The materiality turn in organization studies is the theoretical movement emphasizing objects, instruments and embodiments involved in organizations and organizing (the theoretical debate [1]) and the ontologies underpinnings theories about organizations and organizing, what deeply 'matters' in the study of organizations and organizing (the ontological debate[2]; see e.g. Latour, 2007; de Vaujany and Mitev, 2016). In the context of organization studies (see e.g., Tsoukas and Knudsen, 2005 or Clegg et al., 2006), 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. Most turns in organization studies relate to broader ones in the social sciences and humanities. The materiality turn is one of these major turns. 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), the disembodiment of agency (Hayles, 1999), 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 or Turner et al., 2006). The turn can be defined as an intellectual project, a forum that encompasses a diversity of ontologies, and it has a specific history.
Overview The materiality turn corresponds to a broad intellectual project partly related to the symbolic approach of artefacts (see Galiardi, 1990): 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;, de Vaujany and Mitev, 2013). By contrast to debates about sociomateriality (emphasizing the co-constitution of materiality and sociality) which are more likely to lead to a strict relational ontology (see Orlikowski, 2007), the materiality turn is a forum gathering a diversity of ontologies or ontological dimensions (de Vaujany and Mitev, 2016): phenomenology, pragmatism, critical realism, post-Marxism, post-structuralism, post-humanism, post-modernism, etc., which can all contribute and broaden the current debate about materiality.
History
The materiality turn has a specific history and originates from various historical sources, in particular: Marxism (a key source), Foucauldian studies, symbolic artefacts (and aesthetic) studies, material culture, science and technology studies (STS). These studies are largely post-Marxist in the sense that Marxist studies (e.g. with notions such as "Materialism", "Historical Materialism" or "Material dialectic") have been a major turning point both in the development of post-Hegelian ontologies and (probably far from Marx own view) in the disentanglement of ideal and material dimensions, or the distinction between Nature and Society, which are questioned today by some promoters of the materiality turn. The rediscovery of these seminal contributions has provided useful concepts such as materiality, material, devices, apparatus, modes of existence, intra-action, affordance, agentivity, entanglement, heterotopic space, material or sociomaterial practices, ontologies, process, network, meshwork, among others. Following Latour (Latour, 2007: 139), the materiality turn is related to "the way we move knowledge forward in order to access things that are far away or otherwise inaccessible" (materiality) or "the way things move to keep themselves in existence." We propose to call this 'matter-iality', to emphasise how things matter. Instrumentations, mediations, materializations, and preformations are at the heart of the materiality turn, which has strong intersections and commonalities with other turns such as the practice turn, communication turn, visual turn, process turn, performativity turn or spatial turn.
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