There has been a lot in the recent organisational literature about the need for researchers to pay more attention to materiality, and then especially to the myriad technological objects that inundate our lives. Responding effectively to these calls requires clarity about what precisely technological objects are, how they are constituted and how they achieve and maintain their identities. We’ll be talking about two papers that seek to address these questions. The first offers a theory of what we call the technical identity of the objects that surround us (cars, clips, cameras, cranes, etc.). The focus here is on objects that have a material form, that is, ones that possess a definite location, shape, mass, volume and so on. The second, building to some extent on the first, focuses on the ontology of artefacts that do not have a material form (computer programmes, DNA sequences, musical compositions, mathematical theorems, etc.). Both papers have various economic and organisational implications which we’ll discuss as we go along.
Jochen Runde is Reader in Economics and Director of the MBA at Cambridge Judge Business School and a Fellow of Girton College. His main current research interests include social ontology and the ontology of technology, and decision-making under conditions of high uncertainty. He has published numerous papers on different aspects of economics, decision theory and organisational theory, and is co-author of the LiveEconTM series of economics textbooks and co-editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics.
Phil Faulkner is Senior College Teaching Officer and Director of Studies in Economics at Clare College, Cambridge. His research focuses on various topics within social ontology, in particular the nature of technology and the nature of the human economic agent. He is currently also a Fellow of the Cambridge Judge Business School and co-editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics.
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