Author Description

Humans are woven with technology; since their inception in myth, tools - things ready to hand for use - have been what defines us. Understood prosthetically, they are extensions of our physiological and sensory apparatus. Our most basic relationship with the world is thus a technological one. Rather than simply an array of instrumental equipment that enables the creation of end products, technology sets our skills, our understanding, and our action in relation to each other through the sense of productivity, and it is here that technology and organization are intertwined. This handbook will explore the largely unchartered territory of media, technology, and organization studies, and interrogate their foundational relations, their forms, and their consequences. The arrival of digital media technologies - the organizational powers that move people, data, and things - and their subsequent influence on the styles and forms of organizing highlights the need to survey the very technological materials and objects that enable and shape organization, and those that are enabled and shaped by organizational processes in return. To do so, each chapter focuses on a specific mediating, technological object, such as the Clock, High Heels, the Pen or the Smartphone, asking the question: How does this object or process organize? Rather than being a chapter 'on' an object in isolation, the chapters consider how we might think about their resonance in the way we have, and continue to, create organizational form.