ORGANIZING TECHNOLOGY: TOWARD A THEORY OF SOCIOMATERIAL IMBRICATION.

For many years, scholars have treated technological and organizational changes as if they were separate, disconnected processes. Recent empirical research is beginning to challenge the distinction between these changes in contexts where one firm is both the producer and consumer of a new technology. Expanding on such work, this paper proposes a perspective that collapses the distinction between technological and organizational change and casts the evolution of work systems as a process of sociomaterial imbrication. I describe this perspective by first outlining a theory of affordances, which explains how social and material agencies become intertwined through processes of translation. I then illustrate the perspective through the presentation of empirical data on the development and use activities occurring around an information technology to automate computer simulations of vehicle crashes at a large automobile company.