Object‐oriented sociology and organizing in the face of emergency: B runo L atour, G raham H arman and the material turn[Note 1. Graham Harman, Jon Roffe and the three anonymous referees ...]

This paper explores the material turn in sociology and the tools it provides for understanding organizational problems highlighted by the R oyal C ommission into the 2009 ‘ B lack S aturday’ bushfires during which 173 people died in the A ustralian S tate of V ictoria. Often inspired by B runo L atour's material‐semiotic sociology of associations, organization scholars employing these tools focus on the messy details of organization otherwise overlooked by approaches assuming a macroscopic frame of analysis. In L atour's approach no object is reducible to something else – such as nature, the social, or atoms – it is instead a stabilized set of relations. A L atourian approach allows us to highlight how the R oyal C ommission and macroscopic models of organizing do unwitting damage to their objects of inquiry by purifying the ‘natural’ from the ‘social’. Performative elements in their schemas are mistaken for descriptive ones. However, a long standing critique of this approach claims that it becomes its own form of reduction, to nothing but relations. G raham H arman, in his object‐oriented philosophy develops this critique by showing that a ‘relationist’ metaphysics cannot properly accommodate the capacity of ‘objects’ to cause or mediate surprises. Through our case of the V ictorian B ushfires R oyal C ommission, we argue that a purely relational model of objects loosens a productive tension between the structural and ephemeral that drives sociological analysis. By drawing on elements of H arman's ontology of objects we argue that it is necessary for material‐semiotic sociology to retain a central place for the emergence of sociological objects.