The material turn is a reaction to the so-called "discursive turn" initiated by poststructuralism's crises of representation, and basically looks at the roles that objects play in human action as well as signification. Latour and ANT are a landmark, some varieties of Critical Realism address this, but possibly the most interesting take is Graham Harman's work on Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism. Within organization and management studies the realist take fails to get as far as Harman, and is dominated by Information scholars like Orlikowski. Dean Pierides, Jon Roffe and I did a stream at EGOS in 2014 on this - I can provide further references if needed from this and 're:Harman and critics. Should say there's also a body related corporeal turn which is again a response to the discursive but less strictly "objective" than OOO or SR.

Material turn in the academy have raised important issues for academic research across the Social Sciences and Humanities with wide-ranging implications for concepts, methodologies and theories. Many scholars have been tempted to speak of an ongoing material turn or new materialism within the social sciences, inspired by a similar reorientation with in continental philosophy. Current development of a ‘material turn’ is exploring new understandings of how power is made up and exercised by examining the role of material infrastructures in the organization of state power and the role of material cultural practices in the organization of colonial forms of governance. The collection brings together a group of key international scholars whose work has played a leading role in debates in and across the fields of history, visual culture studies, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, museum studies, and literary studies

If you can read french, you should follow MAUSS - Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales

http://www.revuedumauss.com/

The material turn is a reaction to the so-called "discursive turn" initiated by poststructuralism's crises of representation, and basically looks at the roles that objects play in human action as well as signification. Latour and ANT are a landmark, some varieties of Critical Realism address this, but possibly the most interesting take is Graham Harman's work on Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism. Within organization and management studies the realist take fails to get as far as Harman, and is dominated by Information scholars like Orlikowski. Dean Pierides, Jon Roffe and I did a stream at EGOS in 2014 on this - I can provide further references if needed from this and 're:Harman and critics. Should say there's also a body related corporeal turn which is again a response to the discursive but less strictly "objective" than OOO or SR.

The material turn can be also connected with Jean Baudrillard writing (e.g. "The Consumer society", Sage 2009, published in France 1970) and growing impact of social semiotics & consumption studies. I really enjoy studies of the role of object within psychoanalysis (e.g. maternal love expressed through objects, which accelerates consumption seen not as mindless way of spending but... new way of 'sacrifice' connected with the core understanding of being a mother). Hope it helps a bit...

Another excellent resource can be found here (https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415570923); according to the authors there are four (interrelated) main traditions that emphasize the material turn; complexity sciences, ANT, CHAT, and spatial theories. 

Thank you for your answers, these are interesting resources and I hope they keep coming!  My difficulty with the material turn is that there seem to be such a wide array of perspectives coming from different areas, with potentially quite different meanings to "material" - some examples:

1. an "object" based approach stemming out of ANT and socio-material studies of tools

2. a different "object" centered approach rooted in psychoanalysis and object-relations

3. asesthetic approaches focusing on sensory and material properties of artefacts, often linked to art or design literatures

4. embodiment perspectives involving the lived body, the gendered body, phenomenology of "being-in-the-world" etc

5. a materialist approach based in critical theory and invoking a dialectical materialist conception of society

I wonder if there is a similar current pulling such approaches toward materiality, or if the co-occurrence of the material in these literatures is coincidental?

Many thanks, and more ideas please!

Dear Gazi Islam,

I think you can refer the references below:

Michael R. Ott, Rebecca Sauer, Thomas Meier (Herausgeber): Materiale Textkulturen. Konzepte – Materialien – Praktiken. de Gruyter, Berlin-Boston-München 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-037128-4. (OpenAccess) (= MTK 1)

Tony Bennett und Patrick Joyce: Material powers: cultural studies, history and the material turn. London [u.a.] : Routledge, 2010, ISBN 978-0-415-60314-0.

Daniel Miller (Hrsg.): Anthropology and the Individual, a Material Culture Perspective. Oxford, NY: Berg, 2009.

Daniel Miller (Hrsg.): Materiality. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 2005. ISBN 9780822386711

Alfred Gell: Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

Daniel Miller (Hrsg.): Material Cultures. Why some things matter. London: UCL Press, 1998.

Bruno Latour: We have never been modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Arjun Appadurai: The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1986.[4]

There's also the anthropology of consumption approach best known through the work of Daniel Miller (of King's, London), who did a whole book on blue jeans. The material turn is for me about how the material world intersects with the social on its own terms, affecting action and resisting signification. Object approaches that Don't take this line (eg object-relations theory) have been around a long time and Don't constitute much of a "turn". The aesthetic stuff is in part about sensory experience, but again this centres the human not the material itself. Body approaches (corporeal) may have a material dimension (eg seeing the body as a set of physical processes) and may in cyborg or post-human studies place great emphasis on the material. Dialectical materialism may well join in the chorus but it hasn't changed much for a long time, so again hardly contributes to a "turn" - more of a "grumble".

Dear (name removed in an edit on April 16, 2016):

Perhaps the downvote your contribution received (not from me) is due to your use of other people's words without quotation marks or citations. This is generally frowned upon in the academic environment. I would be much more interested in reading your own ideas, expressed in your own words. I am certain that you have interesting ideas to share with us on this virtual forum.

(Detailed critique of plagiarized message deleted on April 16, 2016.)

Please excuse my frankness. I suppose 36 years working with university students and reviewing the work of colleagues has made this sort of verification an automatic process. What makes the "copy-paste" method of writing obvious is the contrast in style between fragments gleaned from diverse sources. Each author has a distinct literary voice, just as our oral voices have unique qualities. Another sign is that the paragraph pieced together from fragments of other texts doesn't really make sense, because sentences and phrases have been removed from their original contexts and strung together artificially.

