In the context of organization studies (see e.g. Tsoukas and Knudsen, 2005[3] or Clegg et al., 2006[4]), a turn is a collective direction of research, focused on some coherent sets of concepts, theories and ideas, which represent a point of bifurcation for the field itself.
It emerged in the nineties, precisely because materiality and the modes of existence of things were questioned by the digitalization of societies and organizations (Van Dijk, 2012[5]), the disembodiment of agency (Hayles, 1999[6]), and the increasingly distributed modalities of collective activity (e.g. with mobile technologies, digital nomadism, systematization of entrepreneurship, coworking spaces, end of work, see e.g. Engeström, Miettinen and Punamäki, 1999[7] or Turner et al., 2006[8]).
The turn can be defined as an intellectual project, a forum which encompasses a diversity of ontologies and it has a specific history.
The materiality-turn corresponds to a broad intellectual project partly related to the symbolic approach of artefacts (see Galiardi, 1990[9]): it develops post-discursive perspectives intended to make sense of the 'materiality' and 'matter-iality' of practices and processes at stake in organizations, organizing and management (Carlile and Langley, 2013;,[10][11] de Vaujany and Mitev, 2013[12]).
If some researchers interested in the materiality-turn focus on spaces, artefacts, objects, instruments, technologies and bodies and their relationships with practices, others prefer to explore broader movements and associations.
In short, the material turn is a theoretical stream covering what is expected to endure across time and space, or what is temporally and spatially constituted through everyday activities, i.e. tools, objects, artefacts, technologies, built spaces, bodies and embodiment and their relationships with organizations and organizing (Miller, 1998;[24] 2005; Carlile and Langley, 2013;[25] Dameron, Lê and Lebaron, 2015[26]).
Some of these approaches adopt critical and historical views to explain how the materiality and semiosis of our world has changed in the post WW2 period (Hayles, 1999;[28] de Vaujany and Mitev, 2015[29] ).
Some of the key issues the materiality-turn addresses relate to: the entanglement of material and social elements in practices (Orlikowski, 2007[33]); the problem of ethics in a complex world and the issue of control and moral delegations in a more and more digital world (Dale, 2005;[34] Introna, 2013[35]); materiality and regulation in a post-crisis economy (Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011[36]); the temporal, spatial and material dimensions of legitimacy, institutional logics and legitimation which remain a key issue for managers and citizens (Jones, 2013[37]); or the new modalities of collaboration involved in the rising collaborative economy, among others.