Interrogating Sociomateriality: An Integrative
Semiotic Framework for IS Research
John Mingers, Kent Business School
Leslie Willcocks, LSE
LSE Seminar June 17th 2014
Overview
• What is sociomateriality?
• Developing the framework:
1. Underlying philosophy: critical realism
2. Peirceian Semiotics
3. Information and meaning
4. Embodied cognition
5. Habermas’s theory of communicative action
• Integrative semiotic framework
• Illustrative examples
• Critique of sociomateriality
• Conclusion
Sociomateriality
Interrogating
Sociomiality: An Integrative Semiotic
 The two most distinctive characteristics of humans as a
Framework
for IS Research
species are:


The ability to use language to co-ordinate actions: communication –
which is primarily social based on meaning and signification
The ability to develop tools to shape the environment: technology –
which is generally realised physically
 Within information systems this is recognised as “ICT” –
technology applied to information and communications.
 But what is the relationship between the social and the
material?
A. One system is dominant – e.g., technological determinists vs social
of technology (SCOT)
Professor Johnconstruction
Mingers
B. School
Two interacting systems – e.g., socio-technical systems
Kent Business
C. The two systems are so intertwined they cannot be separated –
UK
sociomateriality, e.g., actor network theory, Barad, Orlikowski
August 2013
“Agencies of observation … signals the inseparability of the material and semiotic
apparatuses .. The material and semiotic apparatuses form a nondualistic whole”
(Barad 1996, p. 172)
“… on my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the
epistemological inseparability of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’; rather phenomena are the
ontological inseparability of agentially interacting ‘components’”
(Barad 2003, p. 815)
“There is no social that is not material and no material that is not social”
(Orlikowski 2007, 1437)
“In other words, entities (whether humans or technologies) have no inherent
properties, but acquire form, attributes, and capabilities through their
interpenetration. This is a relational ontology that presumes the social and the
material are inherently inseparable.”
(Orlikowski and Scott, 2008, p. 455).
Developing the Framework I: Underlying
Philosophy: Critical Realism
 We are dealing with distinct ontological domains – the
social/cognitive and the material – which critical realism can
accept (Bhaskar, Archer, Mingers)
 Accepts the ontological reality of a variety of different entities,
physical, social, cognitive with different forms of epistemological
access
 Transitive and intransitive domains of science
 The Real, the Actual and the Empirical
 Generative rather than Humean causality
 Epistemic but not judgemental reality
Developing the Framework II: Semiotics
 Semiotics or semiology: the study of signs and systems of
signification where a sign is an event, an object, a symbol or a
behavior that represents something other than itself.
 Signs depend upon a shared set of meanings within a particular
community and are the basis of all communication, whether
linguistic or not.
 Semiotics studies the processes that lead signs to have particular
meanings, and the ways in which such meanings are
communicated and have effects. Thus, semiotics can be seen as
the most fundamental of the social sciences since it underlies all
communication and social action.
 Saussure: rests on a dyadic relationship between signifier and signified
 Peirce: involves a triadic relationship between signifier (representamen),
signified (interpretant) and referent (object)
Representamen
icon, index, symbol
The sign
Object
Interpretant
•Immediate object as
represented within the sign
•Dynamic object as implied by
or generating the sign
•Immediate interpretant – direct meaning of
the sign
•Dynamic interpretant – the effect of the
meaning on an interpreter
•Final interpretant – the eventual effect after
unlimited semiosis
Figure 1 Pierce’s Semiotic Traingle
Further Developments in Semiotics
 Charles Morris characterised semiotics in terms of three dimensions:
 Syntactics – the relations between signs, rules of language
 Semantics – the relations between signs and their objects and
interpretants
 Pragmatics – the origin, use and effects of signs
This was later used by Habermas in the theory of communicative action
 Roman Jakobson saw that Saussure’s distinction between the
syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of meaning were essentially similarity
and contiguity or metaphor and metonymy
 Also developed a model of communication with six components:
 Addresser, addressee, message, context, code and physical or
psychological contact
Applications in Business and ICT
 Stamper’s semiotic framework – organizational semiotics
 Material (physical), empirical (transmission), syntactic, semantic,
pragmatic, social
 Semiotic analyses of ICT as a communicational tool – Web 2.0
(Warschauer), hypertextuality in the WWW (Tredinnick), Tian (e-mail use),
information (Mingers, Beynon-Davies)
 HCI – computer semiotics (Andersen), semiotic engineering (de Souza,
O’Niell)
 Marketing (Mick, Arnold, Harvey), letters to shareholders (Fiol), decoding
regulation reviews (Cooper).
Developing the Framework III – Information
and Meaning
 How do signs and symbols come to have meaning?
