Part 4: Considering Communication and PerformanceInternational audienceIn this paper, we propose to go beyond the notion of entanglement that has been proposed in recent years to fill the so-called gap between “the social” and “the material”, especially in organizational studies. While this notion rightly invites us to reconsider the way we traditionally approach the question of materiality and organizing, we believe that its formulation tends to implicitly reproduce the gap it claims to fill. In contrast, we propose a view according to which sociality and materiality should, in fact, be considered aspects of everything that comes to be and exist. Throughout the analysis of an episode taken from fieldwork devoted to creative teams, we show that things as abstract as ideas, for instance, in order to emerge, exist, and continue to exist, have to materialize themselves in various identifiable beings. While the sociality of an idea is identified through the various relations that make it what it is, we show that its materiality comes from what precisely materializes these relations

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International audienceBuilding on Orlikowski's reflections on sociomateriality, this article argues that we have to stop separating the material and the social to be able to precisely account for what matters in technology adoption and use, and that one way to do this is to take people's matters of concern seriously. This means two things: taking into account all the matters of concern that come to express themselves in conversations (whether related to tools, rules, documents, principles, etc.) and not just the people who voice them, and showing how some of these concerns start mattering more than others by connecting with other matters of concern. To demonstrate the theoretical and empirical value of this approach, we analyze two interactional episodes taken from our longitudinal study of the introduction of a wiki at the French National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management

Proposed in the 1980s, the idea that organizations are communicatively constituted amounts to searching in communication for the mechanisms that produce organizational forms. Communication, according to this perspective, should therefore be understood not as one variable among others, but as that which provides the building blocks that constitute organizations. Three scholars—Chester Barnard, Mary Parker Follett, and Gabriel Tarde—can be retrospectively identified as the precursors of the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) movement, which is today represented by three schools of thought: the Montreal School of organizational communication, the four‐flows model, and Luhmann's theory of social systems.

In this paper, we introduce a new approach to creativity assessment. Arguably, one of the main obstacles to creativity assessment is that creativity criteria are likely to change depending on what is assessed and who is making the assessment. We argue that we might be able to solve this problem by adopting a relational ontology, i.e., an ontology according to which beings of the world acquire their properties by relating to other beings. First, we present the main consequences of this ontological approach for creativity assessment: (a) Accounting for the creativity of a given object involves retracing the beings (including criteria) that relate it to its alleged creativity; (b) One can assess the creativity of this object by looking at the number of beings that substantiate this relation, i.e., by looking at what we call the "degree of solidity" of the relation; (c) One can thus account for the specificity of various forms of creativity and, at the same time, compare them in terms of solidity. Building on these ontological assumptions, we then present a new assessment technique, the Objection Counting Technique, before putting it to the test using an excerpt taken from a naturally occurring brainstorming session.