Materiality and space: organizations, artefacts and practice edited by Francois‐Xaxier de Vaujany and Nathalie Mitev (eds) (2013), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 392 pp. £74

• Author: Helen Richardson
• Date: 01 November 2014
• Published date: 01 November 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12037

Book Review

Materiality and space: organizations, artefacts and practice

Francois-Xaxier de Vaujany and Nathalie Mitev (eds) (2013), Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan. 392 pp. £74

This edited book is the latest in a series launched in 2006 investigating complex

relationships and influences of technological development particularly focusing on

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), work, organisations and

globalisation. Materiality and Space emerged as a result of the 2012 Organizations,

Artefacts and Practices (OAP) workshop initiated by scholars at the London School of

Economics that took place at Université Paris Dauphine.

This book offers a wide variety of ideas and views to understand arguments with

regard to space and materiality. From the late 1990s two major themes were debated.

Firstly the ways in which material spaces are constituted through every day practices

and the need to develop organisation theory to embrace this. Secondly an attempt to

overcome the perceived dichotomy between the social and material calling for inves-

tigation of practices in organisations being constituted by and also producing material

and social dynamics. So this book helpfully sets out work from two multidisciplinary

camps: those distinguishing material and social elements at the level of agency put

forward by, for example, Leonardi et al. (2012), and scholars who emphasise the sym-

metry between the material and social that are meltedinto socio-material practices, àla

Orlikowski (2007) and others. Thus readers can obtain a good overview of many

relevant disciplinary influences including economic geography, social studies of tech-

nology, actor-network theory, and the sociology of architecture, and begin to engage

with ideas informed by theorists such as Wittgenstein, Whitehead, Callon, Latour,

Orlikowski, Leonardi and Barad. The book is thus an eclectic offering with no under-

pinning philosophy,and it aims to showcase a range of empirical studies with a variety

of analyses at the macro, meso and micro levels, with a view to helping make sense of

managerial practices and control conveyed by the space and material artefacts therein.

There are four parts to this book with key questions raised: what is materiality; how

sense is made of space and materials at the level of work practices in society and

organisations; how material artefacts are used to control organisation members; how

identity is managed and controlled through space and materiality; and what are the

institutional dimensions of socio-material practices?

Part 1 has four chapters and is concerned with the relationship between space,

materiality and practice in organisations exploring key notions of the concepts of

materiality, affordance, architecture and space itself.

Andrew Pickering begins by drawing on Stafford Beer’s adaptive interactive bio-

logical systems thinking to propose a ‘post humanist ontology’ describing organisa-

tions as cybernetic with an emergent ‘dance of agency’, steering unpredictablybut not

controlling. Informed by Taoism, Pickering challenges the notion that people are the

sole agents of intention and humans ‘call the shots’, rather he asserts that humans do

things, but so do rocks and TV sets, thereby acknowledging the multiple roles of

artefacts.

Aron Lindberg and Kalle Lyytinen then follow with a core theme of socio-

materiality—that of the affordance construct—borrowed from early studies of Human

Computer Interaction and eco-psychology. This theoretical device is particularly

adopted where there are ‘affordance configurations’ with a combination of artefacts

New Technology, Work and Employment 29:3

ISSN 0268-1072

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd282 New Technology, Work and Employment