The Phenomenology of Materiality in Organizations: How the Relationship With Equipment Affects Experience in Organizations

• In Event: So Far, So Good, Part 1: Organizational Communication Research Escalator

Abstract

In this paper, I propose that Heidegger’s (1962) description of equipmentality can enhance and clarify the role of the material in organizational communication theory, specifically whether humans ultimately have agency over non-humans (Aakhus et al., 2011; Cooren, 2012; Leonardi, 2011, 2012) and the role of material objects in communicatively constituting organizations (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009). Using the empirical example of a comparative study of bike commuters in the American Midwest and Copenhagen, Denmark, I argue that although the social (and organizational) world is constitutively entangled “all the way down” (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008), humans’ mundane interactions and relationships with materiality itself affect how they experience the world at a basic level. The nature of the relationship itself between humans and non-humans (ready-to-hand or present-at-hand) can change one’s experience of being-in the organizational world.

Author

• Elizabeth D. Wilhoit, Purdue University