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This paper aims to draw on data from a study of professionals’ experiences of work and learning framed by a complex adaptive systems approach to examine the nexus of work and learning in complex adaptive organisations.

The study used an adapted phenomenographic approach and the complex adaptive systems conceptual framework (CAOCF) to analyse data from semi-structured interviews with fourteen professionals from a variety of organisations and industry sectors within Sydney, Australia.

The findings highlight that work in complex adaptive organisations is best described as fluid work. Further, the findings suggest that fluid work influences professionals towards flexible learning approaches that take place in the flow of work.

This paper empirically demonstrates the nexus of work and learning as experienced by professionals in their day-to-day work, as well as the ways in which fluid work influences flexible and adaptable learning through participation in work.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the core ideas of adaptive leadership and relates them to challenges confronting academic libraries.

The paper provides an overview of the adaptive leadership model and highlights the key concepts. Recent initiatives at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library are used as cases to illustrate how the model may guide the authors’ focus to finding leverage points.

Using the model, the key role of positional leaders shifts from the traditional sense of giving direction and protection to followers, to one that orchestrates the change process with the team through difficulties and uncertainties, and to build culture and structure that facilitate adaptive changes.

Academic librarians can use the concepts and framework of adaptive leadership to design change strategies and manage change processes.

This is the first paper introducing the adaptive leadership model to academic libraries.

This study explores the professional work of managers in professional service firms (PSFs) by focusing on the relational position of managers as they interface between diverse groups of actors and navigate a multiplicity of accountabilities.

Drawing on an ethnographic study of managers in a Brazilian PSF, this study demonstrates through observations, interviews and shadowing how PSF managers address multiple accountabilities in the conduct of professional work.

To navigate multiple accountabilities, PSF managers perform several forms of boundary work, which the authors conceptualize as “revamping” and “remolding” operations and “translating” and “transforming” understandings. The form of boundary work performed depends on the configuration of two elements of accountability demands: knowledge orientation and extent of exposure. Although analytically distinct, these elements intertwine, suggesting the need for a dynamic perspective on accountability. The analysis shows that professional work extends beyond fixed or passive views of hierarchical and intrinsic accountability to emphasize that managers exude accountability of an adaptive nature.

This study illustrates and theorizes the role of boundary work in PSFs, develops its link to accountability, and identifies its scholarly and practical affordances and limitations for understanding managers’ professional work when navigating multiple accountabilities.

The findings reveal perspectives and behaviors of managers embedded in PSFs, illustrating their unstructured and agentic experiences of accountability and boundary work in practice. The insights can be extended to other contexts where managers face multiple accountabilities in conducting professional work.

In the emerging disciplines of risk management and supply chain management, resilience is a relatively undefined concept. The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated perspective on resilience through an extensive review of the literature in a number of disciplines including developmental psychology and ecosystems. In addition, the paper identifies and addresses some of the current theoretical gaps in the existing research.

Supply chain resilience has been defined by a number of disciplines. An integrative literature review is conducted in an attempt to integrate existing perspectives. This review also serves as the basis for the development of a conceptual model.

The key elements of supply chain resilience and the relationships among them, the links between risks and implications for supply chain management, and the methodologies for managing these key issues are poorly understood. Implications for future research advocate testing the proposed model empirically.

Supply chain disruptions have adverse effect on both revenue and costs. Resilient supply chains incorporate event readiness, are capable of providing an efficient response, and often are capable of recovering to their original state or even better post the disruptive event.

Supply chain resilience has yet to be researched from the logistics perspective. Even in well‐developed disciplines the unified theory of resilience is still under development. This research leverages existing knowledge and advances an interdisciplinary understanding of the concept.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of the organizational environments of Indian business organizations and to identify the adaptive response mechanisms that organizations use to cope with their environments. This paper also examines in detail the causal texture of the organizational environments and attempts to build a conceptual model mapping adaptive responses of organizations to different types of organizational environments.

