceptive self-presentation through our fourth metaphor, social media as a masquerade ball. We argue that social media scholars can use these and other metaphors to enhance communication of their research findings. Additionally, we believe that social media metaphors can be powerful pedagogical and communication tools, particularly when working with students for whom high levels of social media use is the norm.

Information-Sharing Behavior on WeChat Moments: The Role of Anonymity, Familiarity, and Intrinsic Motivation

Information-sharing behavior is affected by identity recognition perception. The current study aims to delve into the impact of familiarity and anonymity on information-sharing behavior, and the mediating role of intrinsic motivations on WeChat Moments. We hypothesized a mediator role of intrinsic motivations in the relationship between an individual's perceptions and information sharing. Based on the self-determination theory, a model was created and tested using a sample of 531 frequent users. In this study, these users were asked to use WeChat Moments, the most popular mobile private social networking site in China. The results demonstrate the significance of familiarity and identifiability in an interpersonal relationship, when using social networking sites. Moreover, the influence of perceived anonymity on information-sharing behavior, which is entirely mediated by intrinsic motivation has been validated from an empirical perspective. Our findings extend previous studies by showing the totally mediated effect of perceived anonymity on information-sharing behavior on WeChat Moments and the influential mechanism of intrinsic motivation. The results will inform researchers about the importance of incorporating the interpersonal structural features and intrinsic motivation of social networking sites into future studies on online information-sharing behavior. Important ways to promote attention and share information involve building a familiar relationship with communities and equipping oneself with off-line relations. Final indications for future developments are provided, with a special emphasis on the development of these findings in various social networking sites contexts.

The emergence of connected discretion

Purpose

Previous studies repeatedly claim that social media challenge and even disrupt organizational boundaries conditioning discretionary work. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how police officers, drawing on institutionalized value logics, actively shape their awareness of how to use social media with discretion.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with police officers from Sweden, the analysis explores similarities and variations in how they assess their discretionary awareness of how to manage social media potentials across different police practices. Supporting documents have been analyzed to put interviews into context.

Findings

The analysis shows how police officers justify their awareness of how to manage two social media potentials providing communicative efficiency and networking opportunities, by applying two justificatory modalities of momentary reconciliation. Contributing to previous research, findings show how these modalities accommodate tensions between different value logics urging officers to engage in situated problem solving or moderation of the intensity in different connections. By drawing on discretionary awareness about enduring value tensions, police officers maintain legitimate claims on social media discretion. The study also complements previous research depicting digital communication and discretion as mutually exclusive. Findings suggest that web-based digitalization like social media raises new demands of awareness of a connected discretion.

Originality/value

Previous research rarely analyses officers’ awareness of how to manage idiosyncratic social media challenges. By introducing the concept discretionary awareness, this study illuminates how arrangements of institutionalized value logics guide police officers in applying “good judgment” in day-to-day use of social media.

The negotiated order and electronic patient records: A sociomaterial perspective

In this article, we consider how the notion of the negotiated order can be reinterpreted by drawing on ideas from sociomateriality. We argue that the negotiated order is an ongoing accomplishment in which a heterogeneous set of situated sociomaterial practices (or actors) are implicated. To do this, we draw upon an in-depth study of the use of a computerised physician order entry system in a hospital in Saudi Arabia. We explore how a computerised physician order entry system, as a new sociomaterial actor, performatively repositions the actors involved and hence offers the conditions of possibility for medical work practices to be renegotiated. We show that it is often contingent, mundane, situated sociomaterial practices that enact the conditions under which the negotiated order becomes re-established in terms of division of labour, legitimacy, collaboration, and social capital. We argue that as the social and material are co-constitutive, or intra-actional, it makes more sense to talk about the negotiated intra-actional order rather than the negotiated order. Importantly, such a change in conceptual vocabulary reveals the empirical and ontological issues at stake; essential for a more nuanced understanding of change/becoming.

Culture, technology, and process in ‘media theories’: Toward a shift in the understanding of media in organizational research

The concept of ‘media’ can provide an anchor point for developing organizational theories about information and communication technologies, materiality, communication, and organizational change. However, to date, organizational research often takes the meaning of the term media for granted. This article therefore explores various conceptions of media, outlining how such theories can be used for advancing the conception of media in organizational research. Using three ideal-typical branches of conceptions of media, we explore key concerns regarding media in existing literature outside of organizational research. First, the culture and power branch problematizes how cultural practices and power structures are inscribed through media; second, the technology and infrastructure branch emphasizes the inherent ‘eigenlogik’ of media technology; and third, the process and change branch explores how existing economic and aesthetic conventions in media persist over time. Using organizational media in general and enterprise social media in particular we discuss how each of these three ideal-typical branches offer pathways for organizational research. Specifically we argue for shifting the use of the term media beyond merely describing tools for communication as media theories offer insights for understanding the long-term consequences of materiality and ontological co-constitution within sociomaterial assemblages.

