Guest editorial

Citation

Antonacopoulou, E.P., Guttel, W.H. and Pesqueux, Y. (2010), "Guest editorial", Society and Business Review, Vol. 5 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/sbr.2010.29605aaa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Society and Business Review, Volume 5, Issue 1

About the Guest Editors

Elena AntonacopoulouProfessor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Liverpool Management School where she leads GNOSIS – a research initiative advancing practice relevant management scholarship. Her principal research interests include change and learning practices in organizations and the development of new methodologies for studying social complexity. She is currently undertaking a series of research projects in organizational learning, social practice and dynamic capabilities working collaboratively with leading researchers internationally and with practitioners and policy makers in co-creating knowledge for action. She writes on all the above areas and her work is published in international journals such as Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and Academy of Management Review. She is currently Subject Editor for Organizational Learning and Knowledge for the Emergence: Complexity and Organizational Journal and has recently completed a five-year term as Joint Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Management Learning. She serves on the Editorial Board of Organization Science, Academy of Management Learning and Education Journal, Society, Business and Organization Journal, and Irish Journal of Management. She has recently completed a four-year prestigious senior research fellowship as part of the Advanced Institute of Management Research. She has served on the EGOS Board for two terms (six years) and has been elected in several positions at board and executive levels at the Academy of Management (the USA) where she has now been appointed to lead the Practice Theme Committee.

Wolfgang Güttel Professor for Human Resource and Change Management at the Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria). Previously, he served as full Professor at the University of Kassel (Germany) and as temporary Professor at the universities of Hamburg (Germany) and Kassel (Germany), Research Fellow at the universities of Padua (Italy) and Liverpool (the UK), and Assistant Professor at the WU Vienna (Austria). His main research field concerns strategic learning, i.e. linking learning, knowledge creation, transfer, and replication on individual, group, and organizational level with strategic objectives. In particular, organizational ambidexterity, i.e. the integration of competing learning modes of exploration and exploitation, dynamic capabilities, i.e. the firm's mode to govern change, and replication, i.e. the transfer of successful business models in new markets, are investigated in relation to human resource and change management. Research results are presented at international conferences and published in several books and scholarly journals. Prior to his academic career, he acted as management consultant at Daimler-Benz AG in Stuttgart (Germany), at Diebold Management Consulting in Vienna (Austria) and as independent consultant within a consulting network (1997-2002).

Yvon PesqueuxProfessor at Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Head of the Chair Développement des Systèmes d'Organisation. PhD in Economics, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (1975), his special interests are management, philosophy and ethics, business and society, corporate social responsibility. He has published several scientific articles. His last books link organization and politics: Stakeholder Theory: A European Perspective (in collaboration with M. Bonnafous-Boucher), Palgrave-macmillan, Basingstoke, UK, 2005, Management de la Connaissance – Knowledge Management & Apprentissage Organisationnel & Société de la Connaissance, Economica, Paris, 2006 (in collaboration with M. Ferrary), Décider avec les Parties Prenantes in collaboration with M. Bonnafous-Boucher), Editions La Découverte, Collection “Recherche”, Paris, 2006, Gouvernance et Privatisation, PUF, Paris, 2007, Management de la Qualité, une Analyze Critique, Economica, Paris, 2008, Filosofia e Organizaçoes, Cencage Learning, Sao Paulo, Brésil, 2008. His is also Editor of Society and Business Review (SBR) (Emerald Publishing – www.emeraldinsight.com/sbr.htm) and member of the Société Française de Management.

This special issue is dedicated to one of the biggest challenges socially conscious businesses face; namely, to take stock of the impact of their socialization practices. Given the orientation of Society and Business Review (SBR) to advance ideas that can directly enhance the contribution and commitment of businesses in society, we present in this two-part special issue fresh insights on the impact of socialization practices of businesses across a range of industries and countries. Leading scholars across a range of disciplinary backgrounds come together to voice and illustrate theoretically and empirically the importance of socialization practices in the ways in which staff induction practices specifically are performed. The various papers in this two volume special issue collectively make a distinctive contribution in that they provide innovative ways of understanding how the ways in which induction practices are performed in different contexts.

