Affordance

Yassine Talaoui and Marko Kohtamäki

Chapter 2.1 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Strategy as Practice, 2025, pp 113-114 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Strategy is continuously made through ‘all kinds of stuff,’ ranging from an organization's routines and procedures to its stock of discourses and material objects. Doing strategy with ‘stuff’ is consequential for creating, making sense of, and conveying strategy. In these doings, we ‘subjects’ are also constructed as strategists in the same way these ‘things’ we do strategy with are shaped. Naturally, while we are capable of perceiving the features of these different ‘things,’ their utility hinges upon our goals, needs, and behavior as we go about considering their usage. Therefore, the utility of a ‘thing’ does not depend solely on its ‘thingness’ or us ‘humans’ but on the relational interaction between both as these ‘things’ carry attributes and we choose to appropriate the ones we believe best propel action. This idea is called ‘affordances’ and represents how we choose to appropriate certain aspects of ‘things’ if we feel they offer us a certain utility ‘affordance’ to act upon.

Keywords: Affordances; Materiality; Sociomateriality; Technology; Relationality; Performativity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035315956
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035315963.00035 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:22511_28

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().