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Research article
First published May 2005

Affiliative Objects

Lucy SuchmanView all authors and affiliations
Volume 12, Issue 3
https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508405051276

Abstract

Through the case of a particular organization devoted to technological research and development, this paper investigates how values of the ‘new’ operate in what Appadurai (1986) has characterized as the social life of objects. Drawing on previous scholarship in anthropology and science and technology studies, I adopt the trope of the ‘affiliative object’ to describe the relational dynamics of association (and disassociation) that characterize the identification of objects and persons. This perspective emphasizes the multiplicity of objects within the unfolding and uncertain trajectories of organizational life, as both problem and resource for organization members. The paper examines how ‘object-centered sociality’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1997) is enacted as a strategic, but also contingent, resource in the alignment of professional identities and organizational positionings.

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This paper is part of a larger project titled ‘Reproducing the Centre: Performing Innovation at Xerox PARC’, supported in part by the UK Economic and Social Research Council Grant L144250006. My thanks to Frank Blackler for careful reading, provocative questions and ongoing encouragement, to Jyri Engeström, John Law and Laura Watts for sharing a preoccupation with objects, and to two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions for improvement to the original manuscript.
1.
1 Although strong cases have been made for the intimate relationship between material things and the conceptual ‘objects’ of activity, the focus of this paper is on objects as understood in the more colloquial sense. I assume, however, that objects in this sense are always constituted in activity, and imaginatively as well as materially. See also Lynch and Woolgar (1990), Goodwin (1994), Goodwin and Goodwin (1996), Heath and Hindmarsh (2000), Law (2002), Callon (1986), Latour (1993), Pickering (1995), Knorr-Cetina (1997), Barad (2003), Daston (2000), Smith (1996), Engeström (1995), Bucciarelli (1994).
2.
2 For an overview of laboratory studies, see Knorr-Cetina (1995). See also Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger (2002).
3.
3 The question of the originality of objects has been extensively addressed in discussions of intellectual property (see, for example, Coombe, 1998). Although members of the organization described here were increasingly enrolled in projects of patenting, the focus of this paper is on a broader repertoire of practices through which the ‘newness’ of objects is asserted and contested.
4.
4 For popular histories of PARC’s founding and first decade, see Smith and Alexander (1988) and Hiltzik (1999).
5.
5 For this history, see Schwartz (1998: ch. 6).
6.
6 This and other observations in this paper are drawn from field notes that I maintained between August 1980 and June 1981, along with observations, experiences and documentary records collected over the subsequent 20 years of my employment as a research scientist at PARC.
7.
7 Copiers were classified for both development and marketing purposes along a scale of production, as ‘low’, ‘mid’ and ‘high’ volume. As discussed below, these categories implied as well particular scenarios of placement and configurations of user.
8.
8 In practice, most copiers, particularly of the size of the 8200, are placed in store rooms or other dedicated spaces to contain the noise and associated stocks of paper, toner, etc. that they bring with them. The ‘hallway’ or other open space nonetheless was the paradigmatic setting for the ‘casual’ user.
9.
9 In his cultural history of practices of copying, Schwartz traces practices of copying back to a time when they were not mundane but sacred, specifically in the religious orders of the 10th century (1998: 215). Even then, however, pressures were on to speed up the process, increasing accuracy while decreasing human labor.
10.
10 For a critical analysis of the trope of the ‘project’ in technological research and development, see Law (2002). See also Button and Sharrock (1996).
11.
11 The main observation of studies of face-to-face human conversation was that human conversation does not follow the kind of message-passing or exchange model that formal, mathematical theories of communication posit. Rather, humans dynamically co-construct the mutual intelligibility of a conversation through an extraordinarily rich array of embodied interactional competencies, strongly situated in the circumstances at hand (which are, in turn, unfolding through that same interaction).
12.
12 The decision as to which researchers would participate in such presentations was directly shaped by the position of visitors in the organizational hierarchy, the importance of the researchers marking assessments of the relative importance of the visitors, and vice versa. The making of agendas, in terms of both what projects would be featured and who would be enrolled to represent them, was a deeply political matter.
13.
13 The ambivalent status of corporate management was evident, for example, in references to those most resolutely committed to the company’s reprographics business as ‘toner heads’.
14.
14 For more on this initiative, see Suchman and Bishop (2000).

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Published In

Volume 12, Issue 3
Pages: 379 - 399
Article first published: May 2005
Issue published: May 2005

Keywords

  1. identity
  2. invention
  3. materiality
  4. multiplicity
  5. object-centered sociality

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Lucy Suchman
Lancaster University, UK, [email protected]
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