Over the past decade, wearable technology has proliferated and pervaded many facets of human endeavor, thanks to the digitalization and miniaturization of computer and communication devices, and their integration into everyday artifacts and activities. From fitness bands that encourage physical activity for a healthy lifestyle, to medical patches that track ingestion of life-saving drugs, to augmented reality glasses that download reams of information to the pupil of our eyes, and to wearable cameras that provide raw, unfiltered, and objective audio-visual information from a first-person perspective, wearable technology has become the go-to elixir for many contemporary challenges and opportunities. Wearable technology increasingly operates to blur the boundaries between human and non-human performativity, ushering non-trivial improvements in specific tasks and performance outcomes. Fundamentally, wearable technology affords digitally mediated experiences of everyday actions and outcomes.;This thesis documents and reports results from an empirical investigation of the use of a new wearable technology by police officers in six police organizations. The substantive focus is to find out what phenomena are constitutive of the use of a wearable digital technology (Body-Worn Camera) by police officers in the performance of an organizational function or practice (police patrol); and to further elaborate the process of entanglement of the social and material agencies of these phenomena.;Informed by a grounded theory approach, the data are obtained over a two-year period, from dozens of interviews with police officers at various strata of the organization, and civilians who manage related data and technology artifacts. The interviews are complemented with 117 hours of direct observation of police work involving the use of BWCs, and policy documents and manuals related to their implementation.;The analysis identifies three phenomena---wearability, situationality, and contextuality---as constitutive of the relationship between a wearer and a wearable technology; and co-functioning as the process of entanglement of the wearer-wearable relationship. Together, the phenomena and entanglement process form the building blocks of a performative model to explicate the sociomaterial entanglements of the wearer-wearable relationship. The research also developed a comprehensive definition of wearables, and a generalizable classification system, encompassing three domains of wearable technology is provided.
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