Objects of Knowledge in Organizations

Report on ‘The Power of Objects in Shaping Workplace Practices’, a sub-theme at the 20th Colloquium of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS)

From July 1st to 3rd the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) held its 20th Colloquium on The Organization as a Set of Dynamic Relationships in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The Colloquium attracted over a thousand participants from 44 different countries. The conference was divided in 43 different sub themes of which The Power of Objects in Shaping Workplace Practices, the sub theme I attended, received most abstracts. The convenors, Silvia Gherardi (University of Trento) and Antonio Strati (University of Trento), were inclusive in order to enhance discussion between participants with various backgrounds. The sub theme consisted of eleven sessions (some parallel), each consisting of five papers, spread over the three days.

The convenors have organized other workshops in the past on what they call ‘practice-based studies’. Scholars who investigate processes of learning and knowing in work and organization have become increasingly interested in practice (how activity is carried out in the workplace and how this relates to knowing in practice and organising processes). Practice-based studies are thus an emergent field within the sociology of organization and informed by different approaches (situated learning theory, activity theory, workplace studies, actor-network theory, etc.). At the EGOS conference specific attention was paid to the role of objects in learning and knowing.

What is an object? This was a question that came to the fore time and time again. The participants referred to many different things as objects, amongst which networks, team meetings, electronic patient records, pens, and water samples. They could be discursive (ideas are regarded as real things in practice) or material. Some argued that we cannot a priori distinguish what is an object and what not: we have to study how objects emerge and become referred to as objects. Sometimes objects and humans (if one can distinguish them) engage in relationships. Cristiano Storni (University of Trento) argued that a new unit of analysis then emerges which is neither human nor an object (or non-human). This is of course a familiar debate for people familiar with Science and Technology Studies (STS). I had really been looking forward to discussing the relation between objects and learning and knowing in organizations, however, often very localised practices were studied and sometimes the relation to wider institutional practices, or the knowing and learning in these practices, remained unclear. At times, this resulted in repeating insights well-known (at least) in the STS literature for some time now. Yet, sometimes the study of localised practices also offered new ways of thinking about practices. Below I will mention a few papers which I found particularly interesting (unfortunately I cannot mention all of them) and which revealed something about the relation between objects and organizations.

Christian Heath (King’s College London) spoke about how objects become commodified and given value in a collaborative process at auctions in the UK. With help of conversation analysis and a videotape which showed the gestures made by the auctioneer, he investigated in detail how the ownership of objects is transferred and how the value of objects gets constituted in only a few moments. The constitution of value in this setting seems a contingent process, yet, the process of auctioning has to provide legitimacy and trust in the final value of the object. In a few seconds, the career of the object and the social relations around the object can change totally. The value of the object is thus not inherent in the object itself, but established by social relations and the organizational setting. However, this particular organizational setting would not exist if there would not be objects to auction. This mutual construction of object and organizational practices came back in many papers. One other example was a study in which the role of a pen was investigated in meetings of a group of designers (Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, University of Helsinki). The pen orchestrated the dynamics of the conversation (handing someone the pen is giving someone the right to speak in a group of designers; the expert who holds the pen temporarily holds the future of the product in his/her hands) and made it possible to work collectively. The pen thus expands someone’s agency temporarily and can (re)order a situation.

Others showed how objects do not change situations by creating new orders, but are regarded as stable factors in an ever changing environment. Silvia Jordan (University of Innsbruck) presented a paper which showed that objects can fulfil different roles for different people in a department of anaesthesiology. For inexperienced nurses who started to work in this department, objects provided stability in an environment of otherwise ever changing routines and workplaces. The nurses preferred standardised technologies to the newest devices, because being able to rely on the instruments was necessary for them: the routinisation of cognitive processes took place through technical objects. However, experienced nurses showed less trust in the technological devices; for them the objects were more ambiguous. Christian Heath added that ambiguity results from treating the technology as independent, whereas it always has to be skilfully interpreted: one needs to know under what circumstances one can ignore an alarm and under what circumstances one needs to pay attention to it.

