Materiality and Time ― Historical Perspectives on Organizations, Artefacts and Practices

Sociomaterial research overcomes the dichotomy between social and material worlds by concentrating on organizational practices. These practices are constituted by, but also produce, material and social dynamics. This research is currently having an important impact in management studies and adopts a subjective investigation of time to explore materiality and materialization. Studying the institutional evolution of an organization implies long time spans and it is shown more clearly through the inclusion of material traces of past actions.

Materiality and Time is split into three parts: Part I explores how time is materialized and performed in organizations, i.e. how artefacts and material space perform time and temporal dynamics in organizations. Part II examines how organizations and organizational members are constituted by and constitutive of material artefacts. Part III reflects on what a historical perspective on these materializations can bring to the study of organizations. Contributions focus on the materialization of time and the material dynamic of organizations.

Pierre Laniray is a PhD candidate at Universite Paris-Dauphine having obtained a Masters in Political Science and a Masters in Business Consulting and Information Technologies. Grounded in organization theory and information systems, his current research looks at the sociomaterial aspects of professional identity (or workplace identity). His teachings relate to management of information systems and strategizing with ICT.

Nathalie Mitev is an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics, Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management and has held prior positions at Salford University in Manchester and City University Business School in London. Her research focuses on the organizational aspects of information systems and technology, particularly from a sociological and political perspective. She has published critical work in management studies, including the Journal of Management Studies, Management Learning, and Personnel Review, and information systems, such as the European Journal of Information Systems, the Journal of Information Technology, Information Technology and People, The Information Society, and Information Technology for Development. She is a visiting professor at the Ecole de Management de Strasbourg and the Institut d'Administration des Entreprises at Grenoble University.

Emmanuelle Vaast is an associate professor of information systems at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University. She received her Ph.D. from Ecole Polytechnique, France. Her research questions practices and their transformations at the individual, community, network, organizational, and field levels, especially as they relate to innovations and the introduction of new technologies.

Francois-Xavier de Vaujany is professor of management and organization studies at Universite Paris-Dauphine, France. His research focuses on the relationship between space, artefacts and practices in organizations, in particular (but not exclusively) in the context of ICT-related practices. His main ongoing research explores the relationship between spatial practices and legitimacy (in particular for global universities or business schools), information and sociomaterial practices, or fashion cycles in the adoption of IT by organizations (through the ethnographic analysis of tradeshows in France and Spain).