We need to distinguish between information and meaning. Following several
authors (Dretske, Mingers, Floridi),
“(semantic) information is the propositional content of a sign or message” – that
which is implied by the existence of the sign.”
This means that information is objective and true for it to be information (as
opposed to misinformation or disinformation)
“Meaning” has two senses:
(i) the system of meanings (connotations) that allows the signs to have a
sense, and that basic sense (direct interpretant)
(ii) The particular meaning (import) that the signs have for the receiver
(dynamic interpretant)
So, the meaning for an individual is partly subjective and leads eventually to
(in)action
Illustrative example – Khipu and the Inka Buraucracy (Beynon Davies 2012)
Developing the Framework IV – Meaning and
Embodiment
 How does meaning get created and translated into actions (embodied
cognition)? And how do actions and information get transmitted
(technology)?
The process by which information is converted to meaning and that then
results in action has been called embodied cognition (Heidegger, MerleauPonty, Mingers, Maturana, Dourish, O’Neill), what Peirce called “habits”
“There is not thought and language … Expressive operations take place between
thinking language and speaking thought; … It is not because they are parallel that
we speak; it is because we speak that they are parallel … I do not speak of my
thoughts; I speak them and what is between them.”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 18, orig. emphasis)
Illustrative examples: work on human computer interaction e.g O’Neill 2008
embodimant and presence in virtual worlds e.g Schulze 2010
“It is rather stormy”
Immediate
object:
wanting to
know how the
weather is
Meaning 1:
Understanding,
Immediate interpretant
Dynamical
object: the
addresser has
looked out of the
window
Addresser
Meaning 2:
Connotation,
Dynamical interpretant
Addressee
Meaning 3:
Intention, Final
interpretant
Meaning 2: Generation,
Dynamical object
“Iet’s not go today then”
Meaning 1: Action,
Immediate object
Embodied cognition
Figure 2 Stages in the Interpretation of and Response to Signs
Developing the Framework V – Habermas’s
Theory of Communicative Action
 Habermas argues that communications (speech acts)
raise validity claims with respect to three different
worlds:
 The material world: truth about matters of fact in the objective world
 The social world: rightness about agreed norms of behaviour in our
social world
 The personal world: sincerity about feelings and beliefs in my personal
world
 These are analytical distinctions but nevertheless point to domains with
substantively different ontological and epistemological characteristics
Integrative framework: Semiosis and the Three
Worlds
Personal
Intent,
Import
Semiosis
Connotation,
reproduction
Social
Representation,
transmission
Material
“Sociomateriality”
Figure 3 The Relations Between Semiosis and the Three Worlds
Illustrating the Potential of the Framework (1)
1. Trip Advisor – study by Scott and Orlikowski, 2009
on-line travel community with reviews and opinions
The study asks questions from a social-materiality perspective
but very pertinent questions can also be asked from the personal-material,
and the personal-socia, and how these relate to semiosis e.g.:
• How do individuals relate to the technology?
• How do they use it? Why do they use it?
• Is it only extreme experiences that get recorded?
• Level of belief on accuracy and validity?
• What determines personal use?
• How does the personal influence the social facts created?
• Are actual experiences more convincing than statistical data?
• Does social media change meaning, the flow of informaiton, and create
ratings/assessment as facts?
• What is the role of signs in creating a continually remade and contested social and
personal reality?
Illustrating the Potential of the Framework (2)
2. Dairy Production Plant – Kallinikos, 2011
Workings of a full computerized dairy production plant, and the role of semiotics
Documents changes in the nature of work, personal-social-technological interactions
Records how process operators seemingly needing to turn their back on the physical
Production process and devote themselves instead to the task of examining the
very structure of signs, codes and symbol schemes whereby physical relationships were
mediated and regulated.
Fragmented system of signs and codes that saw little relationship between token
and referent.
Critique of Sociomateriality
 Inherently self-contradictory: how can we discuss “humans” and
“technologies” if they are inherently inseparable?
 Reduces two distinct but interacting structures to a duality that loses
sight of both its components
 Lack of depth ontology which allows for emergent properties generated
by the interaction of lower level mechanisms
 Reduces and emasculates the active agency of subjects without whom
neither society nor technology would occur (the personal world)
 Reduces the role of semiosis as the process and the mechanism
through which meaningful human interaction occurs. Technology is both
the medium of semiosis, but also a condition for and the result of
semiosis.
Conclusion
Semiosis becoming central in conditions of accelerating virtualization,
abstractness, and modes of representation driven by advances in
technologies, media and software.
‘Sociomateriality is always being enacted, performed and in the making.
But… two other relationships – of sociation and embodiment – also need
to be addressed on a more precise basis, and semiosis needs to play a
central, explicit, rather than implied, part in the study of contemporary
ICTS’
– Mingers and Willcocks, 2014
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