Sociomateriality in the Sand Box: Visually Oriented Documenting Practices of Young Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are important drivers of innovation. Their work is highly creative while also requiring a distinct paper trail for processes such as incorporation of a business, filing of patents, and management of shifting resources. In order for entrepreneurial team members to interact in productive and creative ways, they need to establish shared and stable frames of reference (i.e., actional field) to support collaborative decision-making and coordination. Documents play a central role in this process. The authors present an ethnographic study of 20 student start-up teams that explored the ways in which young entrepreneurs use documents of mixed materiality (both visual and text-based, analog and digital) to demarcate the actional field for their communicative activities. Many of the teams in this study were embarking on their first experience with the start-up process, providing an interesting opportunity to observe the sociomaterial relationship between their emergent communicative activities and documenting practices.