Creative work in organizations today is often a collective process, with many inherently creative fields relying heavily on the use of material artifacts, tools, and technologies. However, materiality is often either ignored or explored separately in research limiting significantly our understanding of the dynamics at play in creative settings. In this study, we extend understanding of collective creative work from a practice perspective by shedding light on how material practices influence assuming and enacting agency and power in the creative process. Building on an ethnographic study in a creative team of architects, we propose that different material practices can play explorative, elaborative, decisive, persuasive, exclusive, and distributive roles during a creative process and they cut across traditional manual practices using hand tools to the various uses of technology. We argue that despite the importance of technology in contemporary organizations and its ability to flatten hierarchies in creative work, to put it short, the person holding the pen has the power to decide and validate what piece of knowledge goes on the paper for further development. We also consider the use of various material practices from the perspective of hybrid and virtual work.
