This article engages with the affordance literature and identifies a need for a reorientation of its use in organization and management studies. Thus far, affordances has mainly been used as part of the program of sociomateriality to describe the technology–user dyad. Only to a lesser extent have studies using the affordance concept been sensitive to the means in which contextual conditions outside the technology-user dyad configure technological affordances. In order to provide such a sensitization, this article mobilizes the emerging field of valuation studies. It contributes to affordance literature with a synthesis of valuation studies and affordance theory and by constructing the concept of situated valuation as an associate concept to affordances. This article demonstrates the worth of this association by drawing on a comprehensive, ethnographic study of Lean management in a children’s hospital.

Introduction

Reflecting the proliferation of management technologies in organizations, organization and management scholars are paying increasing attention to materiality, tools, and technology (Fayard & Weeks, 2014: 237). This turn to sociomateriality (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008; Orlikowski, 2007; Zammuto, Griffith, Majchrzak, Dougherty, & Faraj, 2007) has sparked conversations in the field of organization and management studies on how to (re)define and (re)invent the theoretical relation between organization and technology (Faraj & Azad, 2012). A recurrent theme of this conversation is the co-constitutive nature of the relationship between organization and technology; a theme which seems to oscillate between polarized conceptions of the role of technology, such as oversocialization versus undersocialization (Bloomfield, Latham, & Vurdubakis, 2010), voluntarism versus determinism (Fayard & Weeks, 2014), and constructivism versus realism (Rappert, 2003). To push this conversation beyond oscillation, scholars are increasingly mobilizing affordance theory. Affordance theory was introduced to the field of organization and management studies as a “third way” of approaching the schism between technology and the social. The sociologist Hutchby (2001) presented the affordance concept as a means to bridge the positions giving primacy to either human agency or technical capacities (Hutchby, 2001: 44). However, while gaining momentum as part of the sociomateriality movement (see, for example Leonardi & Barley, 2008; Van Osch & Mendelson, 2011; Zammuto et al., 2007), several scholars have asserted that the affordance concept has yet to prove its usefulness in understanding the empirical processes through which affordances of technology come into existence in unique situations (Faraj & Azad, 2012: 255) and what role organizational dynamics play in this process. For example, Bloomfield et al. (2010) note that although Hutchby (2001) underlines the relational aspect of affordances, it is not followed through (Bloomfield et al., 2010: 429). The affordance lens has been used in a manner that brings along a tendency to focus on the human–machine dyad and overlooks the role of the co-presence of other artifacts, people, and temporally contingent practices (Bloomfield et al., 2010; Faraj & Azad, 2012; Fayard & Weeks, 2014). The aim of this article is to enrich the literature on affordances with an attunement to the reality of the organizations of today, where multiple technologies of different types are at play, and where the relevance of particular technologies changes over time. To accomplish such an attunement, this article pairs the affordance concept with that of “situated valuation”; a concept informed by the emerging field of pragmatic valuation studies and developed in this article. The locus of valuation studies is to investigate how things come to count as valuable in empirical situations (Antal, Hutter, & Stark, 2015; Dussauge, Helgesson, & Lee, 2015; Helgesson & Muniesa, 2013).