Absorptive Capacity and Enterprise Systems Implementation

In this paper, we focus on how firms engaged in enterprise systems (ES) implementations absorb knowledge from consultant companies. We take a practice-based view of absorptive capacity (AC) and focus on how prior-related knowledge - a necessary condition to absorb new external knowledge - is created (when it is lacking). We therefore move from the traditional positivistic approach to AC to a more nuanced and practice-based approach of the construct, involving materiality and power considerations. We contribute to the IS literature by providing an account of AC that departs from the deterministic and outcome-focused approach that has characterized past studies and propose a view that accounts for everyday practices.

The promise and peril of agency as motion: A feminist new materialist approach to sexual violence and sexual harassment

Organizational scholars have established that sexual harassment, the most studied kind of sexual violence, is an organizational problem. Extending this work, we analyze two critical events regarding sexual violence in the United States—one in the military and another at a university—in which discourse detracts from understanding the problem in this way. We draw upon feminist new materialism and its primary method—diffraction—to track ‘cuts’, the practices that simplify and pause agency’s complex, perpetual motions. Our analysis shows that agency moves in discussions about the aftermath of violence. That momentum highlights the organization’s capacity to respond to rape. Even so, during discussions about enacting violence, the perpetual motion of agency congeals around discrete humans, thereby maintaining assault as an individual act. These cuts, whereby agency pauses on individual perpetrators, obscure how organizational dynamics make sexual violence more or less likely to occur. We suggest that a focus on agency’s kinetic qualities can help feminist scholars continue to highlight how the systemic aspects of harassment and other forms of violence become hard to notice.

Does Identification Influence Continuous E-Commerce Consumption? The Mediating Role of Intrinsic Motivations

The motivation behind online consumption behavior is different from that of online social behavior, and research is lacking regarding the impact of identification on e-commerce consumption. The current research examines the influence of identification, which is perceived anonymity, and intrinsic motivation on the continuous purchasing behaviors on retailing e-commerce websites based on self-determination theory. The mediating role of intrinsic motivation was also empirically tested from a sample of 661 frequent consumers using the partial least squares approach. The findings were: (1) Identification negatively influences perceived anonymity, and its low, but significantly positive, influence on continuous e-commerce consumption were totally mediated by perceived competence, perceived autonomy, and perceived relatedness. (2) Perceived anonymity positively influences self-determination factors, which has partly mediating impact between perceived anonymity and continuous consumption. (3) The authenticity and concealment of identity are based on different mechanisms, but both of them are conducive to promoting continuous purchases. On retailing e-commerce websites, customers’ identity management should consider both identification in the background and anonymity perception in the service, and the contributions of the service to promote consumers’ perceived competence and perceived autonomy are important in continuous consumption.

The role of discourse in transforming digital infrastructures

Radical shifts in large information technology programmes or digital infrastructures are unusual, but they do occur, usually as a consequence of problems or misalignment. What we know less about is the role of discourse in these shifts. Our interest in this article is to investigate the role of discourse when digitalisation programmes encounter problems. Building on Foucault’s theory of discourse, our research question is: what is the role of discourse in the transformation of digital infrastructures? Our research approach is a critical realist case study, discussing three cases from eHealth innovation. We use Foucault’s archaeological methodology to identify the emerging discursive formations when a programme encounters difficulties. This enables us to analyse the causal relationship between discursive formations and other mechanisms in the infrastructure. We offer two contributions: first, we outline a framework to understand the role of discursive formations in digital transformation; second, we propose a set of configurations to explain how contextual factors and causal mechanisms contingently lead to the transformation of a digital infrastructure.

Don’t throw rocks from the side-lines

Purpose

Social media such as blogs are being widely used in organizations in order to undertake internal communication and share knowledge, rendering them important boundary objects. A root metaphor of the boundary object domain is the notion of relatively static and inert objects spanning similarly static boundaries. A strong sociomaterial perspective allows the immisciblity of object and boundary to be challenged, since a key tenet of this perspective is the ongoing and mutually constituted performance of the material and social. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

The aim of the research is to draw upon sociomateriality to explore the operation of social media platforms as intra-organizational boundary objects. Given the novel perspective of this study and its social constructivist ontology, the authors adopt an exploratory, interpretivist research design. This is operationalized as a case study of the use of an organizational blog by a major UK Government department over an extended period. A novel aspect of the study is the use of data released under a Freedom of Information request.