This focus on a practice perspective which has captured a renewed attention in recent years in what has been termed as return to practice (Schatzki et al., 2001) has provided a useful basis for rethinking a number of social complexities across a number of levels including the individual, the collective and the institutional level (Giddens, 1984; Bourdieu, 1990; Turner, 1994; Schatzki, 1996; Seo and Creed, 2002). Perhaps, of particular importance is the way a practice orientation provides a basis for responding to wider calls in social sciences in general (Emirbayer, 1997), for a relational analysis of action as not the product of inter-actions, but action as emanating from trans-action where the relations and the entities creating these actions are not isolated but are seen to co-evolve in ongoing negotiation as constitutive of each other and of the possibilities their interrelationships can productively create. A focus on unpacking some of the inherent tensions that practices reveal as Antonacopoulou (2008a) argues, provides the opportunity to integrate insights from pragmatism (Dewey, 1927), critical realism (Sayer, 1992; Archer, 1995) and various branches of phenomenology – from Husserl's (1936) transcendental phenomenology; to Heidegger's (1927) hermeneutic phenomenology, to Schutz's (1932) phenomenology of the social and not least Merleau-Ponty's (1945) phenomenology of perception. This phenomenological orientation other than drawing attention to tensions as endemic to the social character of practices it also shifts our orientation to the dynamic nature of practices in the ways in which they are performed relationally.

This focus on the ways in which practices are performed, introduces to the debate a greater attention to practising as a powerful process fuelling both the ways in which practices are formed, performed and transformed (Antonacopoulou, 2007). Practising is reflective of the dynamic and emergent nature of practice. This perspective that embraces as central to practice their becoming also acknowledges that becoming is tentative and ongoing. It is not merely a process punctuated by events and activities. It is a movement that develops and unfolds through the intensity of connections that drive the process of becoming based on trying things out, rehearsing, refining, and changing different aspects of practice and the relationships between them. Practising therefore, has been defined as the deliberate, habitual and spontaneous repetition (Antonacopoulou, 2007). Practising is a process of repetition embraces the multiplicity of possibilities hence, is distinct from the process of replication. Replication implies institutionalization in the process of re-presentation and re-production. Repetition on the other hand, implies re-hearsing, re-viewing aspects of practice. As Deleuze (1994) points out repetition is perfection and integration. Repetition is transgression. It forms a condition of movement, a means of producing something new in history. This means that at the core of practising a practice is actively learning and unlearning different aspects of a practice in a proactive way that does not only rely on routines of habit but different ways of embodying a practice. Repetition allows for spontaneity in the way practitioners respond to intended and unintended conditions that shape their practice. This orientation promotes a practise-centred research approach (Antonacopoulou, 2008b) to researching practice which does not only focus on what is a practice and how is practice performed. It also seeks to understand the role and power of practitioners in shaping their practice by virtue of the choices they make through their practical judgments and modes of knowing (phronesis). Practitioners phronesis reflects their insights, their identity and identification with the practice, their passion and personality. This provides us a richer understanding of human nature and is fundamental in extending our understanding of socialization and institutionalization.

The papers in the first volume of the special issue on practising, socializing and institutionalizing present cutting-edge insights on all these processes and through a practice perspective illustrate some of the nuances that contribute and affect how socialization and institutionalization take place.

To ensure that readers have a basic backdrop to fully appreciate the way these empirically informed contributions extend the debate on practice, socialization, and institutionalization, the first two papers present an up-to-date review of the relevant literatures.

The first paper of this special issue by Elena P. Antonacopoulou and Yvon Pesqueux entitled “The practice of socialization and the socialization of practice” provides a thorough theoretical introduction into practice research and its application for analyzing induction practices and socialization. The paper introduces a dynamic practice perspective where interaction between social actors is perceived as a series of tensions between competing priorities that are constantly negotiated. Therefore, the performance of practices enables active change and reconfiguration instead of a simple evolution.

