Materiality and change: Challenges to building better theory about technology and organizing

Abstract

Researchers have had difficulty accommodating materiality in voluntaristic theories of organizing. Although materiality surely shapes how people use technologies, materiality’s role in organizational change remains under-theorized. We suggest that scholars have had difficulty grappling with materiality because they often conflate the distinction between the material and social with the distinction between determinism and voluntarism. We explain why such conflation is unnecessary and outline four challenges that researchers must address before they can reconcile the reality of materiality with the notion that outcomes of technological change are socially constructed.

Introduction

Building theory about the relationship between information technology and organizing sooner or later leads one to contemplate the line between the material and the social, a line that looks less solid up close than it does from a distance. Contemporary students of technology and organizations generally acknowledge the importance of both the material and the social, regardless of from which side of the distinction they begin or on which side they end up. For example, authors of research on information technology remind readers that despite their materiality, technologies are products of negotiations (Constantinides and Barrett, 2006, Howcroft and Wilson, 2003, Orlikowski, 1992), human agency (Boudreau and Robey, 2005, Poole and DeSanctis, 2004, Vaast and Walsham, 2005) and personal interest (Kling, 1992, Markus and Benjamin, 1996, Scott and Wagner, 2003). Similarly, researchers acknowledge that organizing revolves around the interaction between people and machines (Mohr, 1971, Thompson and Bates, 1957), social and technical subsystems (Barley, 1990, Scott, 1998, Trist, 1981) or social and material practices (Orlikowski, 2002, Schatzki, 2005). In other words, there is general agreement that information technology and organizations both arise at the intersection of social and material phenomena. What remains unresolved, however, is the epistemological and ontological nature of the relationship between the material and the social and, hence, how information technologies and organizing are tied.

The difficulty of specifying the nature of this relationship often leads researchers to what Jackson, Poole, and Kuhn (2002) have called “the tendency to tilt”. Although theorists may argue that social and material factors are equally important, most papers on the creation, perpetuation or change of technologies and organizations eventually favor one or the other. One reason for tilting may be our tendency to conflate two important, but separate, philosophical distinctions: the difference between determinism and voluntarism, on one hand, and the distinction between materialism and idealism, on the other (Barley, 1998). Determinism holds that our actions are caused by technological, cultural and other forces prior to, external to, and independent of our behavior. Voluntarism takes the opposite stance, arguing that humans have agency (what philosophers call “free will”) and can shape their environments to achieve their interests and goals. To be a materialist is to hold that human action stems from physical causes and contexts such as geography, biology, climate, and technology. Conversely, idealists argue that ideas, norms, values, ideologies and beliefs (what most of us call the social) drive human action.

Although the distinction between determinism and voluntarism is orthogonal to the distinction between materialism and idealism, social scientists frequently write as if materialism implies determinism and idealism implies voluntarism. This is simply not the case.¹ To be sure, early work on information systems adopted a materialist stance and favored deterministic explanations for technologically-induced organizational change (Leavitt and Whistler, 1958, Mann and Williams, 1960, Swanson, 1974). It is also true that researchers have worked hard to counter the legacy of materialistic determinism by showing that users’ practices, beliefs and agendas significantly shape how information technologies affect organizing and that agency matters even when it is unwitting (Holstrom and Robey, 2005, Orlikowski, 2000, Poole and DeSanctis, 2004, Walsham, 2002). Authors of such studies often explicitly or implicitly criticize materialist accounts for promoting determinism and instead champion a perspective that is both more idealistic and more voluntarist (Boczkowski, 2004, Boudreau and Robey, 2005, Constantinides and Barrett, 2006, Schultze and Orlikowski, 2004).

Yet neither materialistic determinism nor voluntaristic idealism exhausts the universe of viable visions of technology and organizing. For example, it is possible to be an idealist and a determinist, as was Braverman (1974), who argued that technological deskilling was the inevitable outcome of a dominant managerial ideology that stressed the separation of conception from execution. Conversely, one can also be a materialist and a voluntarist, as are most ergonomists, who believe that technologies directly shape human behavior but that because technologies are designed and because designs can be altered, humans can both intend and change the social effects of a technology by redesigning it or, failing that, by refusing to use it.

The problems with conflating determinism with materialism, on one hand, and voluntarism (agency) with idealism (or the social) on the other are twofold. First, tilting to either social or material explanations of change too often becomes value-laden. Those who emphasize the material antecedents of technological or organizational change are often accused of being determinists and, hence, blind to the role that people play in bringing about technologies’ effects on organizing. Conversely, those who privilege social antecedents are chided for ignoring materiality and for being too quick to deny an artifact’s demonstrable constraints and affordances. Over time, such stances acquire a kind of moral authority that warrants programs of research that marginalize and even eschew alternative explanations of empirical findings. This leads to the second and ultimately more important problem: theoretical accounts that are epistemologically and ontologically unable to handle the entwining of the material and the social and that cannot speak with precision about degrees of agency and constraint.

Our agenda in this paper is to move toward reconciling materialism with voluntaristic (or agential) theories of change. Materiality matters for theories of technology and organizing because the material properties of artifacts are precisely those tangible resources that provide people with the ability to do old things in new ways and to do things they could not do before. The materiality of information technology remains grossly under-theorized (Orlikowski and Iacono, 2001, Zamutto et al., 2007), in large part, because conflating materialism with determinism poses subsidiary challenges that make it difficult to tease apart the role of the material and the social.

In this paper we outline four such challenges. The first challenge is simply to recognize that it is possible to talk about a technology’s materiality without also being a determinist. The second challenge is to broaden the range of technologies that contemporary researchers normally choose to study. The third is for researchers to study the relationship between development and use in order to understand how the practices of designers effect users and vice versa. The final challenge is for researchers to realize that they no longer need to demonstrate that technologies can occasion different outcomes in different social contexts. We have reached the point where more can be gained by asking why different organizations experience similar outcomes with the same technology. In outlining these four challenges our goal is to push research in directions that will stimulate new ways of understanding the dynamics of technologically-induced change and enable scholars to build better theory about the role of materiality in the process of organizing.