Findings

The authors present three exemplar instances of how the blog and organizational boundaries were performed in the situated practice of the case study organization. The authors draw on the literature on boundary objects, blogs and sociomateriality in order to provide a theoretical explication of the mutually constituted performance of the blog and organizational boundaries. The authors also invoke the notion of “extended chains of intra-action” to theorize changes in the wider organization.

Originality/value

Adoption of a sociomaterial lens provides a highly novel perspective of boundary objects and organizational boundaries. The study highlights the indeterminate and dynamic nature of boundary objects and boundaries, with both being in an intra-active state of becoming challenging conventional conceptions. The study demonstrates that specific material-discursive practices arising from the situated practice of the blog at the respective boundaries were performative, reconfiguring the blog and boundaries and being generative of further changes in the organization.

Spatiality as Care: A Heideggerian Perspective on Sociomaterial Practices

The relationship between technological artefacts and the social settings of their design, production and use has received considerable attention in recent years, particularly through the emergence of the sociomateriality literature. This paper reviews extant conceptualizations and discusses the contribution of a Heideggerian perspective to the study of sociomaterial practices. Drawing on insights from Heidegger’s ‘existential spatiality’, an alternative view of spatiality is presented, namely, spatiality as care rather than physical extendedness. Then, the sensitizing concepts of ‘theoretical significance’ and ‘practical significance’ of technological artefacts are introduced grounded in these insights. Finally, implications of spatiality as care for the emergence and change of sociomaterial practices are discussed.

‘Welcome to the whiteboard, the new member of the team’: Identity regulation as a sociomaterial process

Organizations are frequently subject to changes that promote new and/or (supposedly) trendy identities for their members. Various studies have sought to understand how such identity regulation processes are achieved through discourse, a fact that has led researchers to call for a more material understanding of this phenomenon. Through an in-depth ethnography of a transformation programme aimed at constructing a new social identity among project managers – that of internal consultant – we find that identity regulation is exercised through a sociomaterial process affording the performativity of the promoted identity, mainly through the consultants’ bodily performances. This is important because it shows how identity regulation is achieved through both (and intertwined) discourse and materiality.

Sociomateriality and Information Systems Research

This paper provides an elaboration and comparison of two main streams of "sociomateriality" research within Information Systems (IS) discipline. Through the rapid and controversial emergence of discussions around sociomateriality, IS research has become entangled with the radical ideas derived from quantum mechanics. The philosophical elaboration of the implications of quantum mechanics, as formulated by physicist/philosopher Karen Barad, has provided a source of inspiration and a basis on theorizing for many IS scholars. Agential realism (AR) questions the Cartesian assumption of inherent and fixed demarcation between matter and meaning, and reworks many taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning much of IS research. In contrast, some IS scholars have sought to preserve the more conservative and established assumptions, and (re)turned to critical realism (CR) in order to fit sociomateriality to IS theorizing without radically reworking the Cartesian assumption. Thence, while both make references to 'sociomateriality', their conceptions build on largely different foundations, and use very different vocabulary to describe the phenomenon of interest that easily leads to confusion and to philosophically incongruent theorizing. By elaborating and juxtaposing the two perspectives of sociomateriality and related concepts (ontology/epistemology, matter, agency, time and space), this paper extends and contributes to the prior discussions (1) by providing generic research frameworks; (2) by outlining and explaining the related lexicons; (3) and by foregrounding challenges and opportunities to conduct sociomateriality research.

Doing Sociomateriality Research in Information Systems

This paper agrees with Mueller et al.'s (2016) view that researchers who want to adopt a sociomaterial approach often find themselves confused regarding research methods. However, it departs from Mueller's et al. suggestion to seek guidance from the structural-functionalist approach of Parsons' and Shils' (1951) General Theory of Action. The paper argues that finding a methodological framework for research following a sociomaterial approach has to be consistent with the philosophy, ontology and roots of this approach and that it is limiting to read the post-human approach of sociomateriality through a structural-functionalist lens. The paper briefly reviews the roots of the sociomaterial approach in sociology and information systems and offers a methodological guidance based on Actor Network Theory (ANT) and post ANT/Feminist lenses.