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Words and things: Discursive and non-discursive ordering in a networked organization.

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... According to discursive psychology, artifacts can be perceived as having invitation and inhibition toward certain kinds of actions. An article by Brown and Middleton (2006) draws basic ideas from discursive psychology, and they assume the position that artifacts can be conceived as material frameworks, which either enable or constrain certain discourses or practices. They add that it is reasonable to assume that objects place limits on the ways they can be described and constructed in a discourse, but they do not exist "just there." ...
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The article analyzes ergonomics as a social and cultural phenomenon, as something that is formulated and described by speakers in a specific social context; in a company that is specialized in producing ergonomic office furniture. Through a case study of an office chair, the article examines how ergonomics and its association with the vision of the potential users and their working spaces are constructed by the relevant actors in project meetings and individual interviews during the manufacturing process. The article is concerned with how, in the process of producing an office chair, the chair gains an identity of an aesthetic design object and how this comes to mean the reformulation of the idea of ergonomics. The empirical analysis also provides insight into how the somewhat grand discourses of soft capitalism or aesthetic economy are not abstract, but very much grounded in everyday practices of an organization. The article establishes how the vision shared by all the relevant actors invites active, flexible, and cooperative end-users and how the vision also has potential material effects. The research is an ethnographically inspired case study that draws ideas from discursive psychology.
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