The Coevolution of Objects and Boundaries over Time: Materiality, Affordances, and Boundary Salience

Building on recent work suggesting that objects and boundaries coevolve in practice, this paper theorizes the mechanisms for such coevolution. We argue that users in organizations choose objects to use for crossboundary collaboration, because they believe that they will afford certain types of communication. Over time, use of the object changes collaboration, which alters the constitution of the boundary at which the object was originally used. When the object’s materiality makes it difficult to achieve collaboration goals, users change objects. New objects provide new affordances for communication, which help to transfer new knowledge across the boundary. As knowledge changes people’s work in practice, the boundary that separates them changes, often requiring the use of a new object with new affordances useful for communicating across the new boundary. We illustrate our emerging theoretical perspective that highlights the role of materiality and affordances in the coevolution of objects and boundaries through a longitudinal study of a global product development organization. We discuss how our findings can lead to novel theorizing about the coevolution of objects and boundaries, the role of affordances as the mechanism for this coevolution, and the use of objects in communicating knowledge across boundaries.