I suspect most people on ResearchGate can easily detect when a colleague is copying and pasting from the web. Usually people choose to ignore it, looking the other way, to avoid uncomfortable situations. I prefer to point it out, hoping that this will have some positive effect on the current epidemic of plagiarism that is shaking the foundations and the credibility of academic institutions throughout the world. If we do not set a good example for the rest of society, and especially for our students, we will be in danger of losing our collective legitimacy as educators and researchers.

Best regards,

David

Hi Gazi,

to me the most interesting difference of all the "material approaches" mentioned above concerns agency. How much agency has materiality? It ranges from being a part of the study without having agency over being an important part of social practices to being an important part of a network that is as powerful as humans.

I do prefer the relational perspective of dispositive approaches introduced by Michel Foucault, because it allows for addressing the mutual relations of discursive and material elements that make up a phenomenon and for using diverse and experimental methods to account for the complexity. I think the questions on power and agency should be empirically answered.

This works on the status of materiality and new materialism give you a broad overview:

Reckwitz, A. (2002): The Status of the “Material” in Theories of Culture: From “Social Structure” to “Artefacts”. In: Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 32 (2), 195-217.

Coole, D. and S. Frost (2010): Introducing the New Materialisms. In: Coole, D. and S. Frost (Hg.): New materialisms. Ontology, agency, and politics. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press, 1-43.

Best,

Moritz

Dear Gazi,

Although I am coming mainly from the cultural heritage and aesthetic sides of the discussion, regarding your inquiry about the general development of material studies/materiality, I recently saw (full text) on academia.edu:

Chapter 1 of:

Dan Hicks & Mary C. Beaudry 2010. Introduction. Material Culture Studies: A Reactionary View. In D. Hicks and M.C. Beaudry (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-21.

and

the beginning of Chapter 2 of the same volume:

The Introduction of Dan Hicks' (2010) The Material-Cultural Turn: Event and Effect. In Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford: OUP, pp. 25ff.

Best,

Christina

Thank you once again for your insights and especially for all the useful citations!  Again, the eclecitism of these reinforce the idea that "materiality" discourse is really taking a wide variety of diverse forms, rather than a unified front, although some names e.g. Miller seem to be coming up many times.

I find particularly interesting Stephen's response to my earlier comment that of all the lines I mentioned, most are only partially materialist, and still are deeply rooted in a subjectivism that does not take the material "in its own terms".  So, the psychoanalytic and aesthetic approachs, for example, and perhaps also the marxian variants, while they rely on objects, artefacts, and material processes, would be less radically materialist than, for example, s-t-s approaches that are more "post-humanist". 

The idea of analyzing the material "in its own terms", however, perplexes me.  I'm not sure what the terms of materiality, autonomous of human designs, would look like. Besides, I'm a bit wary (having been alerted, perhaps, by the more humanist strands of psychoanalysis and critical theory) of the spectors of "fetishism" and "reification", and wonder if taking the material turn out of the ambit of the human wouldn't risk losing some kind of critical stance vis a vis the social life of objects.

Again - please do add your ideas - the input so far has been really helpful!

material turn has become crowded with the cacophony of many ideas: some call it 'material' (Ingold) some call it 'thing' (Daniel Miller) some call it 'object' (Harman). Every one comes with some definition to further their own theoretical desires. I suggest look at your research aim and investigation then you can find the appropriate trend for your work. However, let me through my suggestions from the anthropological angle:

First : Tim Ingold Ecology of material

Second: Holbraad Power of powder

Third: I find Graham Harman and his brand of Object Oriented Ontology truly fascinating. He is a frim critique of Latour and ANT. He opens up ANT and demonstrates what is wrong with relationality. He also disagrees with both materialism and new materialism for instance he explains problems with DeLanda. I strongly suggest his book Quadruple Object.

Surely an ontology based on things or objects takes thinking back two and a half thousand years at least. Everything that has moved forward in intellectual activity has been in terms of relationality. In science it is the only option. What has been 'demonstrated to be wrong with relationality' I wonder? This sounds to me like the usual dumbing down of the popular academic scene.

With respect Younes, the two papers you cite look to me to be more extreme examples of academo-acrobatic twaddle than I have yet come across in 65 years. I am impressed by the ability to froth meaningless verbiage to this degree. Does anyone take this stuff seriously? (I guess that is a rhetorical question.) What people will do to draw a salary these days,

Good question, Gazi.   I believe we need to go beyond the philosophical nitty-gritty of dualisms like relationality-materialism, realism-antirealism, positivism-constructivism. While it may be attractive for some to reinforce this dinstinctions, all these terms (and many others) are actually complementary. Social scientists may have a hard time understanding this, but anyone else - on a daily basis - (implicitly) draws on material, representational, constructivist, relational and other conceptions of knowledge, depending on the nature of the activity, task, or challenge at hand. So, we need to embrace all these different notions and perspectives as providing different but complementary (human and social) values, etc.

(And yes, you may sense I'm talking from a pragmatist, inclusive perspective here.)

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-quest-for-professionalism-9780198737735?cc=nl&lang=en&

Book The Quest for Professionalism: The Case of Management and En...

Hi - You can read my chapter on the material turn, mentioned above in the thread, here - https://www.academia.edu/1527571/The_Material-Cultural_Turn_event_and_effect

All the best, Dan Hicks

https://www.academia.edu/1527571/The_Material-Cultural_Turn_event_and_effect