A constructivist stance was adopted in this exploratory study to capture the perceptions of the organizational leaders through the multiple case study design to capture the features of the organizational environments and their causal texture. The multiple case study design used an embedded mixed-methods approach to collect data. Within-case analysis and cross-case analysis were conducted to draw out prominent themes across cases ordered for particular organizational environment types. The study was conducted by following construct validity, internal reliability and external validity guidelines.

The study highlights and describes in detail the characteristics of the different organizational environment types in India. It is revealed that a majority of Indian organizations exist in turbulent environments. There are differences in the adaptive response mechanisms of organizations in the environment types studied. The study specially focuses on the strategies adopted by Indian organizations to adapt to turbulent environments.

This study maps the causal texture of organizational environments in India and maps the organizational adaptive responses to the environment for greater effectiveness. This study offers various strategies to cope with turbulent organizational environments and adds to the research focus on causal texture and adaptive capacities of organizations across different types of environments.

This study contributes to an ignored subject area of organizational environments. Managing organizations in uncertain and turbulent environments is complex, and this study provides an understanding about the various types of adaptive mechanism that are used to cope with environmental turbulence. This study also attempts to answer several questions that previous research works have raised about strategies that organizations use when they fail to cope with environmental turbulence.

This paper contributes to this special issue on the ethics and aesthetics of adaptive reuse with a reflection on the specific case of the reuse of those sites and buildings that can be regarded as “difficult”, “uncomfortable”, or “neglected” heritage (MacDonald, 2009; Logan and Keir, 2009; Pendlebury et al., 2018; Lanz, 2021). By doing so it is the author's intention to add to the most recent research-driven and theory-oriented strand of the contemporary architectural debate on adaptive reuse (Lanz and Pendlebury, 2022). They also intend to encourage increased research engagement within such a debate, both across disciplines and with methods and approaches that may be able to bring in greater critical consideration of the more-than-architectural aspects involved in adaptive reuse practices.

Building equally on a comprehensive literature review on the subject and extensive field work, the paper works through one paradigmatic example – the San Girolamo mental asylum in Volterra, Italy – and combines on-site observation, field notes, qualitative interviews and archival research with theory-driven reflections to discuss the ramifications of adaptive reuse processes in place-based memory and heritage practices.

The case of the former mental asylum San Girolamo in Volterra, today abandoned and decaying on the landscape, is discussed via the metaphor of the building as palimpsest to explore the significance of this built heritage in both its materiality and meanings. The San Girolamo asylum demonstrates the value, complexity and potential of this heritage site, and other alike, to act as a powerful place which connects the past and present that might serve as a platform to promote productive discourses about contemporary sensible topics, ethics of care and human rights. Drawing on these observations, the paper concludes by expanding on how the case of the San Girolamo former asylum both showcases and advocates the need for developing more creative, explorative, trans-disciplinary and collaborative approaches and methodologies to the study and implementation of adaptive reuse projects for these site “beyond intervention”.

This paper draws on and contributes to the more recent research-driven and theory-oriented corpus of studies focussing on adaptive reuse.

This paper aims to explore the topic of adaptive reuse referring to urban open spaces into a more-than-human perspective. It underlines that dealing with heritage means being part of an inherent and ongoing process of transformation and so that reuse is inextricably an adaptive practice, constantly facing mutations, and that adaptation is a coral practice that involves different kinds of users and makers, inclusive of human and not human livings.

This paper looks at the lexicon of abandonment, in search of the more essential and intense meanings of words, and at some pioneering practices in Europe to comprehend the aesthetic and ethical implications of adaptive reuse of neglected landscapes.

Processes of reuse involve many different communities of users who in turn continuously redesign the site, into a comprehensive, coral and conflicting collaboration, whose results are never given once for all and are both uncanny and beautiful, scaring and marvellous, like a monster.

Accepting the idea that humans are not the only users and makers of urban sites can widen the range of tools, methods and values involved in heritage adaptive reuse.

