The performativity of permanent and temporal practice: The role of technology infusion

• In Event: ‘Doing Time’: Temporal Imaginaries, Performances, Practices, Infrastructures

Abstract

Organisational work 'practices' are said to constitute how employees exist and belong within their organisation (Tsoukas 2010). Although the sayings-and-doings of practitioners helps to reinforce their practice, the activities of practitioners unfold in and across space-time contexts. This means that the 'constant' of practice is both reinforced, but also open to change, precisely because of the performative temporalities of enacting one's practice. As this enactment will always constitute in-use technology, the different contexts for practical enactment can showcase how new technology can come to 'matter' to practitioners and subsequently their practice (Orlikowski 2010). In turn, a technological change of practice is possible via a process that transitions from observation to usage, which is when technology seeps into the background of practitioner awareness (Riemer and Johnston 2012). By providing reflections as an embedded ethnographer, someone who is situated between business and academia, the aim of this discussion is twofold. Firstly, to demonstrate how practitioners enact their practice in and across temporal settings; and secondly, to showcase how the performativity of practitioners within these temporal contexts reveals the role and potentialities of technology. Understanding the use and mattering of technology from a practice perspective can demonstrate how one's 'being' in the world constitutes an infused relationship with other practices and technology, both material and digitally based. This view of practice is only slowly gaining momentum in empirical research, even though science itself is another practice that is performed via patterns of technology-infused temporality.

Author

• Natalie Hardwicke, University of Sydney