Affiliative Objects
通过一个技术研发组织的案例，研究“新”的价值如何在对象的“社会生活”中运作，提出“亲和性对象”概念来描述对象与人的关联动态，对组织成员既是问题也是资源。
Through the case of a particular organization devoted to technological research and development, this paper investigates how values of the ‘new’ operate in what Appadurai (1986) has characterized as the social life of objects. Drawing on previous scholarship in anthropology and science and technology studies, I adopt the trope of the ‘affiliative object’ to describe the relational dynamics of association (and disassociation) that characterize the identification of objects and persons. This perspective emphasizes the multiplicity of objects within the unfolding and uncertain trajectories of organizational life, as both problem and resource for organization members. The paper examines how ‘object-centered sociality’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1997) is enacted as a strategic, but also contingent, resource in the alignment of professional identities and organizational positionings.