The EBF site is dead. If you click through you will be taken to the Internet Archive site to find an archived copy.
Things bring people together. They oblige them to interact, and to enter into exchanges. Every day, organisations and institutions of all sorts are formed around things. Things create social situations that, in some cases, their participants are no more than dimly aware of and, in others, use ruthlessly to their advantage. Thus things take on a “social density”, contributing to and reinforcing certain kinds of social relationship and exchange.
…We should begin to understand the “culture” of the workplace in a much more dynamic way, more conditioned by things and their exchange than by culture per se.
…Things give people ideas. They lead to shared beliefs. They bring some people together and exclude others. If we focus on a particular thing, we quickly find it connects a whole network of people. It does not matter how mundane the thing is. There are the people who go about making and selling them; there are the different ideas other people have about the things themselves and how one should go about making and selling them; there are the beliefs that the makers and sellers put into the things; and there are the games they all play as they interact with one another, as well as with the things themselves.
What is more, it is the thing itself, not a set of national cultural dispositions (for want of a better phrase) that usually inflects the form that the social world around it takes.
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