Sociomateriality is a theory built upon the intersection of technology, work and organization, that attempts to understand "the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday organizational life.
"[1] It is the result of considering how human bodies, spatial arrangements, physical objects, and technologies are entangled with language, interaction, and practices in organizing.
[1][3][6] The concept adopted the focus on relations from Bruno Latour's[7] and John Law's[8] actor-network theory (ANT) and further opposes the Kantian dualism of subject and object drawing on Karen Barad's[9] and Lucy Suchman's [10] feminist studies.
Key aspects of sociomateriality are according to Matthew Jones[11] a relational understanding of the world, the observation of day-to-day technology use at the workplace during practices and the inextricability and inseparability of the social and the material.
From the 1990s onward, it was clear that because of a variety of information and communication technologies being adopted in the workplace, consideration of sociality and materiality in tandem would be met with increasing significance and academic attention.
'[13] This critical statement is representative of not only the research most scholars in this field do focus on, but pushes forward what they are missing as a result: matter, or, the material.
Early scholars like Joan Woodward and Charles Perrow were bearing a deterministic point of view in their study, and consider the materiality of technologies to be the sole cause of organizational changes.
Contractor, Monge and Leonardi[21] use sociomateriality combined with actor-network theory, and developed a typology that brings technology into the network study.
Existing literature already proves to be thought provoking in terms of understanding big issues, such as what is being compromised by sociomaterial practices, and how are values and assimilation procedures in organizations changing due to technological dependencies.
From such works, it is clear that an ethnographic approach to understanding sociomaterial practices is a way forward in the field, and one can presume many qualitative, empirical studies of this nature will be conducted over the years while organizations continue to evolve and change in light of new technologies.
[3] Nonetheless, these authors are all adding to the new frontier in management and organization theories and research to understand the inextricable sociomaterial relationship between humans and technology.
Despite its popularity in various disciplines, the theorizing of sociomateriality has been critiqued due to its less specific definition of technology and a neglect of broader social structures.
[28] In responding to the criticism, Scott and Orlikowski maintain that sociomateriality is a novel and innovative perspective, and scholars should strive to sustain the openness and experimentation in the framing of the theory.