This paper tries to widen the meanings of adaptation into a multispecies perspective. It intends to broaden the range of agents that can be involved as users and makers, assuming a more-than-human point of view that is not yet commonly applied.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive model of the relationship between control and sales performance contingent upon the commitment and adaptive selling variables. Specifically, the study tests the mediator effects of adaptive selling and organizational commitment on the effect of managerial control systems on self-assessed performance of the salespeople working in the field of industrial marketing.

In total, 472 firms active in the industrial marketing field for tangible industry products in Turkey were selected for the research. The proposed model that tested posits relationships among management control variables and adaptive selling, organizational commitment and sales performance measures. Management controls are related to sales performance through the mediating effect of adaptive selling and organizational commitment. Management control styles (output as formal and professional as informal) were the independent variables, while changes in organizational commitment and adaptive selling were tested both as mediators and sales performance as dependent variable, consistent with the reciprocal effects model under analysis.

The findings demonstrated that “control” is positively associated with “sales performance” and “commitment” and “adaptive selling” mediate this relationship. Findings indicate that control impacts sales performance through a mediating mechanism that involves adaptive selling and commitment. Taken together, results showed that adaptive selling and commitment played a critical role in sales performance.

This research is the first to empirically analyse the model regarding the relationship between sales performance, control, adaptive selling and commitment variables.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasise projects as being part of a social process. It aims to move away from the traditional views that lay emphases on linear and predictable models of project practice to one that better highlights the complex nature of human interrelations.

The work reported upon involved a case study where one of the authors was embedded as a reflective practitioner undertaking action learning and elicitation of knowledge from colleagues using soft systems methodology as a primary research method.

Findings from the doctoral research implemented in the Middle East, indicate that socio‐cultural factors in project contexts affect knowledge creation processes critical to organisational change.

Research results benefited from viewing the project organization as a “complex adaptive system” with a structurally open project entity facilitating the contextual interconnections necessary for detecting and creating environmental change.

Pragmatic knowledge was seen as emergent through movement of human interactions and contributed to the portrayal of the project organisation as a “becoming” cognitive system whose resilience is dependent upon producing meaning as opposed to processing information. When change management is viewed in a multicultural context such as this, within this paradigm, then greater emphasis will likely be placed upon complexity and uncertainty issues arising out of the interplay of culture and the political aspects of managing change in a more empathic way.

Complexity in project management and theory has traditionally focussed on technical and structural aspects of project practice; but given the heterogeneous nature of human capital residing in today's organisations, aligning social systems with nature where disorder and uncertainty prevail, provides a more relevant ecological model of social analysis. The paper shows that the challenge today for those working in culturally pluralistic project environments is to make sense of such multiple realities and disparities in language to effectively manage the inherent power relationships that influence project outcomes.

This paper aims to explore the concept of resilience set within a family business context and considers how familiness and the nature of noneconomic factors, such as relationship dynamics influence performance. This paper provides new insights into the nature and impact of familiness as a mediating device, uncovering the potential for reframing resilience theory and practice.

The paper draws on a review of the extant literature in the areas of resilience and familiness as a means of developing a deeper understanding of the social-ecological system of the family firm.

The study reveals family business as a complex interrelationship between complimentary social-ecological systems. It highlights the complexity of family business and the challenges of the relational nature of familiness and how this presents additional layers of complexity in the decision making process and implementation.

The paper draws on literature that is dominated by western culture and may partially or not at all reflect the issues associated with organisational resilience in family firms with such backgrounds and their culturally bound social-ecological systems.

The paper seeks to fill a knowledge gap by exploring the key elements of organisational resilience in the context of familiness. The work calls for further research into the nature of familiness connections mediating the nature of family relational dynamics. It further provides a framework indicating how these elements can shape and subvert day-to-day management events, raising implications for theory and practice and calls for deeper empirical research to be undertaken.