Materializing Practices: When Elusive Social Practices Meet Digitization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the increasing scholarly interest in the materiality of organizing, the ontological separateness between the social and the material remains problematic. However, little progress has been achieved exploring the role of materiality to the very enactment (existence) of work practices. We address this question via a field study of a large project involving technology-derived change in a governmental agency. Our study posed two interrelated research questions: What is the role of materiality in the enactment of practices? And why does materiality matter for some practices more than others? We found that transformation of elusive practices at a time of technological change is dependent on a) rebuilding the linkages that tie together the sociomaterial assemblage, b) reshaping intelligibility for the participants, and c) evolving new work arrangements that are negotiated by the stakeholders. By tracing in great detail the evolution of three specific practices, we contribute to a more thoroughly materialized account of transformation, emergence and disappearance of practices within the extant literature. Specifically, in explaining the role of the material in evolving practices we highlight how our conception of assemblage can capture the spirit of materializing process during sociomaterial change. That is, if changes in the material element are accompanied by relative continuity in other elements of the assemblage then the practice is likely to morph by maintaining significant family resemblance between old and new--elements of the practice may survive albeit through re-combination or mutation. Furthermore, if the changes in the material element are vast and wholesale, there is likely to be total breakdown of intelligibility and the old practice is likely to be rendered defunct.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.055 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.026 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".