Materiality at work: A note on desks

In the course of the material turn in social sciences, the material precondition or fabricatedness of practices increasingly comes into focus. In this article we explore what happens when applying some of the current notions of material power to the analysis of economic and business settings. We do so by focusing on one specific, omnipresent and taken-for-granted object: the table. Different manifestations of the table in the context of work, management and retail will be outlined and analysed with regard to the respective status of materiality.