In their demonstrations that technologies and organizations are sociomaterial, or how they become sociomaterial, scholars have not reflected in any measurable depth on the concept of materiality by itself. This chapter explores how materiality emerges from an organization’s interaction with its environment. The verb “emerge” is used purposefully. To say that materiality is entirely strategicall...

This article addresses the relationship between technology and institutions and asks whether technology itself is an institution. The argument is that social theorists need to attend better to materiality: the world of things and objects of which technical things form an important class. It criticizes the new institutionalism in sociology for its failure to sufficiently open up the black box of...

A singularly influential sense of `material worlds' has been developed by actor-network theories of science and technology, which trace out the kind of social action that emerges from encounters between `humans' and `non-humans'. What happens when this approach to materiality takes on the question of law? One answer is suggested by Bruno Latour's recent ethnography of law making in France's Con...

This study advocates for ‘materials-centered’ accounts in the history of technology, and presents such an analysis for the early history of microelectronics. Innovations in semiconductor crystal production were central to the emergence of solid state electronics and the dynamics of the early semiconductor industry. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Bell Telephone Laboratories developed nov...

Brady v. Maryland I established that, as a matter of due process, a criminal defendant has an access right upon request to evidence within the prosecutor's possession that is both favorable and material to the defense.2 The extent of this constitutional right, however, depends on the definition of materiality. In United States v. Agurs, 3 the Supreme Court created a two-tiered framework for det...

The Financial Reporting Council is the first auditing standard-setting body to require audit materiality threshold disclosure. Audit thresholds are a function of auditor benchmark choices and percentage rates chosen for benchmarks. This study investigates association between effort thresholds, auditors’ use benchmarks computed based on non-Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (non-GAAP) mea...

In this papera number of transformation claims associated with the introduction of Clinical Information Systems (CIS) are explored. The paper posits that popular notions surrounding the substitution of the paper record and the elimination of human error are problematic for the way they ignore the materiality of the digital artefact. In this regard the paper highlights how the current discourse ...

A vast range of archaeological studies could be construed as studies of consumption, so it is perhaps surprising that relatively few archaeologists have defined their scholarly focus as consumption. This review examines how archaeology can produce a distinctive picture of consumption that remains largely unaddressed in the rich interdisciplinary consumer scholarship. Archaeological research pro...

In this paper we suggest that ES (Enterprise systems) implementation is an absorptive capacity (AC) challenge. However, we acknowledge that the insights provided by the AC lens are limited in that the construct takes into account only the possession perspective of knowledge and the concept of power is very weakly discussed. We argue that ES implementations, especially if seen from a process per...