Materiality, Sociomateriality, and Socio-Technical Systems: What Do These Terms Mean? How are They Related? Do We Need Them?

TLDR

The chapter surveys the historical use of the terms materiality, sociomateriality, and socio‑technical systems in organization studies and information systems research. It examines how these concepts overlap and diverge, proposing that materiality refers to enduring technological properties, sociomateriality to the collective spaces where people engage with artifacts, and that sociomaterial practice aligns with the technical subsystem shaping and being shaped by human tasks.

Abstract

This chapter reviews the history of three terms increasingly used by researchers in the fields of organization studies and information systems: "materiality," "sociomateriality" and "socio-technical systems." After this review, I explore ways in which these terms overlap and depart in meaning from one another in scholars' writings. I suggest that materiality might be viewed as a concept that refers to properties of a technology that transcend space and time, while sociomateriality may be used to refer to the collective spaces in which people come into contact with the materiality of an artifact and produce various functions. I suggest that the concept of a sociomaterial practice is akin to what socio-technical systems theorists referred to as the "technical subsystem" of an organization, or the way that people's tasks shape and are shaped by their use of machines. This technical subsystem is recursively organized alongside the social subsystem of an organization, which is characterized by an abstract set of roles, communication patterns, and so on.