The social, the material, and the ontology of non-material technological objects

Recent calls for more attention to the impact of the material in organizing processes tend to neglect the non-material nature of many of the technological objects that populate our world. We address this shortcoming by setting out a theory of non-material technological objects, a central feature of which is the distinction between such objects and what we call their bearers. We then use this theory to elaborate various key features of computer files, to generalise Faulkner and Runde’s recent theory of the identity of technological objects, and in a critical evaluation of the emerging Sociomateriality perspective. Acknowledgments: we are grateful to Nathan Crilly, Martin Kilduff, Wanda Orlikowski and participants at the Judge Us seminar, Cambridge Judge Business School, June 2010, for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.