ABSTRACT
The analysis of artifacts in most cases implies the analysis of a fundamental category of experience: space. Artifacts are pathways of action and constitute a concrete element in the social structure: actors daily create and recreate the reality of their own identity and of the mutual relationships within bounds which are the result of previous choices, made by other actors or by themselves at different moments. The relationship between artifacts and intellectual knowledge is ambiguous and probably of reciprocal interdependence. The emphasis on mental processes and cognition is probably at the origin of our incapacity to give exhaustive explanation to such other fundamental organizational processes as control, persistence, and change. Michael Rosen has discussed the special epistemologically based problems arising out of the fact that in organizational research the studied and the studier most often inhabit the same society. Organizational cultures tend to reify their basic assumptions and particular way of feeling in the setting constructed by the organization.
