Creating a Space For Change Within Sociomaterial Entanglements

Aboard a sailboat, when the wind changes unfavourably for our course, we can adjust the sails. We perform the operation of pulling a rope—but when the rope is fastened to the sail as a sheet, pulling the rope means adjusting the sail, while also paying attention to the wind, the sea current, the movements of the boat. The rope-with-sail is the very rope we are pulling: a sociomaterial entanglement as well as a physical element in that same entanglement. We can only know if the pulling is successful by looking at the sail and noticing how the boat reacts to the adjustment. We are able to handle the entanglement of the boat, the sail, the wind, the current as a whole while at the same time making small, incremental adjustments with the material rope. With both the whole and the material in mind we elaborate our position in the debate. In our paper ‘Conditions for Autonomy in the Information Society: Disentangling as a public service’ (this issue) we argue that the tax advisors of the TICC help citizens with tax issues by disentangling the sociomaterial entanglements of the tax system as it plays out in their lives, by creating a space for action for the citizen. We suggest to extend the theory of sociomateriality by differentiating between an imbrication (Leonardi 2011) and an entanglement (Orlikowski 2007; Orlikowski and Scott 2008; Orlikowski 2010) to approach this space. We empathize with the taxpayers calling in to the TICC feeling that they are caught in a difficult situation that they do not know how to change or escape. In a design perspective the focus is to improve the situation by changing one (or more) of the constituents of the sociomaterial entanglement characterizing the situation. How we talk about the ways we understand and perform the identification of technical, organizational, institutional, cultural or social possibilities for changing the sociomaterial whole is the topic of this commentary paper.