Materiality, Sociomateriality, and Socio-Technical Systems: What Do These Terms Mean? How are They Related? Do We Need Them?

This chapter reviews the history of three terms increasingly used by researchers in the fields of organization studies and information systems: “materiality,” “sociomateriality” and “socio-technical systems.” After this review, I explore ways in which these terms overlap and depart in meaning from one another in scholars’ writings. I suggest that materiality might be viewed as a concept that refers to properties of a technology that transcend...