Abstract
We present a sociomaterial conception of organizational compassion. We are inspired by the emergence of the positive psychology literature in management as well as the paradigm of positive computing (http://www.positivecomputing.org/) which aims to design and use IT for human well-being. Compassion is fundamental to supporting human well-being. From an IS perspective, organizational compassion is the phenomenon where social and technological elements of an organization synergistically combine with one another such that the organizational system collectively notices, feels, makes sense of, and responds to suffering experienced by that system’s internal and external stakeholders. We leverage the notions of affordances, imbrications, routines, and human agency within the critical realist view of sociomateriality promoted by Paul Leonardi and colleagues to develop our conception. Through our sociomaterial formulation of organizational compassion, we hope to promote dialogue about IT-enabled compassion as a compelling addition to IS scholarship.
Recommended Citation
Chatterjee, Sutirtha; Chakraborty, Suranjan; Fulk, H Kevin; and Sarker, Suprateek, "A Sociomaterial Conception of Organizational Compassion" (2019). AMCIS 2019 Proceedings. 30.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2019/treo/treos/30
A Sociomaterial Conception of Organizational Compassion
We present a sociomaterial conception of organizational compassion. We are inspired by the emergence of the positive psychology literature in management as well as the paradigm of positive computing (http://www.positivecomputing.org/) which aims to design and use IT for human well-being. Compassion is fundamental to supporting human well-being. From an IS perspective, organizational compassion is the phenomenon where social and technological elements of an organization synergistically combine with one another such that the organizational system collectively notices, feels, makes sense of, and responds to suffering experienced by that system’s internal and external stakeholders. We leverage the notions of affordances, imbrications, routines, and human agency within the critical realist view of sociomateriality promoted by Paul Leonardi and colleagues to develop our conception. Through our sociomaterial formulation of organizational compassion, we hope to promote dialogue about IT-enabled compassion as a compelling addition to IS scholarship.