Situated Valuations: Affordances of Management Technologies in Organizations

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.