ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines three cumulative steps for analyzing the role of technological artifacts in organizations. The first step is to account for the materials out of which a technological object is produced. Understanding these materials – their possibilities and limitations – is essential for being able to describe with any specificity the ways that technological artifacts matter for organizing. The second step is to account for materiality. Materials only have potency if they are called for in action in some way. I argue that people call them forth as they construct perceptions of their affordances and constraints. Because the construction of affordances and constraints involves a relationship between materials and people, affordances can be seen as the mechanism by which the social and the material worlds become entangled. The third step is to account for the way in which technological artifacts materialize in the organizing process. This means that researchers must explore when and how particular affordances come to shape the patterns of action and interaction that define the organizing process. Unless technological artifacts materialize into patterns of action and interaction, they cannot be said to be constitutive of organizing. For each of these steps, I generate a list of questions that analysts must answer when coding their data to be able to uncover the ways in which technological artifacts come to matter for organizing.
