More from the Academy

The socio-materiality professional development workshop, run by Anne-Laure Fayard, Samer Faraj and Wanda Orlikowski stimulated thinking about the relationships between material, embodied, practices and social relationships and interactions. Theorizing sociomaterial practice is important, as phenomena observed in research are difficult to understand in terms of a social realm that is separate from / outside of the material world.


Questions that I brought to the PDW are:
• How to build socio-material constructivist (as opposed to social constructivist) explanations of organizational practices?
• How to use interviews as well as observation to study digitally-enabled work through the range of situated material practices?
• How our understanding of the role of management might be reframed in/through socio-material studies?

Back from Montreal

A set of interesting discussions around strategy as practice, the socio-material and digital, and new forms of work at the Academy of Management conference. Particular highlights were the workshop on 'strategy as practice' at HEC before the main conference, and a range of presentations by researchers who are starting to theorise about new forms of work - for example around issues of building trust in 'remote management'; and of projects with different levels of 'membership intensity.' Steve Barley's keynote on 'IT in the Wild' provoked thought about the changing forms of labour relations involved....

The paper that I discussed at the Academy is now published as: Whyte, J. and Lobo, S. (2010) Coordination and control in project-based work: digital objects and infrastructures for delivery, Construction Management and Economics, Vol. 28, Issue 6, 557-567.