ABSTRACT
We wish to consider what is done with a kind of artefact that has become ubiquitous in the practices of any organisation – archives of email messages. The ordering and use of these archives bring into the focus the relationships between words and things, and sociality and things within unfolding organisational practices. In particular, the ways in which archives of messages are configured and used in organisational settings collapses any distinction between sociality and materiality. We aim to demonstrate, using an analytic approach derived from discursive psychology, how archives configure interdependencies between persons and things within organisational practices. In so doing, we challenge the conventional assumptions concerning the role of computer-mediated communication in organisational settings where ‘the social’ is taken as the gold standard against which communicative effectiveness is judged. Rather, we need to understand how archival practices of computer-mediated communications are devices that order the socialities of organisational practice.
