The agency of things: how spaces and artefacts organize the moral order of an intensive care unit

Abstract

This article focuses on the constitutive role of space and artefacts in delineating the moral order of a specific context. Building on the premises of a post-humanistic phenomenology, it proposes a theoretical contribution to a critical understanding of communication as a complex phenomenon distributed between human and non-human semiotic agents. Drawing on ethnographic research in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), the article empirically illustrates this point. It analyses how the interior architecture and some ordinary objects (e.g. the glove box and the alcoholic dispenser, the monitors and the handwritten clinical record) delineate the range of the "right things to do" and participate in telling which philosophy of medicine is at play in this ICU.

A Pill in the Lifeworld of Women in Burkina Faso: Can Misoprostol Reframe the Meaning of Abortion

“…For women who have access to misoprostol, its use to stop a pregnancy influences how they define abortion, especially in view of the fact that misoprostol, as a technical object, can be a meaning-making vehicle [43]. That is to say, that it can impose a certain frame of thought [44].…”

Making up leaders: Reconfiguring the executive student through profiling, texts and conversations in a leadership development programme

“…This is apparent, for instance, when the participant’s epistemic domain of experience is subsumed into that of the profile. Taking our argument for using socio-epistemics further, we see a growing variety of textual or non-human agents noted within The Montreal School studies: written sheets of paper (Cooren et al, 2006), a contract (Brummans, 2007), a note on the wall (Benoit-barné and Cooren, 2009), a measuring stick (Cooren and Matte, 2010), space and clinical objects (Caronia and Mortari, 2015), and a strategy document (Vásquez et al, 2018), to name some. Profiling situates itself amongst the most complex of these, and we suggest that one consider socio-epistemics in the analytical mix when unfolding how organizational technologies with comparable complexity and comparably strong claims to authority contribute to performing organization.…”

“Putting people in charge of their own health and care?” Using meta‐narrative review and the example of online sexual health services to re‐think relationships between e‐health and agency

“…At a more fundamental level, long‐standing assumptions about the nature and locus of agency can be destabilized. Within some scholarly currents, agency is routinely ascribed to non‐human actors, and this has obvious relevance to any analysis of agency in e‐health care where technologies delineate what is possible, engineering specific clinical pathways and creating new possible identities for users . This broader ascription of agency is a powerfully generative move for re‐conceptualizing questions about the relationship between e‐health and agency (even for those who ultimately wish to resist this broader reading of agency).…”

“…This review and discussion suggests an approach to service development and evaluation that assumes the presence of many human and non‐human actors, blurs the boundaries between them, identifies their components and expects unpredictable and evolving interactions that will constitute the agency of each. It emphasizes the importance of research on “the thing side,” that is the technologies that structure experience of e‐health services and acknowledges the distributed nature of health decision making that goes beyond single consultations and includes many people and things . This analysis indicates that sustained interdisciplinary research is required to inform intelligent policy making, including research to map the agency of technologies within e‐health care and to identify the full range of their actions in a given context.…”