On thursday night at 21:20, my cellphone beeped and an SMS was received informing that the situation room was about to be manned at the fire and rescue services in Gothenburg. A sports arena was on fire and the response work was estimated to continue all night. I arrived to the main fire station at 21:50 and started a field-study and ended at 02:30. My focus this night was oriented on how the people working in the situation-room and the technology in use were intertwined. This particular incident provided very good insights on how people, procedures, roles and technology could be understood as entanglement in practice. In addition, it was also clear that technology is hardly used according the designers intention but reinvented and restructured in situated action. In return, the actions by the human actors were shaped by the material properties of the technological actors. Trying to separate human actors and technological actors seems difficult. I believe that we must view emergency response work as sociomaterial practice in order to move beyond the less meaningful discussion of technology vs method when it comes to exploring innovative conduct in future emergency and crisis response work.

I am looking forward to discuss entanglement in practice and sociomateriality with my fellow researchers during the ISCRAM2012 conference in Vancouver, 22-25 april.

This blogpost is heavily inspired by the following text:
Orlikowski, W. J. “The sociomaterialty of organizational life: Considering technology in management research.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2009): 125-141