Sociomateriality — taking the wrong turning? A response to Mutch

In responding to Mutch's (2013) commentary on sociomateriality, our aim is to reassert a well-established tradition of plurality in theoretical approaches in information systems and organization research. We challenge his critique by proxy and exclusionary discourse in favour of identifying commonalities and mutuality among theories that explore subtle realism. Further, we maintain that ruling out novel perspectives and stifling innovation is likely to undermine any field of study. If there is a measure of healthy scholarship then it is surely our capacity to sustain the conditions that foster openness and experimentation in the framing and doing of our research endeavors.     

Performing catharsis: The use of online discussion forums in organizational change

Online discussion forums have been used to both support and resist organizational change. Our empirical study examined how employees in one organization used an online forum to help them deal discursively with changes that they perceived as threatening to their identity. In particular, we found that the postings of one key individual were central in framing the organizational changes in a way that had powerful cathartic consequences for employees’ feelings of anger and loss of face. Paradoxically, however, we also found that such use of the online forum had the contradictory consequence of helping to facilitate the very changes that employees perceived to be problematic.     

Exploring Material‐Discursive Practices

Our intent in this commentary is to support the turn to materiality in organizational research, and contribute to it by considering some differences in our approach from that proposed by Hardy and Thomas. Drawing on agential realism – which theorizes the entanglement of matter and meaning – we explore the relation between discourse and materiality in terms of the ideas of materialization and performativity as enacted in a study of hotel valuation in the hospitality industry. We offer our comments in the spirit of constructive engagement and hope that our discussion along with others in this Point‐Counterpoint will generate further explorations.     

In praise of the incomplete leader

Today's top executives are expected to do everything right, from coming up with solutions to unfathomably complex problems to having the charisma and prescience to rally stakeholders around a perfect vision of the future. But no one leader can be all things to all people. It's time to end the myth of the complete leader, say the authors. Those at the top must come to understand their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Only by embracing the ways in which they are incomplete can leaders fill in the gaps in their knowledge with others' skills.The incomplete leader has the confidence and humility to recognize unique talents and perspectives throughout the organization--and to let those qualities shine. The authors' work studying leadership over the past six years has led them to develop a framework of distributed leadership. Within that model, leadership consists of four capabilities: sensemaking, relating, "visioning," and inventing. Sensemaking involves understanding and mapping the context in which a company and its people operate. A leader skilled in this area can quickly identify the complexities of a given situation and explain them to others. The second capability, relating, means being able to build trusting relationships with others through inquiring (listening with intention), advocating (explaining one's own point of view), and connecting (establishing a network of allies who can help a leader accomplish his or her goals). Visioning, the third capability, means coming up with a compelling image of the future. It is a collaborative process that articulates what the members of an organization want to create. Finally, inventing involves developing new ways to bring that vision to life. Rarely will a single person be skilled in all four areas. That's why it's critical that leaders find others who can offset their limitations and complement their strengths. Those who don't will not only bear the burden of leadership alone but will find themselves at the helm of an unbalanced ship.     

Reconfiguring relations of accountability: Materialization of social media in the travel sector

Expanding use of Web 2.0 technologies has generated complex information dynamics that are propelling organizations in unexpected directions, redrawing boundaries and shifting relationships. Using research on user-generated content, we examine online rating and ranking mechanisms and analyze how their performance reconfigures relations of accountability. Our specific interest is in the use of so-called “social media” such as TripAdvisor, where participant reviews are used to rank the popularity of services provided by the travel sector. Although ranking mechanisms are not new, they become “power-charged”—to use Donna Haraway’s term—when enacted through Web 2.0 technologies. As such, they perform a substantial redistribution of accountability. We draw on data from an on-going field study of small businesses in a remote geographical area for whom TripAdvisor has changed ‘the rules of the game,’ and we explore the moral and strategic implication of this transformation.     

The institutional environment for multinational investment

This article posits that the effect of political hazards onthe choice of market entry mode varies across multinationalfirms based on the extent to which they face expropriation hazardsfrom their potential joint-venture partners in the host country(the level of contractual hazards). As political hazards increase,the multinational faces an increasing threat of opportunisticexpropriation by the government. Partnering with host-countryfirms that possess a comparative advantage in interactions withthe host-country government can safeguard against this hazard.However, as contractual hazards increase, the potential benefitto the joint-venture partner of manipulating the political systemfor it's own benefit at the expense of the multinational increasesas well, thereby diminishing the hazard-mitigating benefit offorming a joint venture. A two-stage bivariate probit estimationtechnique is used to test these hypotheses on a sample of 3,389overseas manufacturing operations by 461 firms in 112 countries.