Laura Lucia Parolin (University of Trento) continued talking about medical settings, however, she discussed what happens when the object is absent. She investigated a case of telemedicine and found that classifications and labels of the object are necessary to be able to talk about it. General Practitioners (GP’s) and cardiologists use standardized typologies to be able to communicate about a specific patient. It was interesting to see that the cardiologist had a need for more specific labels than the GP. Categorisations were also important in my own paper which argued that in order to create a water sample that complies with the water quality regulations, the water sample (or object) has to be materially constructed by adding a preservative to the sample bottle to neutralise the substances that may otherwise affect the amount or characteristics of the substance that needs to be measured. For the water company it would be easier to take one sample with which all regulatory substances could be measured, however, the water has agency and can resist certain classifications. At first the object has to be created materially to be transformed into a number at a computer screen later on where it can re-order and transform information obtained from analysing the sample. Here we enter the realm of virtual objects.

Paolo Landri (Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies, Italy) explored how information and communication technologies redistributed competences and performances at Italian public schools. Dirk Bunzel (Keele University) investigated how customer service became virtual, and dematerialised, in an Australian coastal hotel. In order to provide the guests with the best service, the hotel simulates service scenarios and designed an ideal guest. The virtual service has become so ‘real’ or ‘hyperreal’ to use Baudrillard’s concept that employees can be sanctioned on basis of their encounter with a virtual guest which Bunzel calls neither real nor entirely fictitious, but a Phantom (based on texts by Günther Anders). He argued that the ontological status of the imaginary object (the guest) can shape hotel practices.

A paper by Gianni Lorenzoni and Alessandro Narduzzo (both from the University of Bologna) however stressed that objects can still be material and fulfil a special role in organizations. The Swatch Creative Lab (that produces most of the famous watches) stores concepts of watches, also the ones that were not selected for the market. This archive of material objects (both successful and unsuccessful) is what they call a ‘huge repertoire of solutions, combinations of colours, ideas, material, and concepts’ that designers can use for inspiration and that are in that sense objects of knowledge or objects of knowledge construction. It provides an organizational memory.

The main conclusions were that objects and organizations always co-perform; that objects are never alone, but always interpreted and experienced in a particular setting at a particular time; and that objects often transform and that these transformations should be studied. A number of questions was raised as well. How can objects be studied? Is the researcher part of or apart of the practice in which the object plays a role? If objects can be regarded as boundary objects, what is the ‘in between’ boundaries? If objects can be regarded as objects of knowledge, should we pay more attention to the unaccomplished, to what is not learned and how it is not learned? Should we not study more how objects sometimes do not bridge boundaries, but create them, limit interaction, and resist certain practices? A sociology of attachment is needed: what happens when people get attached to (or dependent on) objects? Objects and organizational practices are mutually constructed, but there are also multiple constructions: what role do these play in organizations? If one wants to study an artefact to understand organizational functioning, is there a way to find out in advance which objects are strategic and will bring us an understanding of organizational processes or can we only know this retrospectively? What happens if we give agency to objects? In other words: what are the political implications of practice-based studies? And who are we writing for? Who is the subject and who has the power to define an object? If there is no object without a subject, is there a subject without an object? If the authority of the subject (an author, a doctor) is challenged, what happens to the object? (Robert Grafton Small, University of Leicester, suggested that academics going to conference might feel like an appendix to their paper, because it is the paper going to the conference and no one at the conference knows whether you really are the author).

These questions suggest many possibilities for further research projects. Personally, I would especially be interested in more research that explicitly addresses the role of (material) objects in learning and knowing in organizations; research that attempts to combine a micro approach with the opportunities and limits (which can be difficult to address with help of an actor-network approach) the institutional or organizational environment may provide and set.

The author is affiliated with the Free University, Amsterdam.