Why matters always matters in (Organizational) Communication
Résumé
The so-called “linguistic turn” purportedly has allowed scholars to demonstrate why it seems so important to focus on language, discourse, and social interaction when studying organizational phenomena. However, it could be argued that it also led them to neglect some key aspects of the role material agency plays in organizational processes, a negligence that the more recent “material turn” could be said to be addressing. This chapter proposes to show, both theoretically and empirically, that analysts do not actually need to keep turning in one direction or another, that is, choose between materiality and discourse, so to speak, but that they should rather focus on the multiple ways by which various forms of reality (more or less material) come to do things and even express themselves in a given interaction.