WODA

Mobile Devices

Is IT social or material? Or sociomaterial? (Mazemanian et al)

  • A number of scholars have recently argued for the importance of taking materiality seriously in studies of organizations (Leonardi and Barley 2010, Orlikowski and Scott 2008).
  • ....Being able to easily carry the device everywhere, repeatedly and discreetly glance at it, be alerted by a red flashing light flash to new messages, and quickly scan the top-level information to decide whether or not to respond both reaffirmed and enhanced these workers’ sense of themselves as competent professionals...
  • Highlighting this materiality at work helped us understand how the use of mobile email devices became constitutive of what it took to be and act as an effective knowledge professional.
  • It allowed, as Dale (2005, p. 652) put it, the recognition that “humans enact social agency through a materiality which simultaneously shapes the nature of that social agency.”
  • One creates the other -> Essential for knowledge workers to have a phone
  • Reflect on how human agency is exercised and constrained (e.g. what scope/power do people have to change their situation/ context?)

Discussion