Introduction: Materiality in Institutions
In recent years, scholars of organizations and management have embraced the “material turn” in the social sciences (Boxenbaum et al. 2018; Leonardi et al. 2012; Carlile et al. 2013a, b; de Vaujany and Mitev 2013; Robichaud and Cooren 2013). The material turn seeks to investigate and theorize the unique roles that materiality, including bodies, artifacts and technologies, play in social and organizational dynamics , such as their enabling and constraining influences on a variety of organizational phenomena. The attention to materiality is adding a novel and exciting layer of analysis to scholarship in organization and management theory , which—like the social science more broadly—has been dominated by cognitive and verbal perspectives for several decades (Barad 2003; De Vaujany and Mitev 2015). The integration of materiality is helping to shed light on many organizational and managerial phenomena that were previously neglected because our theories and methods were ill-equipped to capture them. In recent years, several branches of organization and management theory have started to engage with the material turn. Some scholarly communities were created around a shared interest in formulating theoretical accounts and developing empirical methods to decipher how materiality interacts with cognition, discourse and/or behavior in organizational dynamics (Carlile et al. 2013b; de Vaujany et al. 2014; Leonardi et al. 2012; de Vaujany and Mitev 2013).
In line with this view, scholars from multiple subdisciplines have highlighted the need for a more profound consideration of materiality within the areas of organizational communication (Castor 2016; Cooren et al. 2012; Vásquez and Plourde 2017), management of information systems (Robey et al. 2013), and management and organization studies (MOS) (Boxenbaum et al. 2018; Carlile et al. 2013a, b; de Vaujany and Mitev 2015). The objective is not only to grasp tangible, yet overlooked, aspects of materiality, but also to increase the empirical richness of scholarly investigation (Faraj and Azad 2012), in particular, to account better for visible dimensions of materiality in its literal sense (Carlile et al. 2013a; Vásquez and Plourde 2017). This turn to studying more tangible objects relates to growing voices from MOS that question discourses as primary analytical objects for research in MOS (Carlile et al. 2013b; Leonardi et al. 2012; Mitev and de Vaujany 2013; Orlikowski 2007). Gestures, pictures, social media, architectures and spaces are as performative as the verbal texts that often surround them. The heuristic journey to materiality has been frustrating so far due to the separation between the material and discursive worlds (Castor 2016; Cooren et al. 2012; Vásquez and Plourde 2017) and, in our view, due to the challenges related to investigating materiality without a prior discussion of its methodological , epistemological and ontological underpinnings.
The rising interest in materiality within MOS manifests also in conjunction with the fact that institutional theories have previously paid only limited attention to materiality. Institutions represent a dominant topic of study within MOS and have a pervasive impact on a large spectrum of organizational phenomena. They shape the definition of an organization’s mission (DiMaggio and Powell 1991), regulate relationships between organizations (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Suchman 1995) and contribute either positively or negatively to an organization’s success (Meyer and Rowan 1977). They also deeply influence the sustainability of an organizational system (Merton 1938), if not its survival, through trust repairing (Bachmann et al. 2015), role definition (Abdelnour et al. 2017) and complex integration mechanisms (Jourdan et al. 2017). Because institutions correspond to a core matter in organizational life, research on institutions has been attracting a significant proportion of analytical attention within the MOS scholarly community.
Past institutional research has emphasized the discursive and ideational views of institutions and institutional dynamics (Boxenbaum et al. 2016, 2018; Jones et al. 2013; Meyer et al. 2018; de Vaujany et al. 2014). As a result, the analysis of how objects and artifacts contribute to institutional dynamics has been neglected. To better integrate the material dimension of institutions, scholars are increasingly turning their interest toward materiality. Examples of research on the material turn in institutional theory include the material dimensions of institutional work (Lawrence et al. 2013), sensemaking (Stigliani and Ravasi 2012), legitimacy (Puyou and Quattrone 2018), and organizational responses to institutional pressure (Raaijmakers et al. 2018). Other examples include the role of space in organizational legitimation (Jones and Massa 2013; Lawrence and Dover 2015; Lawrence et al. 2013; de Vaujany et al. 2014), bodies and institutions (Martí and Fernández 2013; Stowell and Warren 2018), and the role of technology in institutional dynamics (Petrakaki et al. 2016).
Institutional scholars are also calling for an integration of material dimensions (Boxenbaum et al. 2016; de Vaujany et al. 2014; Jones et al. 2013) into institutional scholarship. Accordingly, institutional scholars have begun to incorporate artifacts, bodies , gestures , movements , architecture , and buildings in their methodological procedures (see Boxenbaum et al. 2018). Further integration of materiality into institutional theory is likely to not only renew the theory but also broaden our understanding of materiality within social and organizational settings. For instance, recent research suggests that elaborating an institutional approach to materiality leads scholars to embrace a more historical and temporal view of artifacts and movements, including how actors embody symbolic aspects that resonate with broader institutional dimensions (Arena and Douai, this volume; Carlile et al. 2013a, b; Stowell and Warren 2018; de Vaujany et al. 2014).
In this introduction, we discuss three aspects of the ongoing engagement of institutional research with materiality, which collectively represent the specific approach taken in this book. First, we discuss the way the increasing attention to materiality is structuring how institutional researchers think about the main conceptual components of institutional theory, in particular in relation to the two major substreams of institutional research: institutional logics and institutional work. Second, we consider how this material turn opens new questions related to the deeper conceptual layers of institutional inquiry, that is, questions related to the articulation of ontological, epistemological, methodological and, eventually, theoretical positions in institutional theory. This deeper approach stimulates institutional researchers to address the inherent diversity of materiality. Finally, we introduce an encompassing view of materiality within institutional analysis in the form of a reflexive journey, which points to four prominent aspects of materiality: artifacts and objects, space and time, digitality and information, bodies and embodiment. We then detail how the different chapters of the book exemplify the engagements of institutional research with materiality.
Increasing Attention to Materiality from Institutional Researchers
Institutional scholars have in recent years drawn on materiality to investigate institutional phenomena that deeply influence organizational dynamics. In opening this line of inquiry, many institutionalists have called for an extended investigation of how materiality impacts core theoretical concepts, such as institutional logics and institutional work.
Institutional logics are understood as collective practices and beliefs that root a system wider than an organization and shape the cognition and action of its members at a field level (Friedland and Alford 1991; Ocasio 1997). Institutional logics deeply impact the behavior of organizations and their members (Thornton et al. 2012) by “organizing cognitive frameworks that provide social actors with ‘rules of the game’ (…) and that operate, often implicitly, as practical guides for action” (Jones et al. 2013, p. 52).
An organization’s pattern of development can be deeply influenced by institutional logics combined with local meanings (Binder 2007). More specifically, institutional logics allow groups of actors to question, redefine, refine or legitimate identities, assumptions, practices and so on. By doing so, they frame material, practical and symbolic experiences in a dynamic fashion (Friedland and Alford 1991). Previous research has emphasized that rather than being mere “cultural dopes”, actors can use logics as a “tool kit” (Swidler 1986) and employ different logics at different times to achieve certain goals, such as making legitimacy claims. Scholarship has thus increasingly emphasized the importance of exploring how logics are enacted on the ground, assuming that individuals use them in their daily enactments (Thornton et al. 2012).
A traditional method to empirically study institutional logics in organizations is to trace the verbal discourse of organizational ...
