Introduction

In media and organization studies objects have a grounding role: they both embody and transform the structures and processes of the social. The study of the mediating roles objects play in human life is as old as the hills, but has only recently come back into vogue, now we have begun once more to question the assumption that only human beings act. Correspondingly, organization is now being thought and explored as a socio-material phenomenon, as something that comes into being by way of human/non-human assemblages and that therefore entails and requires a host of objects that need to be understood as agential forces. And, in turn, media are being thought of less as conduits or channels connecting one agent with another, and more as structuring conditions configuring the very possibility of agency: they are not just objects braided with information, but also power.

It is in and from this setting that this Handbook of Media, Technology, and Organization Studies acquires its rationale and its urgency. The Handbook explores, maps, and theorizes the territory of media, technology, and organization studies. Written by scholars of organization and theorists of media and technology, its entries focus on specific, and specifically mediating, objects that shape the practices, processes, and atmospheres of organization. Such media configure (power) relations that are in-built into the devices and apparatuses of organizational life. ‘Media organize’ (Reinhold Martin); and perhaps, to paraphrase Friedrich Kittler’s notorious dictum, ‘media determine organization’. Attention thus falls on the medial a prioris of organization; that is, on the operations, effects, and affects of mediating devices and forms (over and against any interrogation of their ‘nature’) in organizational contexts. In terms of this Handbook, the question becomes how media and technology are intimate with the capacity to organize and be organized.

This intimacy of technology, media, and organization is staged and reflected in the Handbook’s cover by the artist Simon Denny. The cover reproduces an image of his adaptation of the contemporary boardgame ‘Game of Life’ in which the players’ choices (and hence values) are shown to be riven with, and utterly conditioned by, a nexus of media technology and organizational processes. Denny’s work is based on a sustained and richly attentive form of artistic-organizational research in which an anthropologist’s eye is turned to how media organize, and how media are organized, ‘after’ digital technology. His art evocatively and repeatedly performs a recursive logic: to understand how media technologies condition contemporary life, one needs to inquire into their organizational affects and effects. And in order to trace how media technologies are produced, take place, disappear or are transformed, one needs to trace the organizational constellations in which they are inscribed and which they make possible.

As the first sustained and systematic interrogation of the relation between technologies, media, and organization—and through bringing together the fields of organization theory and media studies—the Handbook will consolidate, deepen, and further develop the empirics and concepts required to make sense of the material forces of organization. Top and tailed by this brief introduction and an editorial essay on the relation of media, technology, and organization, it consists of 43 entries, each of which considers, and lingers with, an object and its capacities to mediate organization. The Handbook is thus focused on the level of material specificity, of specific instances and forms of what the authors and editors consider to be organizational-technological mediation. An open question that runs across the volume, then, concerns the point at which the material becomes technological. The threshold is, we argue, configured by the condition of organization. Contrary to a somewhat hyperactive sociology of socio-material association (or actor-networks), we do not assume that each and every actant is on symmetrical footing with any other actant, in a merry dance of agencies. As technology, the object in question organizes or affords a certain process of organizing. It can thus be configured as technological medium that enables and shapes, perhaps even in some ways conditions or determines, organization.

The entries are written so readers can think with the objects being written about. We would like the reader to ask: ‘How does this object organize?’ In staying with the object the entries remain committed to the everyday, empirical world, refusing to be pinioned to established disciplinary concerns and theoretical developments. Relatedly, the Handbook is not just a reflection of the technologies and ‘digital media’ that are current in media and organizational theory; it consciously avoids the fetishism of the new so prominent in writings on technology. Many ‘old’ objects continue to exercise a strong hold on how humans act and think, and, as many of the entries reveal, much of the purportedly new is rather old.

As to the objects in the Handbook, they hold no categorical promise. They have been suggested by, discussed with and drawn from the work of our contributors. They are ‘mediators’ that demand reflections on how they organize and are organized. There is no claim to completeness, then—and given our assumptions about the ubiquity, proliferation, and efficacy of technological mediation, how could there be? We would make a claim to relevance, however. These are explorations that teach us about how organization takes place by way of specific objects; how they organize us and how we organize with them in everyday life. We hope they provoke further ventures into the in-between territories of media, technology, and organization (studies).

Since it would contradict our way of proceeding to impose a hierarchy of technologies or media, we have opted for an alphabetical order of objects. Sorting entries from A–Z is of course a contingent and arbitrary way of structuring the Handbook—in this sense, any other order of precedence would do. Or maybe it is not wholly arbitrary. At least with regard to the printed book, the contingent grid of an alphabetical ordering allows for a spatial, printed juxtaposition of wildly different media of organizing in close proximity, or at some remove—just like, we’re tempted to say, in organized life (see the editorial essay at the end of this volume). Such an ordering perhaps also opens up the book (the reader?) to surprise and untypical ways of wayfinding. In the spirit of our endeavour, these are minor enactments of how the Handbook as medium of organization indeed organizes certain ways of reading and browsing, while being open to some (but only some) reorganization in the way that it is used and misused, perused and discarded, annotated and forgotten, referenced and turned into a literal doorstopper.

We will not be so glib as to thank, say, Dropbox, word processors, academic texts, and Oxford University Press’ production and distribution technologies for enabling and shaping what you hold in your hands or see on your screens. Books and academic labour are grounded in these technologies—specific thanks presume a condition of decisional choice on our part, as editors, that is simply not there (as if we could have done without them). As ever, thanks are thus due to specific agents and collectives: To the authors for their engagement with the idea of the Handbook and their splendid entries, to many who granted permission for image rights, especially to Simon Denny who graciously let us use his art. A ‘thank you’ is due also to Oxford University Press and Jenny King and Adam Swallow for believing in the project and for seeing it to completion in a wonderfully constructive and helpful way, and to Jo North for copyediting. Due to the support of Oxford University Press and Leuphana University Lüneburg’s Centre for Digital Cultures, we were able to host a writing workshop in Berlin in November 2017, discussing first drafts with their authors. And Nelly Pinkrah supported the project’s coordination and communication from its inception—thanks!

Finally, we should also note that the Handbook is part of a wider endeavour of bringing together advanced thinking of media and technology with organization studies, and we would just like to mention the European Group of Organization Studies’ Standing Working Group on ‘Digital Technology, Media and Organization’ and the ongoing work of Leuphana University Lüneburg’s Centre for Digital Cultures on the threshold of social and media theory, some of it in conjunction with Copenhagen Business School’s Departments of Management, Politics and Philosophy and Management, Society and Communication.