The second paper by Elena P. Antonacopoulou and Wolfgang H. Güttel entited “Staff induction practices and organizational socialization: a review and extension of the debate” analyzes the state of the field of conceptual and empirical research on staff induction and socialization. Surprisingly, most of the literature is conducted in a psychologist tradition and is focused primarily on the newcomer despite the fact that induction and socialization are the main mode by which organizations and their idiosyncratic character survive due to the continuous integration of new employees. Moreover, owing to the lack of multi-level analysis of staff induction, the underdeveloped link between staff induction and human resource management systems is missing. Equally scant are investigations of the contribution of staff induction for organizational recreation. The paper outlines future research directions and presents the case for ways in which a practice perspective can usefully inform the future research agenda. In some respects, whilst the first two paper set the stage and the agenda, subsequent papers take this agenda on and present empirical findings around the issues idenfied as critical.

The three papers that follow are devoted to staff induction (one in a bank, one in a bank and in a consultancy company and one devoted to three different centres for medically assisted reproduction). They all end on a conceptualization of the notion of practice according to the collected empirical data.

Kjersti Bjørkeng and Stewart Clegg have worked on staff induction in an Australian bank (DragonBank). They have followed newcomers and their learning to become customer service officers with a description of processes of situated learning (DragonBank's induction course and in the bank's branches posterior to this formal induction course). They particularly explored what they have labelled authoring acts in which the inductees make sense of themselves in relation to their practice and the performative acts constructing practice. This article suggests a constructive role on behalf of the inductees in the shaping their practice, and emphasises a dual dependency between becoming a practitioner and constructing a practice.

Jérôme Méric and Rémi Jardat have worked on induction as an institutionalized and institutionalizing practice in retail banking and consultancy in France. Their research on the same practice in two different companies from two distinct activities has led them to consider that two dimensions within this multiplicity are particularly relevant to understand why change in practices can occur or not (coordination of persons and resources in order to exert specific functions). But their case studies also help emphasize the role of the institutional dimension and articulates the analysis of ostensive and performative aspects of induction practices. This shows how active and constant interrelations produce a pattern of organizational immobility. They finally discuss the research outcomes as a specific expression of institutionalization processes that interact with organizational devices.

Silvia Gherardi and Manuela Perotta have empirically studied three different centres for medically assisted reproduction in Italy between May 2005 and March 2006, using qualitative data collection and analysis techniques – specifically participant observation and interviews. The centres selected were Sisma, a public university centre of medium size (around 300 infertility treatments a year), Beta, a private centre of small size (around 60 treatments a year) and Bioartlife, a network connecting a large centre with six satellite centres of medium and small size (for a total of 1,500 treatments a year, of which half at the main centre). The three case studies illustrate three different models of induction. They conclude by pointing out that the “same” practice assumes very different situated features, and that a practice-based approach is able to bring out the ecology of actors that locally stabilize a situated practice and reciprocal power relations. With regard to various types of organization, this study shows that induction is not the effect of solely an encounter between individual and organization, for two other agents are involved in the process: the profession and the peer group.

A last paper has been added to this issue. David Pick, Kandy Dayaram, and Bella Butler analyze the tensions between regional development and global capitalism on an empirical basis: the case of the Pilbara, Western Australia, according to the wave of increasing prosperity due to a rapid rise in the global demand for natural resources, particularly from China. The Pilbara case (a key natural resource region in Australia for minerals, oil, and gas) is located in the national context for direct global economic engagement and in turn to the wider neo-liberal policy reform agenda that has been employed by successive Australian Governments over the two past decades. In this paper, it is argued that the unleashing of global markets forces as a key element of regional development policy can be understood as part of a neo-liberal rationality of government termed “New regionalism.” Pilbara may be considered as an epicentre of global natural resource extraction where there is significant and on-going agglomeration of international capital in the form of resource extraction, processing, and transport infrastructure.

Elena P. Antonacopoulou, Wolfgang H. Güttel, Yvon PesqueuxGuest Editors