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Cambridge Journal of Economics Advance Access published online on November 5, 2009
Cambridge Journal of Economics, doi:10.1093/cje/bep058
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved.

The sociomateriality of organisational life: considering technology in management research

Wanda J. Orlikowski*

* Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Address for correspondence: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA; email: wanda{at}mit.edu

Drawing on a specific scenario from a contemporary workplace, I review some of the dominant ways that management scholars have addressed technology over the past five decades. I will demonstrate that while materiality is an integral aspect of organisational activity, it has either been ignored by management research or investigated through an ontology of separateness that cannot account for the multiple and dynamic ways in which the social and the material are constitutively entangled in everyday life. I will end by pointing to some possible alternative perspectives that may have the potential to help management scholars take seriously the distributed and complex sociomaterial configurations that form and perform contemporary organisations.

Key Words: Technology • Organisations • Sociomateriality • Practice

JEL classifications: O33, M10

Manuscript received April 23, 2008; final version received July 19, 2009.


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